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Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

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Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#101

Post by jhasse »

minitech wrote: post #87
seabird wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to wager that it's because Firefox has devolved into a Chrome wannabe that you suffer through for ideological reasons and little else. XUL addons were the reason to use Firefox; it's an otherwise mediocre browser that gets trounced by Chrome in every conceivable way but privacy (and even that might not be a guarantee). Mozilla started to get really into the whole ethics and responsibility arena around the s…

> trounced by Chrome in every conceivable way but privacy and performance, and memory use, and UI.

Yeah right. We're all just using Chrome because it was advertised on google.com and came bundled with Anti-Virus programs.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#102

Post by detaro »

_Microft wrote: post #98
justinclift wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong, I do agree with the 2nd two, though I haven't really thought through the first use case. :) I'm mainly just replying to the poster that attempted to say that since Firefox already makes network requests, ~anything should be ok.

A captive portal is a login screen of a service that prevents other activity unless logged in. My guess is that Firefox will not try to check for updates or other things if it notices that the detectportal-request was not successful (i.e. the user is not logged into the hotel-wifi or something like this yet).

It also then can prompt the user to go to the captive portal page and log in, without the other redirection methods of the captive portal breaking anything (e.g. if they spoof DNS responses to redirect you to the login page) or the user being confused why they can't use the web despite being in the network.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#103

Post by bromuro »

eridius wrote: post #66
justinclift wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of Firefox _is_ to make network requests. Just to point out, that "the whole point of Firefox" is to make the network requests I want . eg from my perspective it's a tool like (say) cURL that has a specific purpose. It's a subtle difference, but an important one. :)

Every one of the requests that 43920 listed in a request in service of you, the user. The first is to detect captive portals, which is something you'll find very important if you're behind a captive portal. The second is for OCSP certificate validation, which helps ensure your safety while browsing. The third is checking for updates, which again is for your benefit.

Every request is a way for tracking you. We don’t want to be tracked when we open Firefox.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#104

Post by justinclift »

eridius wrote: post #66
justinclift wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of Firefox _is_ to make network requests. Just to point out, that "the whole point of Firefox" is to make the network requests I want . eg from my perspective it's a tool like (say) cURL that has a specific purpose. It's a subtle difference, but an important one. :)

Every one of the requests that 43920 listed in a request in service of you, the user. The first is to detect captive portals, which is something you'll find very important if you're behind a captive portal. The second is for OCSP certificate validation, which helps ensure your safety while browsing. The third is checking for updates, which again is for your benefit.

Thinking about that OCSP cert validation, that's done on a per-domain basis isn't it?

So... guessing here, that particular request would be checking if the domain for the Firefox update check itself has a valid cert.

If that's not what it's checking, hmmm...

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#105

Post by jrochkind1 »

eridius wrote: post #71
terryd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renee DiResta: Mozilla Fellow, Director of Research at New Knowledge https://www.mozillapulse.org/profile/410 New Knowledge is the organization that setup a fake Russian botnet, and then tried to push a narrative about how the Republican candidate in an Alabama Senate race was being assisted by this "Russian election interference"... anybody involved with that organization is a scumbag - it has zero redeeming qualiti…

I hadn't heard of this before, so I just dug up the original NYT story. At least one person from New Knowledge was involved in a small experiment designed to explore how the sorts of tactics used by the Russians worked, which attempted to convince Republicans that Mr. Moore was receiving Russian help, but it was designed to be too small to actually affect the outcome of the election (as the goal was to explore how th…

Really? Even just your version of the story above sounds AWFUL to me.

No, it's not okay to 'experiment' with effecting the outcome of an election, even if they say it did not effect the outcome.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#106

Post by wasdfff »

blondin wrote: post #82
baby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pocket is such a useful tool that I have a hard time understanding this comment.

mind sharing how you use pocket? i stopped using the web and mobile apps. all i get now is a weekly digest and that covers all i want.

For me its simple. I get most of my info on the web from RSS, and pocket is able to get through paywalls on articles with a right click.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#107

Post by wasdfff »

mnutt wrote: post #68
baby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pocket is such a useful tool that I have a hard time understanding this comment.

I eventually disabled Recommended by Pocket on my new tab screen because the recommendations were typically clickbaity and being on the new tab screen, it would many times divert me from whatever more important original action I meant to take. The creators probably had good intentions, but Recommended by Pocket seems almost like a dark pattern.

I disabled that too but I still use pocket to manage my reading list. My new tab screen is completely blank, its oddly calming.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#108

Post by tw20190405jxkro »

yarrel wrote: post #73
sanxiyn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla acquired Pocket. Pocket is now part of Mozilla, providing content recommendation.

Yes that was a mistake. It did get the person who had the original lunch with Pocket off the hook though.

... and it cost $29m... and the thing still isn't open source...

Thanks, MoFoCo.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#109

Post by tw20190405jxkro »

aphextron wrote: post #2

Mozilla is ethically compromised at the highest levels. They’ve made a shift over the last few years from a scrappy, low-rent, nonprofit dedicated to helping the web to just another data mining tech company. Just try setting your Firefox browser to a blank page with no requests on startup and watching the Wireshark log if you think otherwise.

> Mozilla is [...] made a shift over the last few years from a scrappy, low-rent, nonprofit dedicated to helping the web to just another data mining tech company.

This is a delightfully concise summary of Mozilla today. I was a Mozilla contributor in the "scrappy" years and became one of those listed on /about/owners.html. But Mozilla today is basically unrecognizable. A few years ago, even after I'd stopped contributing, it made me sick to my stomach to think about where things have gone, but I can process it better nowadays.

Mozilla's done worse than what's written in OP, but the absolute worst they can do is continue getting people to believe they're the same scrappy organization fighting for good.

If you believe in the Mozilla mission, then use Firefox, I guess, because there's not really a better option. (Although I suppose a WebKit-based browser should be an acceptable equivalent.) But please don't give Mozilla any money or tell people that Mozilla is their friend. It sort of tarnishes how things were around the time when you could say that and it was actually true all the way through.

Re: Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming

#110

Post by alyandon »

zaarn wrote: post #100
alyandon wrote: post #3

In a similar vein, I'd appreciate it if Mozilla would stop using updates to Firefox as a mechanism to re-enable misfeatures I've explicitly disabled like Pocket integration and the "recommend X feature|extension while you are browsing but don't forget we totally respect your privacy!" settings. :-/

I've disabled Pocket via about:config and despite a year worth of updates, I honestly had never had the issue of it reenabling. And that is both on Windows with Auto-Update and Linux via package manager.

I run mostly FF dev & nightly and I've had it happen to me multiple times. I'm assuming the Pocket getting re-enabled problem is the result of an internal update to the extension that caused it to re-populate all the defaults in the config.

The other config settings I'm going to be less charitable about considering there would be no rational reason for an update to ever change those values.

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