Mozilla continues the war against Firefox users in an effort to make it ever more Chrome-like.
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Some side projects felt useless. Some feel quite relevant to the goal (e.g. Mozilla VPN), some grew to become huge (Rust). Some were maybe an amazing idea at the wrong time (Firefox OS?). I wouldn't want Mozilla to stop doing any side projects.
What's so bad about MV3? Would love to hear your take. Mozilla made it clear it will not adopt changes that prevent extensions like uBlock Origin from working. Many other changes seem to be focused at user security (which is good), and other seem to just follow the "standard", which one can argue is quite important from the perspective of users too, because the fact that extensions can be easily built for Chrome and Firefox together is effectively _the reason_ some of the extensions I use are even available on Firefox.
It's a trust issue. Mozilla burned a lot of it in recent years.
> Mozilla made it clear it will not adopt changes that prevent extensions like uBlock Origin from working.
That's the thing: I don't trust they'll keep good on that promise for more than a year or two. I may be misremembering things, but I'm pretty sure they initially weren't going to adopt MV3 at all, then they weren't going to add DNR, now they're adding DNR but "not removing request blocking, pinky swear". Once DNR lands, I worry they'll start thinking about removing request blocking, under the guise of "security".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite
It had a reputation for being slow and bloated at the time which prompted the creation of a slimmed down browser, Phoenix which eventually became Firefox
And towards your question: Different times. Both hardware and browser capabilities were vastly different back then, so some technological choices made in the early days might have made more sense.
For me personally, I know that back in the day I was a lot more forgiving of delays than I am now.
Which will stop accepting MV2 Extensions after the move to MV3
Therefore leaving you without a store again
Calling it now, let's see in a couple of years how deep the state really is.
These moves keep happening in tech all the time. Slippery slope fallacy doesn't work here - if you see something that looks like slippery slope in a tech business, it almost definitely is one.
Quite frankly i feel like every time a web browser is mentioned on hn, everyone reaches to weird conspiracies.
No, because there is no conspiracy needed. Chrome is a product of an adtech company, and Firefox is funded by the very same one. Mozilla is at best fighting a losing battle here, forced to make concessions to survive. Or, it could be argued that Firefox exists only to serve as an antitrust shield for Google.
I disagree
> Or, it could be argued that Firefox exists only to serve as an antitrust shield for Google.
That might well be why google funds them. I can’t say I mind, and it doesn’t make them more user-unfriendly.
Mozilla or Google?
If Mozilla: Do you think that Mozilla would think of their users' privacy if it meant alienating Google and loosing their money? I'm not picking a side here - I have no idea so I'm just asking.
Yes. One example is tracking protection, which blocks Google Analytics on every FF installation by default.
But there are valid technical reasons to support DNR. It really does make more sense from a performance point of view, if it happens to support what you need. If not, then it's good to have blocking web requests available. And there's good reason to be unhappy if Firefox drops them. I don't see any strong incentives for doing so, though.
You actually got it in your first paragraph - for me, it's a trust issue. I don't trust Mozilla to retain web request blocking, particularly when DNR becomes established in Firefox and most extensions migrate: because then, the argument for removal web request blocking will be, "look, there's very few legitimate extensions using this, and it's a Huge Security Hole, and everyone standardized on DNR already".
Sounds to me like uBlock is literally top priority for Mozilla, so I don't see why they would do that.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/02/06/ublock-origin-for...
Then you can point to the source of widevine? Something that chrome developers called a core component when they where caught side loading it on dedicated open source distros a few years ago and initially refused to supply an option to disable it?