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Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

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Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

#281
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes!!! people don't realize that volunteers review the addons and that sometimes they make mistakes. They start acting as if Mozilla sent an internal memo to kill something when it is usually not the case.

> that volunteers review the addons I don't think that makes it better. In fact, it's worse. Why is Mozilla Corporation, a company with gross revenue of $562 million, delegating an important security role to unpaid and apparently unaccountable volunteers?

Why is Google, a company with gross revenue of much more than that, not doing it at all?

Obviously, the Mozilla Corporation's only stake holder is the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, so they can't pay out much of their revenue to anyone other than their employees (and to those in wages that are comparable with the rest of the industry; they have to publish their finances for that), so they certainly can afford to spend more money on things like that, but they're still trying to avoid spending huge amounts of money on something that can be done just as well in 99% of cases at a fifth of the cost.

As far as I know, they have a system where at least two independent volunteers have to approve an extension and some employees will occasionally check up on things, too, and can revoke volunteers that make mistakes too often or are plain malicious.

So, most of the time, this system will fail on the side of things being disapproved that should have been approved. It will much less often be the case that for example malware will get approved (especially since they also have automated malware scans, which is something that Google has, too).

Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

#282
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be a private extension developed by a company internally, and only distributed to internal users.

If it's for an entire company, then it's easy enough to compile your own copy of firefox that accepts extensions signed with the company signature rather than mozilla.

It's really not. Small businesses exist.

Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple does the very same thing. I understand that Apple does everything in its power to make the life of developers miserable (such as requiring a Mac to be used for iOS development), but Mozilla were supposed to be the good guys on the web.

> I understand that Apple does everything in its power to make the life of developers miserable All XCode projects are automatically code signed on every build. If you have a developer membership with Apple, it uses a certificate issued by Apple. If not, it's just a locally-generated certificate. If you use make or call Clang directly, obviously there is no signing process, but there is a command-line tool that you c…

How do I run XCode on Linux? Or do I have to spend $2k on a machine that will only be used to run a single build? Speaking of, how do I integrate that mess with my automated build systems? Also, how can I get it to sign stuff without forking over $100 every year?

Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's for an entire company, then it's easy enough to compile your own copy of firefox that accepts extensions signed with the company signature rather than mozilla.

It's really not. Small businesses exist.

If you have the resources to develop an internal company addon, you have the resources to build a firefox that accepts a different signature.

Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not. Small businesses exist.

If you have the resources to develop an internal company addon, you have the resources to build a firefox that accepts a different signature.

Respectfully disagree - having to rebuild each time patches come out, on multiple OSes and versions, which have a patch to allow unsigned extensions is a massively more time expensive than developing a browser extension, and requires extra knowledge on the behalf of the persons responsible

Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the resources to develop an internal company addon, you have the resources to build a firefox that accepts a different signature.

Respectfully disagree - having to rebuild each time patches come out, on multiple OSes and versions, which have a patch to allow unsigned extensions is a massively more time expensive than developing a browser extension, and requires extra knowledge on the behalf of the persons responsible

Luckily it's not necessary: you can still enable a flag in ESR releases that allow installation of unsigned add-ons, so that solves it for company-internal tools.

Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

#287

The worst bit here is that they aren't explaining exactly which part of the ToS is being violated, and what needs to be done to fix it...

According to an issue for a different/similar addon[0] that got removed:

> "It appears that your Add-on violates the Firefox Add-on Distribution Agreement and the Conditions of Use. Both prohibit Add-ons that violate the law. Your Add-on appears to be designed and promoted to allow users to circumvent paywalls, which is illegal. ... > We are responding to a specific complaint that named multiple paywall bypassing add-ons. It did not target only your add-on.

[0]: https://github.com/nextgens/anti-paywall/issues/109#issuecom...

Re: Mozilla pulls Bypass Paywalls from Firefox add-ons store

#288
post #33

> Release and Beta versions of Firefox do not allow unsigned extensions to be installed I'm really disappointed at Mozilla regarding this. I recently wanted to do some Firefox customization for my own private use (not even an extension, I just wanted to have some visual indication of which Firefox windows belong to which profile). I was surprised to find out that even just a header .png in a theme can't be loaded loc…

I'm currently developing a browser extension, and was a bit shocked that I couldn't just load it on Firefox like on Chromium. It seems like such a basic thing, maybe that's because I'm a dev and expect that they will cater to development, but it was one of the first usability things where I preferred Chrome. I ditched iPhone for Android for similar reasons, and it seems that one thing Google does really well is make…

You can use web-ext[1] to simplify development process

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext

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