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What’s going on in the world of extensions

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#31

Post by jbaber »

dspillett wrote: post #13
tomComb wrote: post #5

Need we play such language games? It's "ad blocking". People use those extensions to block ads. If you asked the average user about their privacy preserving add-on, or their content blocker they would probably be confused. Yes, obviously I understand the privacy dimensions of advertising, and I realize that this is all in the service of the good guys and against the bad guys, but that shouldn't affect our response to…

> It's "ad blocking". People use those extensions to block ads. I use them, and DNS filters, to block stalking. They just happen to block adverts too because it is practically impossible to separate the two ATM. I'll accept ads based on the page I'm looking at and my rough geographical position, but I don't see why I should put up with being followed and profiled everywhere I go.

Exactly. I didn't even use adblockers before I had kids and thought about them being tracked. Now I use a pihole and bend myself in knots trying to figure out how to pay sites I visit.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#32

Post by cmeacham98 »

rom-antics wrote: post #10
dessant wrote: post #7

Firefox no longer allows extensions to have full control over requests in Manifest V3, despite their repeated public statements. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1786919 They have merged a change that makes it impossible to access and download certain website content the user is viewing and wants to process. Now that Firefox has introduced this limitation without offering an alternative, it is now much ea…

Is the content-blocking model tied to the manifest version, or can you mix and match? Or, rephrased: could gorhill conceivably upgrade uBlock Origin's manifest.json to v3, while still using the v2 content blocking APIs?

The linked change doesn't affect addons like uBlock Origin. GP is being unnecessarily alarmist about a relatively minor change, where the FF devs have even expressed they'd be willing to add back in support for their usecase (they just don't want to allow it by default).

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#33

Post by tomComb »

msla wrote: post #6
tomComb wrote: post #5

Need we play such language games? It's "ad blocking". People use those extensions to block ads. If you asked the average user about their privacy preserving add-on, or their content blocker they would probably be confused. Yes, obviously I understand the privacy dimensions of advertising, and I realize that this is all in the service of the good guys and against the bad guys, but that shouldn't affect our response to…

I see it as a good rhetorical move: Say it's ad blocking, and you get people coming in all po-faced about the need for platforms to make money and how horrible it is to have freeloaders blocking honest, legitimate adtech. Frame it as defense of privacy and malware-blocking and those adtech boosters are on the defensive, to the point they probably don't comment at all for fear of drawing attention to the correlation.

> I see it as a good rhetorical move

I completely agree: it is a good rhetorical move. aka good spin. But I don't think we should celebrate that sort of thing in tech blog posts, or in any writing actually unless your work in marketing.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#34

Post by [deleted] »

tomComb wrote: post #30
dspillett wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's "ad blocking". People use those extensions to block ads. I use them, and DNS filters, to block stalking. They just happen to block adverts too because it is practically impossible to separate the two ATM. I'll accept ads based on the page I'm looking at and my rough geographical position, but I don't see why I should put up with being followed and profiled everywhere I go.

Yes, but you are not the typical user, and that is my point. I wasn't denying that cases could be found that would support the language that Mozilla is using.

[deleted]

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#35

Post by burkaman »

piyh wrote: post #25
nfriedly wrote: post #14

Meanwhile in Firefox for Android: absolutely nothing is going on with extensions, because Mozilla disabled nearly all of them.

You can use Firefox nightly and enable any that you want. I'd rather use the version of Firefox that doesn't crash more frequently, but that's the trade-off I gotta make at the moment.

How? I use Firefox Nightly but I only see the handful of recommended extensions available.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#36

Post by nfriedly »

piyh wrote: post #25
nfriedly wrote: post #14

Meanwhile in Firefox for Android: absolutely nothing is going on with extensions, because Mozilla disabled nearly all of them.

You can use Firefox nightly and enable any that you want. I'd rather use the version of Firefox that doesn't crash more frequently, but that's the trade-off I gotta make at the moment.

Yeah, I know there's workarounds, but it's a pain in the rear.

Currently I'm using Iceraven which is essentially just Firefox with about a thousand extensions enabled instead of 17.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#37

Post by keyme »

burkaman wrote: post #35
piyh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Firefox nightly and enable any that you want. I'd rather use the version of Firefox that doesn't crash more frequently, but that's the trade-off I gotta make at the moment.

How? I use Firefox Nightly but I only see the handful of recommended extensions available.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/

You can create your own "extension collection", and change the default one used by FF on Android. I use the Fennec build of FF from F-droid (Playstore build doesn't support this).

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#38

Post by tannhaeuser »

RobotToaster wrote: post #9
dessant wrote: post #7

Firefox no longer allows extensions to have full control over requests in Manifest V3, despite their repeated public statements. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1786919 They have merged a change that makes it impossible to access and download certain website content the user is viewing and wants to process. Now that Firefox has introduced this limitation without offering an alternative, it is now much ea…

Once again they ruin the extension API to please their overlord google.

Sad but true. FF devs and fans will complain, but a look over the Mozilla Foundation's balance sheet/annual report [1], and in particular the share of revenue that royalties received from "search engines" have, is all you need to know.

[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#39

Post by causality0 »

nfriedly wrote: post #14

Meanwhile in Firefox for Android: absolutely nothing is going on with extensions, because Mozilla disabled nearly all of them.

There's still no way to change the User Agent in Firefox Mobile. I switched to Vivaldi because at least there when I tell it to show me the desktop site it shows me the goddamn desktop site.

Re: What’s going on in the world of extensions

#40

Post by gnicholas »

Vinnl wrote: post #4

Some more detail about the control that the new extensions button gives users: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/11/17/unified-extension... It allows you to disable extensions only on specific sites. (And presumably, that's also the reason you need to dive into about:config to remove it: if you remove it, it's pretty hard for casual users to find out why an extension isn't working. By gating it behind about:config…

Does this allow whitelisting as well as blacklisting? Chrome has offered both for a long time, and I remember being surprised to learn that FF didn't offer either. It's a welcome change!
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