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No, the plan is to deploy it in targeted areas where doing so would have a clear benefit.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation

It’s entirely for build and test. No python actually ships with the browser.

It’s for GeckoView, the embedding API for Android. (I used to work on that team)

Note that this is across all platforms in the repository, so it is skewed relative to the build for a specific platform.

As an example, Java is in there for Android. There is also a lot of JavaScript that isn’t shared between desktop and Android.

dblohm7on LibreWolf – A fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom

> has lost 95% of its userbase

That's not an accurate number.

dblohm7on How our free plan stays free

Tailscale ACLs can prevent that.

dblohm7on Firefox removed Yandex search option

I flagged it because of the editorializing in the title.

dblohm7on Barcode Detection API

And if you look at the badges in the matrix, the API is not a standard yet, either.

dblohm7on Barcode Detection API

Basically, yes. Browser vendors have had an agreement for some time now to only expose new APIs in secure contexts in order to encourage HTTPS adoption.

dblohm7on Interop 2022

Solving these types of issues can be a lot more complicated than you might think.

For example, take WebRTC. Lots of places wrote their WebRTC code to Chrome's non-standard "Plan B" dialect. Now all the browsers are transitioning to the standardized "Unified Plan."

Should Mozilla have spent developer resources on implementing Plan B as a stop-gap until the Unified Plan was rolled out by Chrome, and then subsequently thrown away all the code for the former?

Some people might say so, but others might argue that doing so is a terrible waste of resources.

My point here is that the solution is not always cut and dried.

dblohm7on Convoy Crackdown – power to freeze bank accounts without trial or legal recourse

Wrong law. That's the old one.

Since 1982, and part of our constitution: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-12.html

dblohm7on Convoy Crackdown – power to freeze bank accounts without trial or legal recourse

And that would never be allowed by Canadian courts. Perpetual renewal would not satisfy the Oakes Test [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_1_of_the_Canadian_Char...

dblohm7on Convoy Crackdown – power to freeze bank accounts without trial or legal recourse

> People getting hung up on the text of the bill forget that it's merely an Act of Parliament, and thus can easily be amended or replaced via a simple majority vote.

...and yet still subject to the constitution.

dblohm7on Against Pair Programming

As always, this is about nuance. Too many concepts are forced by management, instead of being organic.

Organic pairing is awesome. Forced pairing is garbage.

dblohm7on Replace the Text Encoding menu with a single override item

By submitting every new Bugzilla ticket as a new HN post, of course!

dblohm7on My default search engine changed after updating Firefox to version 98

When I worked at Mozilla, the official policy was that when the user overrides the default search engine, then that search engine pref is left alone.

(Note that if the user never changed the default, but the default itself changed, for example when Mozilla switched from Google to Yahoo (or vice versa), that was considered to be fair game.)

Whenever this happened while I was there, it was always due to an actual bug. I highly doubt that there is anything nefarious going on here.

dblohm7on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

It is moments like this where the differences between Canada and the US are brought into sharper relief.

dblohm7on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

> Canada has a big opt-out for charter rights, in that “reasonable limits” are allowed if they can be “demonstrably justified”

Indeed, and there is ample case law from the Supreme Court of Canada that provides guidance to judges as to how to apply that section of the Charter.

R v. Oakes was one of the seminal cases in that regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Oakes

dblohm7on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/convoy-protesters-break-through-surrey...

"At about 8 p.m., police said a large farm tractor and a semi-truck attempted to ram a police vehicle. The officer in the vehicle was able to reposition and avoid the collision." https://globalnews.ca/news/8618494/alberta-coutts-border-pro...

dblohm7on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

There have been multiple incidents of protesters using large vehicles to smash through police barricades. What do you call that?

dblohm7on Trudeau Invokes Emergencies Act

Not only that, but a cache of weapons and ammunition was seized from a trailer at that blockade.

dblohm7on The Life of MS-DOS

“ Windows XP moved to the NT kernel, whose primary difference was moving away from a monolithic kernel to a hybrid kernel. With MS-DOS, the kernel and operating system exists completely within the kernel space. Windows NT uses a safer structure, where the kernel is split between the kernel space and the user space.”

Yeah, that’s not what a hybrid kernel entails, and that is certainly not the primary difference between DOS and NT. I had to stop reading.

dblohm7on Every high school student should have to take a philosophy course

I agree with the author's central thesis, but I disagree with the cause.

I came of age in the 1990's, the era of participation trophies and "follow your passions" / "you can become whatever you want." Anecdotally, societal pressure to push students into STEM wasn't really a thing yet.

We had the same problems then as the author is having now: too many people who are incapable of critical thought and worrying more about rote memorization.

dblohm7on This needs some heavy checking... (line 1029)

One of the first codebases I ever worked on professionally allowed gotos as part of its style guide, but only under two conditions:

1. You're using the goto for error handling and cleanup in a function; and

2. You only jump in a forward direction.

dblohm7on Retrospective and technical details on the recent Firefox outage

Yeah, please don't take the pitchfork thing personally, that was more intended for anybody reading that comment who immediately assumes the worst.

As for high level docs about how it works, I haven't been involved in quite a few years, so I'm not 100% sure about the best source, but this link looks like a good place to start:

https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/concepts/history.html

dblohm7on Retrospective and technical details on the recent Firefox outage

I can share several!

If you're running Firefox, you can go to `about:telemetry` and see what data is there. Note that some of that data might be populated even if you have telemetry turned off. Don't reach for your pitchfork quite yet: I assure you that the data isn't being sent.

You can go to https://telemetry.mozilla.org to see various analyses involving telemetry data.

In the source tree, telemetry probes must be defined in one of a few places. Here are their locations:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...

dblohm7on Retrospective and technical details on the recent Firefox outage

IP addresses are uniquely identifiable, sure, but not personally identifiable.

dblohm7on Retrospective and technical details on the recent Firefox outage

The socket thread does not do blocking reads.

dblohm7on Retrospective and technical details on the recent Firefox outage

That's not how Firefox does safe browsing. https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

"One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe."

dblohm7on Retrospective and technical details on the recent Firefox outage

> Wow, I did not realize it would send URLs to Google. That does not sound GDPR-compliant.

That's not how Firefox does safe browsing. https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

"One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Safe Browsing is the idea that the browser needs to send all visited URLs to Google in order to verify whether or not they are safe."