361–370 of 537 posts
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Seems kind of like it is part of an ARG. I can't say I'm totally against something like that; Mozilla's gotta make money somehow, and as long as it's not selling out user privacy it's a better tradeoff than Chrome.
> Mozilla's gotta make money somehow They're a nonprofit; they're not allowed to just "make money". And, they already take donations.
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I'm not sure why this is downvoted. I work in advertising as a conceptual creative. My entire career is about creating ideas like this for brands. An art director and copywriter sat in a room together over two days and came up with lots of different ideas to generate PR for Mr. Robot. They presented the ideas to a creative director, who went through the work and picked the one he felt was most suitable. They presente…
The biggest problem, for me, is that these extensions obviously get less scrutiny in Mozilla organization. The "core" is made with a lot of "eyes" taking care that not something "wrong" for the user enters the code base. Then some marketing people both in and outside of Mozilla push something that is probably not passing the same strict reviews. It points to the organizational problem in Mozilla. Re: "not sure": don'…
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> but the deep Pocket integration was just too offputting You mean the single button that does literally nothing until and unless you click on it?
Yep, that button was really annoying. And the Pocket thing on the home screen, too. And the fact that I had to Google to figure out how to disable it. If you must know why, I don't want promos for particular web properties in my browser. I find Pocket to be annoying conceptually (a service to help you carry around all the things you didn't and won't read—eww, no, no thank you), and I don't want to look at it every da…
My main complaints are that it's not more useful, though with some tweaks, I've made it just that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...
It needs more help than just CSS, but that's a start.
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This is being added to the browser, outside the realm of security updates, through what is supposed to be a UX improvement program, for commercial purposes. It's written by a commercial company that produces advertisement content. It's not clear this code is audited. Sorry, but I'm uninstalling firefox. They have broken the basic trust I have in them as a user to not push arbitrary code to my machine against my inter…
Have fun in Lynx. that's probably the only browser that wouldn't do something like this. Well maybe Safari, not because Apple wouldn't, but because they just don't care enough about ad revenue. Chrome: They leech everything they can get away with, granted it goes only to Google, but you know it's just to feed their never-ending ad-revenue goal. MS: They bypassed IE only ads, and went on to build ads into the entire O…
Truthfully, this is why I use Safari. Apple makes money by selling me devices and services, Mozilla and Google are both driven by ad revenue. Even good actors within these companies are working within a framework where the customer is the product.
.. also Safari saves like 15% on battery.
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Speaking for myself here, but I'm not concerned that Mozilla might push malware into Firefox installations. I'm concerned about the lack of judgement in pushing an extension with a vague, scary-sounding name and description simply for a cross-marketing tie-in, and I'm worried that it could have damaged the trust ordinary users have in Firefox.
I don’t see the harm in a good organization contributing lot of value to this world having a little fun. Some of the comments are mentioning IT managers banning firefox, those will be the same IT managers doing all the other pennywise/pound foolish things that make you try not to work on their team in the first place. Maybe it’s actually good to put something scary sounding in there to raise awareness. It could help…
Many people seem to be shocked because Mozilla installed an add-on automatically. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter since the code is coming from Mozilla - they're building the whole browser, so they could introduce functionality anywhere. If someone distrusts their add-ons, why trust their browser at all? The main question is what behavior is being introduced. I haven't researched deeply, but apparently the ad…
The major problem is that they installed an add-on without properly communicating what it was. A somewhat smaller problem but still a big problem is that was an utterly frivolous add-on that shouldn't have been pushed to people who didn't explicitly want it. But the biggest problem is that Mozilla seems to have trouble understanding why any of those two would be a problem, I want my browser vendor to be serious and n…
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Just coming up to speed, apologies for the potentially obvious questions. 1. Can you explain what you mean by "unknown Mozilla developers?" Unknown to whom? 2. Can you provide more detail on what specific configuration changes are reverted when opening the add-ons window? That sounds like a fairly serious bug. 3. What is the specific "this" you're trying to "properly disable?" You shouldn't have to dive into things l…
I'll try to answer in the parent's place, since I've been watching this issue. > Can you explain what you mean by "unknown Mozilla developers?" Unknown to whom? Unknown in the sense that this extension wasn't documented at all, there was no Bugzilla issue for it and it's not clear whether it was properly vetted by QA. Whether you argue that this kind of silent push updates is good or bad, I think they aren't tested a…
The comment about the visibility of the add-on (Bugzilla, QA process, documentation, etc.) is well taken, as are those regarding the naming of system add-ons, Pioneer, etc.
I've got an intercontinental flight coming up soon, and I'll do some grepping around to try to understand the prefs mentioned. If someone else beats me to it and posts a specific set of steps to reproduce a pref flip on those, I'd appreciate it.
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The biggest problem, for me, is that these extensions obviously get less scrutiny in Mozilla organization. The "core" is made with a lot of "eyes" taking care that not something "wrong" for the user enters the code base. Then some marketing people both in and outside of Mozilla push something that is probably not passing the same strict reviews. It points to the organizational problem in Mozilla. Re: "not sure": don'…
Why would assume that it doesn’t pass through the same review process? None of your assumptions are obvious to me.
This looks like "let's give litte Perry and these marketing departments something to play, whatever, it's just an extension, who cares." So little Perry writes a description of the extension "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS", the extension gets silently pushed to all the US users(!) (Firefox has support for that) who freak out, and the first response from somebody involved with that was "it was not supposed to be seen." You see, it was planned to keep the extension also "invisible" to the users -- Firefox has support that too! The extension was obviously not formally reviewed or formally tested, if the "invisibility" was the goal. Of course, it being "invisible" wouldn't be better. It's a misuse of the whole mechanism, compared to what Mozilla explained to the users. The mechanism was supposed to allow making "studies" from the behavior of the users who agree to take part in them. Instead, it was an attempt to a "viral ad" that was delivered to the whole Firefox using US population. There are multiple wrong decisions in this story.
Now I hope Mozilla does get the idea that the users do care.
Many people seem to be shocked because Mozilla installed an add-on automatically. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter since the code is coming from Mozilla - they're building the whole browser, so they could introduce functionality anywhere. If someone distrusts their add-ons, why trust their browser at all? The main question is what behavior is being introduced. I haven't researched deeply, but apparently the ad…
The major problem is that they installed an add-on without properly communicating what it was. A somewhat smaller problem but still a big problem is that was an utterly frivolous add-on that shouldn't have been pushed to people who didn't explicitly want it. But the biggest problem is that Mozilla seems to have trouble understanding why any of those two would be a problem, I want my browser vendor to be serious and n…
FF 57 installed from Debian unstable repository has "Data reporting is disabled for this build configuration" - which disabled, in theory, the shield "studies" as well. I don't know who made this decision at Debian, but thank you.
I wonder if the Ubuntu stable ones have this too?