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What happened to Firefox Send?

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Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#241

Post by brazzy »

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.

A huge annoyance for me personally: stored passwords are no longer applied to HTTP basic auth.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#242

Post by pseudalopex »

fireattack wrote: post #240
pseudalopex wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think performance matters to more people than full range video.

Performance isn't the only thing people care when choosing a browser. If it is, they probably abandoned Fx for a Blink based browser long time ago. Also does Firefox really have significant performance issue after 57?

Who said it was the only thing?

Blink based browsers aren't faster across the board. They would be without Firefox developers working on performance.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#243

Post by therealx »

sfink wrote: post #182
timvisee wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. They suddenly took it down for 'maintenance'. The relaunch was delayed. Mozilla released a statement on laying off 250 employees. That's when I figured it wouldn't come back online again.

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.)

On other projects, we solved this by incorporating virustotal checking. Sure, a 0day or custom malware may get through, but thats a small number at the end of the day.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#244

Post by therealx »

staticassertion wrote: post #203
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't think about exfiltration - good point. I guess they could just host their own instance on like the good old days.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#245

Post by therealx »

akuji1993 wrote: post #29
0-_-0 wrote: post #6

This is due to people sharing malware: https://www.techradar.com/news/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send... The content can't be scanned server-side because uploaded files are encrypted

I mean... Were they really suprised by this? An encrypted file sharing service, of course it's going to be used for sharing malware and illegal content.. I'm not sure what would've been the solution for this issue, but it was pretty clear that that was gonna happen...

Only allowing one time downloads seemed reasonable to stop 1 and 2 stage payloads. Doesn't help exfiltration, but theres so many options for that anyway. One time downloads may be annoying for non-web savvy people, but seemed like a reasonable tradeoff.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#246

Post by staticassertion »

therealx wrote: post #244
staticassertion wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't think about exfiltration - good point. I guess they could just host their own instance on like the good old days.

Malware authors like nice APIs, just like devs do. They love when it's really nice and simple to just push some data to a storage service.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#247

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

dpc_pw wrote: post #211

The fact that you need a 3rd party service to send a file between two computers is a failure of the Internet as a whole. Instead of addressing it, the technical community as a whole just keeps putting bandaids on it.

What makes it difficult are two problems:

- Dealing with NAT

- Security

Making a protocol for connecting to another machine and sending (or requesting) a file is easy. We solved that a couple decades ago.

But how do you do it when both ends are behind NAT? UPNP was supposed to solve this problem, but not everyone uses UPNP, and it's pain in the ass to deal with port forwarding, also, good luck trying to walk grandma through setting up a port forward on her router.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#248

Post by 40four »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #185
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.)

With the utmost respect, can somebody please tell if anyone thought of requiring a Firefox account? Or charge $2/mo and go from there? Products usually iterate on design and security, no? Not just give up right away? Some of us recommended a Firefox+ service that bundles Firefox Send, the VPN, etc. and charge a monthly premium. I would've paid a lot of money. Nothing makes any sense looking from outside!

They didn’t require a Firefox account, but encouraged it by giving a significant file size limit increase.

I think you’re right, seems ashamed to give up so soon. I just have to imagine it’s a result of their current circumstances as a company.

In times of layoffs, I imagine there simply aren’t the resources to keep this thing going. I do like the idea of a ‘Firefox +’ type of service though.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#249

Post by dpc_pw »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #247
dpc_pw wrote: post #211

The fact that you need a 3rd party service to send a file between two computers is a failure of the Internet as a whole. Instead of addressing it, the technical community as a whole just keeps putting bandaids on it.

What makes it difficult are two problems: - Dealing with NAT - Security Making a protocol for connecting to another machine and sending (or requesting) a file is easy. We solved that a couple decades ago. But how do you do it when both ends are behind NAT? UPNP was supposed to solve this problem, but not everyone uses UPNP, and it's pain in the ass to deal with port forwarding, also, good luck trying to walk grandma…

I know. And it's a failure of an Internet and software ecosystem as whole.

Somewhere between 2000 and 2010 we just accepted how much of fiasco and garbage everything have became.

Re: What happened to Firefox Send?

#250

Post by jb775 »

headalgorithm wrote: post #19

See recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508880

When the service went from unlimited open access to being put behind a login wall, I assumed they were using this tool to pull more users into the Firefox ecosystem (like what google does). I stopped using the service at that point since it effectively lost the privacy aspect.
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