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What happened to Firefox Send?

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Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#201

Post by sfink »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #112
torben-friis wrote: post #43

I really don't understand it. - Content was used to spread malware/illegal content - It was not profitable How are those two things something you find out after the fact? What was the reasoning for launching the product in the first place?

If you were being cynical (and to be honest I don't think this is exclusively what happened here), you could view it purely as a short term marketing campaign. It generated lots of positive reporting about Firefox, associating them with: launching a new product, encryption, freedom and ease of use. It also had an element of virality, in that a passionate Firefox user could use the service to send to someone who doesn…

Heh. The marketing campaign idea does sound plausible, but I don't buy it. It's much easier to burn goodwill than generate it. People hate to lose existing stuff a lot more than they like to get new stuff. "There's no such thing as bad PR" only works when you can lock in your customers.

I agree with your final paragraph.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#202

Post by leafmeal »

laurent123456 wrote: post #175
CodesInChaos wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF? I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.

They made simple workflows more complicated, removed features and move UI elements around for no apparent reason. Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why? There was a useful list of most frequently visited sites on the homepage, which they've decided to remove. Opening a new tab or a favourite now requires at least…

> Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why?

As someone with a larger phone, this has made things 100x easier. Previously, the address bar was out of reach with one hand.

Personally, I'm really happy with all of the changes.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#203

Post by staticassertion »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #189
sfink wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any specific knowledge, but my general impression was that malware was a very real issue that nobody could come up with a realistic response to. Other than that, it seems like Send was a breakout success. (I work for Mozilla, but mostly on the JS engine.)

2 questions: 1) how? 2) how did you know? I can't quite see how malware would be sent with this? An exploiter uploads a file, then gets someone to download it - where's the secret sauce, why does this work better than hosting the file; each file is only downloadable once IIRC? Next, how were Mozilla able to determine the contents of files shared (but not able to just drop by hash known malware, or run antivirus heuri…

It's very common for malware to use services like this:

1) To host secondary payloads

2) To exfiltrate user data

3) In some cases even to coordinate commands to payloads

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#204

Post by jwilk »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #9
shp0ngle wrote: post #2

....oh. I have used it a few times in the past for the classic task "move large file between two computers that are next to each other, how the hell do I do this simply", but yeah, I can't see how that would be cost-effective for Firefox.

Magic wormhole is your friend

Magic Wormhole is a security disaster. Do not use if you have other options.

1) By default, authentication key has only 16 bits of entropy. (I wish I was making this up…)

2) There's no good UI to make the key stronger: you can either use, say, "--code-length 16", which makes the receiving code ridiculously long, or provide your own code with "--code", in which case it's visible to other local users via ps(1).

3) Between "wormhole send" and "wormhole receive" on the other side, anyone on the Internet can attempt to intercept the transfer. Conveniently, you can list all currently valid channel ids (nameplates).

4) If the interception succeeds, the attacker can immediately run "wormhole send" with the same code, so that the intended side wouldn't notice anything is off.

5) If the interception fails, the attacker still ruined the transfer. (DoS)

All of this would be fixable, if not the maintainer's bizarre insistence on using weak crypto.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#205

Post by abemassry »

picodguyo wrote: post #148
llagerlof wrote: post #120

https://transfer.sh

Have used this for years but it's being shut down at the end of October.

I run a similar project like this, I have for the last 8 years, it's pretty bare bones but you can build on top of it: https://github.com/abemassry/wsend

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#206

Post by dylz »

laurent123456 wrote: post #175
CodesInChaos wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF? I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.

They made simple workflows more complicated, removed features and move UI elements around for no apparent reason. Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why? There was a useful list of most frequently visited sites on the homepage, which they've decided to remove. Opening a new tab or a favourite now requires at least…

> Weirdest thing is how they moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen. You can put it back to the top of the screen but it's like - why?

One hand operation / large screen sizes?

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#207

Post by mstange »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #200
unicornporn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We" as in "the people who knows how to use the command line". Unfortunately very few of the people I send files to knows that. There's https://webwormhole.io/ and https://file.pizza/ , but can I know what they really do behind the scenes? Native open-source software for this would be a dream come true. It's 2020 and I still wrestle with sending files between devices. And no, don't take this as a wish for creating ju…

> There's https://webwormhole.io/ and https://file.pizza/ , but can I know what they really do behind the scenes? Also they're not very reliable. I tried to use both of those a couple weeks ago and it just didn't work. File.pizza crashed during initialization on a large file from a friend, and they both failed when I was trying to send a file that was only about 3GB.

My experience was similar: File.pizza didn't work. However, https://justbeamit.com/ worked flawlessly.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#208

Post by sneakypete81 »

unicornporn wrote: post #107
aj3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have Magic Wormhole though and it's awesome! (at least for techies) https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html

"We" as in "the people who knows how to use the command line". Unfortunately very few of the people I send files to knows that. There's https://webwormhole.io/ and https://file.pizza/ , but can I know what they really do behind the scenes? Native open-source software for this would be a dream come true. It's 2020 and I still wrestle with sending files between devices. And no, don't take this as a wish for creating ju…

I've started a UI for magic wormhole:

https://github.com/sneakypete81/wormhole-ui

It's GPL, cross-platform, native (Qt) and uses the same Python library as the Magic Wormhole CLI.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#209

Post by InitialLastName »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #100
rvba wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all their "side projects" look like greenfields used by the project teams to boost their CVs so they can land better jobs. Those teams know very well that those projects have no use case, but they dont care. Foundation does not care either, since it is busy with increasing own remuneration and politics. Meanwhile their core product lost around 10 percentage points of market share (from 15% marketshare to 5%):…

> Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF? I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.

No tab queuing means I can't open a bunch of tabs from another app without constantly having to switch back and forth (Open link in another app -> Auto-opens firefox with that tab -> switch back to origin app).

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#210

Post by jandrese »

rkangel wrote: post #11

I once again don't have a good solution for 'how do I email a large file' but https://webwormhole.io/ is useful and simple, particularly for sending something big to someone you're video chatting with.

Ultimately the problem of "how do I email a large file" isn't a technical issue, it is a political issue. It's like famine in the modern world.

Once you have built a secure and easy to use way to transfer large files to multiple people you have built a piracy enabling tool and you're eventually going to be sued by various media cartels for trillions of dollars and your tool will be blocked by network operators who also don't want to be sued.

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