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F-Droid Dropping Firefox

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Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#31

Post by Flimm »

pluma wrote: post #28
anon3_ wrote: post #24

I boycotted firefox after the Brendan Eich affair. Mozilla is supposed to be a symbol of the hacker ethic. When they bent to the whims of social media lynch mobs - they betrayed the one who literally built the foundation of their existence.

They didn't bend to social media. They made it very clear they were surprised by the internal reactions and that's why he stepped back down. Besides, social media or not, the primary reason the issue blew up at all was a lack of transparency in their organizational politics. This isn't about Gamergate.

The truth is, we'll never know the whole truth about why they did what they did. I find it hard to believe that social pressure played no part in their decisions.

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#32

Post by makomk »

Sephr wrote: post #8

> Removed: Mediastreaming (requires non-free library: play-services)[1] I understand removing EME and DRM support, but they are removing a feature simply because it only works when a certain closed source library is installed. Is graceful degradation somehow "below" them? That's like banning packages that use .NET (when it was non-free) on NuGet. You can create open source code that supports proprietary libraries wit…

The whole purpose of F-Droid is to provide an alternative to the Play Store for people who don't want to or can't install Google's proprietary code. Anyone who has play-services installed would just get Mozilla's official Firefox releases from the Play Store and not bother with F-Droid. They're removing support for that non-free library because their user base is people who've already decided they don't want to use it.

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#33

Post by anon3_ »

pluma wrote: post #28
anon3_ wrote: post #24

I boycotted firefox after the Brendan Eich affair. Mozilla is supposed to be a symbol of the hacker ethic. When they bent to the whims of social media lynch mobs - they betrayed the one who literally built the foundation of their existence.

They didn't bend to social media. They made it very clear they were surprised by the internal reactions and that's why he stepped back down. Besides, social media or not, the primary reason the issue blew up at all was a lack of transparency in their organizational politics. This isn't about Gamergate.

> They didn't bend to social media.

https://www.google.com/search?q=eich+mozilla+ceo

> They made it very clear they were surprised by the internal reactions and that's why he stepped back down. Besides, social media or not, the primary reason the issue blew up at all was a lack of transparency in their organizational politics.

Eich wouldn't have been canned if not due to external political forces.

The core of Mozilla is gone, the organization's ongoing denial of it further sinks the brand off the deep end.

Create a wound. Deny it happened. When in history did that ever work?

It gives me the impression "mozilla are liars, they just don't care." Why do organizations continue to go along with lie as if repeating it rewrites history to washes away treachery like that?

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#34

Post by pmontra »

ubernostrum wrote: post #27
pmontra wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The picture in the Techcrunch post is pretty clear. The browser talks with an adserver (step 5). And how could it get ads if it didn't do that, pick them from a static list compiled into the browser binary? Soon out of date and hardly interesting for advertisers. GETs to the adserver combined with the in-browser selection algorithm leak details on the browsing history of the user (if he's got this ad he could be that…

The picture in the Techcrunch post is pretty clear. The browser talks with an adserver (step 5). And how could it get ads if it didn't do that, pick them from a static list compiled into the browser binary? Soon out of date and hardly interesting for advertisers. Based on what I've read in the actual implementation discussion in Bugzilla, the process actually consists of: 1. A Mozilla-controlled server hosts bundles…

Clever. I'll probably turn it off but is much less worrisome in this way. Could you share the link to that discussion? Thanks.

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#35

Post by icebraining »

pmontra wrote: post #34
ubernostrum wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The picture in the Techcrunch post is pretty clear. The browser talks with an adserver (step 5). And how could it get ads if it didn't do that, pick them from a static list compiled into the browser binary? Soon out of date and hardly interesting for advertisers. Based on what I've read in the actual implementation discussion in Bugzilla, the process actually consists of: 1. A Mozilla-controlled server hosts bundles…

Clever. I'll probably turn it off but is much less worrisome in this way. Could you share the link to that discussion? Thanks.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1120311

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#36

Post by tickit »

anon3_ wrote: post #24

I boycotted firefox after the Brendan Eich affair. Mozilla is supposed to be a symbol of the hacker ethic. When they bent to the whims of social media lynch mobs - they betrayed the one who literally built the foundation of their existence.

Agreed. Same with the deprecation of HTTP. There's a political agenda and they probably don't know that they are doing it.

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#37

Post by vdaniuk »

tickit wrote: post #36
anon3_ wrote: post #24

I boycotted firefox after the Brendan Eich affair. Mozilla is supposed to be a symbol of the hacker ethic. When they bent to the whims of social media lynch mobs - they betrayed the one who literally built the foundation of their existence.

Agreed. Same with the deprecation of HTTP. There's a political agenda and they probably don't know that they are doing it.

> There's a political agenda and they probably don't know that they are doing it.

Ah, the old good FUD. Anything done on Mozilla's scale has political agenda as complex problems include multiple stakeholders and conflicting interests.

Perhaps you'll be able to shed some light on the negative externalities of Mozilla's agenda?

And could you name the people who know what they are doing?

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#38

Post by anon3_ »

vdaniuk wrote: post #37
tickit wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Same with the deprecation of HTTP. There's a political agenda and they probably don't know that they are doing it.

> There's a political agenda and they probably don't know that they are doing it. Ah, the old good FUD. Anything done on Mozilla's scale has political agenda as complex problems include multiple stakeholders and conflicting interests. Perhaps you'll be able to shed some light on the negative externalities of Mozilla's agenda? And could you name the people who know what they are doing?

I'm not saying there's a conspiracy or covert political agenda. There is no allegation to set forth they're aligned with anything.

The organization is reactive to the whims of external political / social pressures, namely that of social media, and they cave to them. They're not engaging in self-introspection, responding based upon core values we would expect, namely, the hacker ethic.

The hacker ethic is about merit. It's about protecting ideas and valuing curiosity, wit and cleverness to spur innovation. Ideas and opinions, especially if unpopular, would be tolerated - which is in essence is diversity. On twitter, Eich's out of work donation for a political cause, in the eyes of mobs, was juicy bait for professional agitators.

Are we to just let every organization get bullied into submission until all expression, down to how you want to raise your family, puts great engineers homeless and on the street?

If they could do it to Eich - they could do it to everyone.

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#39

Post by mintplant »

waterhouse wrote: post #15
icebraining wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't actually send any of your data to anywhere; it runs locally in your browser, using history data it already has.

Just as a little question, are all the ads pre-downloaded, or could someone theoretically observe which ads your browser downloaded and deduce things about your history therefrom?

It downloads the same set of ads for everyone in the same country, then picks which of those ads to show based on local analysis.

https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/files/2015/05/How-...

Re: F-Droid Dropping Firefox

#40

Post by realusername »

gcb0 wrote: post #23
__david__ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When and in what way did Mozilla decide to become spyware?

not necessarily spyware, but moving away from the community focus. 1. UI copying chrome 2. telefonica servers for video chat 3. Ads on your new-tab-page 4. Yahoo search deal 5. Adobe binary blob DRM installed and enabled by default. this is flash security holes all over again. 6. google binary blob DRM on android. mozilla have long gone from being a incubator the firefox project to try to be a startup coming up with…

1. I still prefer the FireFox UI since it works better with lot of tabs, in Chrome the tabs are becoming smaller and smaller until the point that you can't see them. And Firefox's preference screen is so much nicer, so no it's not a verbatim copy, they improved a lot the interface. The history autocomplete is also one of the strong features of Firefox and still does not exist on Chrome.

2. The servers are only use to find clients, the data is transiting directly between the computers with WebRTC.

3. The ad tiles are there until the screen is full (which happens very fast). In practice, almost half of the ads are for Mozilla itself (Firefox for Android, Marketplace ...).

4. And so ? What's the problem by having Yahoo instead of Google in some countries ? It provides some diversity and competition in the search market which really needs it.

5. I agree on this but it's not like Mozilla had a choice, they tried to resist up to the last minute. And their implementation unlike Chrome's one (if I remember) is going to be strictly sandboxed. So they tried to do what they could. This is really Chrome's fault here.

6. I think they did not have a choice either on this one, unlike what Google is advertising, Android is much less open than they say. A lot of proprietary binaries are needed to run the OS and the stock Android is just the bare minimum. Maybe in the future they could provide an open-source replacement to it but I think they did not have enough resources.

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