ameshkov

As usually, Apple does not give developers any time to react. There is no migration plan save for one video from WWDC where they briefly describe some alternatives.

> In macOS 10.15.4, use of deprecated KPIs triggers a notification to the user that the software includes a deprecated API and asks the user to contact the developer for alternatives.

Nowadays, a small team is simply not enough to develop a browser and keep up with the competition. Unless you fork Chrome, of course.

Well, yeah, but focusing on earning does not mean they should start doing stupid things like that or adding a banner place to the start page.

For instance, I would have considered paying for some premium features like additional privacy-related functionality or a VPN.

This might be a sign for other employees that they need to focus on the things that can help Mozilla actually earn more and not just be a good guy. It may sound horrible, but considering their market share dynamics it makes sense.

I don't know why, but for some reason, I was thinking there were about 600 of them. Thanks for the link, I've edited my comment.

Brendan Eich tweeted that they laid off about 70 people: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217517703914643456

This is about 7% of all their employees.

People report that a lot of QA, security, and release management folks were sacked.

A lot more details in the TechCrunch article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-...

> In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this decision

edit: fixed the numbers, added some more details.

I am not sure if an indie developer can afford doing that anyway.

This would be true unless the stores you are talking about were not imposing countless limitations. Microsoft store is for UWP apps only, Mac AppStore is for sandboxed apps only, and I’d better not even start with Play store and iOS AppStore restrictions.

We need independent stores which purpose is to prevent security issues and not impose additional limitations.

Yeah, well, you nailed it, unfortunately.

Google is able to block Github repos as well. Just a few days ago it happened to https://github.com/beefproject/beef

This “shoot first ask questions later” approach is typical not just for Google, but for AV vendors as well. The problem is that in the case of Google the potential consequences for a legit developer are much scarier: all browsers are affected, the whole website may be blocked.

The other, even more serious issue, is that with Google there is no way to get the feedback and learn what exactly they consider wrong?

Let’s also talk about their “unwanted software policy” that leads to this kind of warnings. The policy mostly sounds okayish, but there are some points that bother me. For instance, there is a point explicitly prohibiting working with Google APIs in a nonstandard manner. What does that even mean? Is ad blocking software blocking google’s ad server can be categorized as unwanted now? Or any AV that scans Chrome downloads?

The thing is I am not sure if Igor was developing Nginx on his own time. IANAL as well, but I am not sure if it counts if part of the work was done from his Rambler workplace.

Igor Sysoev developed Nginx while working in Rambler (a Russian search engine) back in 2002-2004. Now, 15 years later, Rambler filed a copyright claim against Nginx and Igor, and demands (allegedly) 51M RUB from them.

I have to disagree. Passively staying does not change anything; the fact that they work for this company has not prevented this initiative.

So you'd suggest staying and fighting against this inside the company? If they truly love the company and it deserves this, you might be right.

edit: what bothers me is that at least by some senior staff members these employees are already considered second-class citizens as otherwise this initiative wouldn't even be discussed, and I wonder how comfortable it will be to continue working with these people now.

If I was a Chinese or a Russian engineer working for Gitlab, I'd consider quitting right now regardless of how this discussion ends. I am surprised that this initiative is not just considered by them, but basically approved by some of the senior staff:

> In e-group on Monday October 15, 2019 we took the decision to enable a "job family country-of-residence block" for team members who have access to customer data.

I don't think there's a need to explain what's wrong with this idea, there are a lot of sane comments on this thread explaining this just okay.

On a side note, I really like how company transparency saves them from making wrong decisions final. I think that this initiative will be dropped just like the recent third-party tracking issue, and I wish more companies were as transparent as this one.

> Would you happen to know why AdGuard's IP addresses point to Russia

The link shows the owner of the AS, not the location of the servers.

The IP address itself belongs to an AS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_(Internet)) that belongs to a Russian hosting company, and we have a long term rent contract on this subnet (with a purchase option), and we'll eventually acquire it.

To check where it really leads you should see the output of `traceroute 176.103.130.130`. However, this is also not the best option because AG DNS uses anycast (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast), and the route depends on your location.

> The AdGuard app does use AdGuard's DNS servers

Well, no it does not if you don't explicitly choose AdGuard DNS among other DNS servers. It filters everything locally.

> through their servers in Russia

I see no servers in Russia on the map: https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

There's new AG for Safari: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari

A local VPN running on your device which code you can examine on Github: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS

Regarding AdGuard being discontinued, this might have just changed: https://twitter.com/AdGuard/status/1135660616679645185

Consider trying AdGuard Home as well: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardHome

I don't think our discussion can come to any compromise. You seem to believe that not doing anything is a good thing, and the API is already ideal. I have a different opinion. Well, it's okay to have different opinions.

> Well it all depends what the requests are, doesn’t it.

Oh, there are all sorts of them.

From simple feature requests (like being able to distinguish fetch/xmlhttprequest) and bug reports (like that it considers requests to subdomains third-party) to something more complicated.

The problem is that regardless of what's requested/reported, there is no reaction.

> I’m sure some have requested the ability to run javascript, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to add that to the api.

Desktop Safari allows extensions to run javascript, why would anyone want to make it a part of the content blocking API.

> I can appreciate that uBlock Origin wants to be a universal condom that works on every website for everyone, but I also don't think it's so damning if the content blocker API is sufficient for that. Yet uBlock Origin and its rule lists still fail at this task as well.

I'd say it is sufficient for 90% of the websites at the moment.

My point is that this is not a constant value. Advertisers adapt and evolve, and content blockers need to do the same.

> A website can do any number of annoying things that uBlock Origin cannot block including things that aren't even related to ads. I simply refuse to use such websites. In fact, I want to know that a website does these things rather than remain in blissful ignorance. I don't want to support such a website even with my viewership.

This is indeed the best way to let site owners know that this approach is unacceptable. I wish everyone were doing the same.

> The rule limit is circumvented by simply bundling multiple rule lists.

Sure, but this is a workaround, quite an ugly one in fact.

> Also, 80% of Easylist is crap anyways

It does contain a lot of redundant rules, maybe 30% of it, but not 80% that's for sure. And what if I want to use more filter lists? The only thing I can do is use the multiple lists workaround. It is simply weird that nothing was done about this limitation in more than 3 years.

So you are telling me that not changing the API in years despite numerous requests is a good thing? Well, I disagree.

Regarding https, this change was made in 2015.

Adblock circumvention is a technique when a website reinjects and encrypts the ads when it detects that they were blocked. Kinda like what Facebook does.

Most of the changes and improvements to modern ad blockers are to deal with this kind of ads. Not in Safari, though. Webkit devs did nothing to improve or extend the content blocking API. Not to say that it still imposes the ridiculous rules limitation - you can't have more than 50k rules in a list (while Easylist alone has more than 80k).

Safari content blocking API is abandoned since 2015 when it was introduced. It simply does not allow using advanced blocking techniques which were developed by Chrome/FF blockers during these years.

It might be enough to handle most of the ads at the moment, but it fails miserably when a website uses any adblock circumvention.