The discourse about Mozilla is ridiculous, here and most everywhere. You've got people taking every perceived opportunity to attack them for things they do, things they didn't do, and things it's imagined they might've done. And then another crowd of equally determined people doggedly defending them for every idiotic blunder they make, such as this one.
Meanwhile Mozilla itself has nothing substantial to say. This is not the first time a prominent extension has mysteriously gone missing from amo with Mozilla telling us nothing about its role in the incident. @[email protected] needs to be in the discussion giving us a real explanation of what happened, why they got it wrong, and what they're doing to improve things.
The best I can think of is that the explainer language used to justify the extension's removal was just boilerplate language that got copy+pasted here because someone clicked the wrong button. But even that makes a mockery of the review process.
I think "oops clicked wrong button" would be slightly more defensible, but not by much. If they truly rejected the extension for content in it that it does not have, it's hard to see how a human could make that mistake even accidentally. But maybe there's something I'm missing.
True in a way. However, there is a rather large collection of speculation on the Internet that is quite an undertaking to correct. And a large population of people and bots willing to speculate. Also, having once been speculated, each speculation takes on a life of its own. If it gets much more substantial, forget Skynet, we're busy creating Specunet and its sidekick Confusionet -- an insidious duo.
Totally agree, I've already blocked @[email protected] because of the endless stream of rage bait and bad faith arguments. Now it is showing up here too.
I thought that was the shit Chrome was doing to block adblockers and antimalware plugins, if Firefox is doing the same thing what browser do we use now? :-(
I don't care about all the browser wars stuff, I lost interest when it was Netscape Vs IE, I just want a browser that I can configure fully myself and have it be as safe and secure as one can make it, within reason.
Mozilla isn't google. They took it back and encouraged the guy to reach out in the future if any issues arise.
BFD, it's not like they banned his account, just one gimped extension that doesn't do the whole ad blocking experience and even then only because he didn't do anything to try and reverse it. Then after it's restored he throws his tantrum and removes it.
With all the extensions out there false positive detections of malicious apps are going to happen. Nobody has unlimited resources to hire boatloads of devs to review every single line of code of every extension for every update done. That's an insane expectation.
There is fairly substantial rumor that there may be a smear campaign against firefox lately because they are still supporting manifest v2, which our owning class does not care for.
Mozilla has made their fair share of stupid decisions lately, but they are still leagues ahead of Google, Amazon, and the other FAANG-type companies in ethics and trustworthiness. Definitely something to keep a pulse on, but nothing to throw the baby out with the bathwater over. And if it really bothers you, use LibreWolf/Fennec.
This one is completely on Mozilla. TBH I'm not very happy with their governance either. Stop spending money on bullshit and start working on the damn browser. Stop hassling devs like him who have had an immense contribution to not only open source, but your fucking browser's usage metrics.
I wish another browser standard comes up and we can say goodbye to this google-infested shit-bucket that is mozilla.
Thats kind of like saying Valve and Steam are not the same thing. Like, yea, Valve owns and develops Steam, but most people will understand someone who calls the company "Steam" (even if they sound a bit daft in doing so).
As I've said elsewhere: I wonder what controls Mozilla has in place to prevent gradual takeover of their board by those with an interest in removing Firefox as a competitor. We've watched the sleeper cell in the Supreme Court transform that body into an illegitimate partisan puppet. Mozilla's actions over the last few years would make much more sense if it were being manipulated into self destruction.
That's a real bummer about Mozilla and uBlock Origin clashing. It's weird 'cause their values seem pretty aligned with privacy and user control. Hopefully they can smooth things out soon—users like us just want our browsing to be smooth and ad-free!
Gorhill is free to do whatever he wants, of course, I thank him for all the good work. But his reaction is honestly childish and dangerous for the community. Once again his decision to pull the plug opens the door to abusers. Now when you go to the addons page and search for uBlock, you may find illegitimate extensions pretending to be uBlock which are trying to collect your data or worse. Less tech say people don't know any better.
It would seem that the ubo lite version was made specifically to cater to chrome and manifest v3 if I'm not mistaken...
In the end the author may have just felt it was too much energy keeping a pared down chrome version on Firefox when the full version is present and working. Especially after this particular drama.
This just makes me worried to rely on uBO but more because what if the author just fucks off because someone else pissed them off.
That is very concerning to me, also.
Large parts of the internet relying on one or two tiny one-man FOSS projects? (UBO and ADguard are often cited as the only two reliable-ish and safe adblockers)
If he can't be bothered with that nonsense, how secure is UBO's future? How secure is the future of adblocking?
I would bet that advertising companies are rubbing their hands now and planning to ramp up pressure against these poor devs.
Mozilla can't be trusted to host the addon, so the author is taking on the responsibility of hosting it himself. How is that his fault and not Mozilla's?
Whether Mozilla acted out of malice or incompetence is irrelevant. The report was false and the findings were incorrect, they have to be held responsible either way.
Lite is barely relevant for Firefox anyway. Gorhill (along with host list maintainers) is one of the saints of modern day open source; if he felt overwhelmed by Mozilla's actions, and chose to just take Lite down from the extension store, he has every right to. No one should shit on someone who has given so much to the community.
It’s probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they “accidentally” remove an ad blocker.
I mean I'm of two minds here. One, there's an epidemic of intellectually lazy, kneejerk Mozilla hate and it's time to turn the tide on that.
But on the other hand, even as a Mozilla fanboy I can see how this is a really bad look, and really indefensible. I think it's more of a huge error of judgment, and if there are other huge errors, I can begin to see a problem, but I think they have too much of a positive track record in their history to just go reaching for the tinfoil hats so quickly.