191–200 of 405 posts
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You can if you use the Developer Edition. It's permanently disabled in the normal version because malware would piggyback on the browser to steal passwords and so on. Obviously Mozilla have no problem with people wanting to make their own extensions and so on.
Telling people to use a buggy beta is not acceptable. This is anti-user and pro-corporation.
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Significant part of FF's userbase decided in its favor exactly because of choice of third-party addons.
How significant? Firefox' market share was falling rapidly. (It still is declining, but not as dramatically.)
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That's like saying windows is dead in the water because it gives the user the ability to install applications not approved by microsoft.
Well, it's actually a been big problem for Windows, and installing unsigned software on Windows is harder than it used to be. Also, luckily for Microsoft, installing another OS is harder than using another browser. (I say using, not installing, because there's always another browser already installed on most OSes.)
And of course the next step would be DMCA takedowns for applications in the appstore. Everyone's computer would effectively be under US jurisdiction.
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How significant? Firefox' market share was falling rapidly. (It still is declining, but not as dramatically.)
I can't offer you a number, but it's significant enough for Google to offer me to autocomplete "firefox quantum addons" with "stopped working", and relevant discussions left a visible footprint on the net. I'm not sure how is the second sentence related to the question. If you're implying that addons dragged it down - it for sure is incorrect.
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Stop enabling the destruction of journalism? That's an entirely serious suggestion. I'm not arguing that what you're doing is illegal. I have all sorts of qualms with copyright and its enforcement myself. If I were "copyright czar", movies would get three years, and newspapers maybe a week. But if we wish for copyright-holders to respect the rights of internet users, it would seem to be a winning proposition to maybe…
Multiple news orgs have stated in public that they don't care about paywalls bypassers because they put up the paywall to convert only the most amenable readers. This is very similar to the paper distribution model where an extreme minority of subscribers represented the majority of revenue, due to extreme discounts and other subsidies given to most readers.
Automating the process by pretending to be Google means the user won't even see that friction or messaging. It's clever, but it breaks the premise.
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Yeah. That's the point. I won't go into the subject of discussing if that is legal or not, but for sure it's not ethical. That said, you're free to try to get around easy "protections", Mozilla is free to take down your methods for doing that.
You could make moral arguments for and against the companies seeking these protections and even Mozilla itself. Ultimately businesses will always ruthlessly try to make more money, and software will ruthlessly seek a more efficient user experience. Often these objective clash. Spotify is the obvious example that seemed to offer a solution in the music space. But we have yet to discover such a solution in online publi…
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Significant part of FF's userbase decided in its favor exactly because of choice of third-party addons.
How significant? Firefox' market share was falling rapidly. (It still is declining, but not as dramatically.)
The rise of Chrome is responsible for all of Mozilla's lost share. But major factors causing Chrome to gain share are being the default on the most popular mobile platform (Android) and being heavily promoted on google.com for many years.
Making it harder to install addons (and breaking all the old ones) is one of the things contributing to Mozilla losing share to Chrome. People used to use Firefox over Chrome because of all the great addons, which they then broke, leaving users with less reason not to use Chrome (which was significantly faster until Firefox Quantum). In other words, the causation is exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting.
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How significant? Firefox' market share was falling rapidly. (It still is declining, but not as dramatically.)
I can't offer you a number, but it's significant enough for Google to offer me to autocomplete "firefox quantum addons" with "stopped working", and relevant discussions left a visible footprint on the net. I'm not sure how is the second sentence related to the question. If you're implying that addons dragged it down - it for sure is incorrect.
This would not be a problem if Mozilla had sided with users for once and allowed us to install xpi extensions from outside their app store.
This view is bonkers. You can still install extensions outside AMO. And you can install unsigned extensions in Dev and Nightly. Is changing your release branch really that much more of a burden than flipping a preference?
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It absolutely can, for example: "It's not gonna happen. Firefox would be dead by now if it still allowed users to customize their webbrowser and make Firefox unusable (as in slow, unstable, and btw insecure), because users wouldn't keep up with that for too long. They'd just use another browser. This may be okay with you for now because you know how to protect yourself against misconfiguration, but in the long run Mo…
Sure, you can always claim that some random lockdown is vital. The thing is, not every assertion is the same. Yours could be nonsense while mine could still be true.