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Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

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Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#341

Post by thisisit »

Izkata wrote: post #330
lenerdenator wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the set of "Indians who can speak fluent English" and the set of "Indians who will work for the absolute lowest bid" are exclusive. And I don't blame them, really. These execs mistake "English is an official language" for "English is a widespread first language". Only 0.02% of Indians speak English as their first language, while total speakers (of first, second, or third language) are 10.6% of the…

Also don't forget it's an Indian dialect of English, with words and usages of English words that don't exist elsewhere in the world.

Indian dialect is derived from the colonial English. So, lot of words and usage can be found in British English.

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#342

Post by nar001 »

elAhmo wrote: post #90
InsomniacL wrote: post #38

> The organization issued an apology for the "mistake" and recommended to Hill to reach out whenever he has questions or concerns about a review. Before taking drastic action like pulling addons from the store, Mozilla should reach out if they have questions or concerns about a review.

It appears all of the companies that are gatekeepers to apps, extensions and similar user-generated stuff are really quick to overreact and unless you are a high-profile person, have a lot of followers or a really popular app or an extension, good luck resolving it in a timely manner.

Gorhill is a pretty high profile person considering uBlock Origin and yet still got it taken down and overreacted though. So the issues seem to run deeper than that.

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#343

Post by 3np »

drdaeman wrote: post #226
kevingadd wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply not true. I've been using unsigned extensions for years. You drag-drop a zip file into the extensions window and it will let you install it.

You must be using either the Developer Edition, ESR, nightly or some unbranded version. Vanilla Firefox doesn’t allow to install unsigned extensions permanently.

As of recentlyish, I noticed this is not an option on ESR, either. Only Nightly and Dev.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#FAQ

The FAQ says that in ESR, xpinstall.signatures.required should be respected but this is out of date IME (ESR 115).

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#344

Post by shiroiushi »

fastest963 wrote: post #278
sunaookami wrote: post #75

It's very annoying you have to submit your extension to gatekeepers to even distribute them to normal users. As gorhill said on GitHub it took days for a self-hosted version to be approved - that's unacceptable. Imagine you would need approval from Microsoft to distribute software. Not even Android is this closed. Enforcing signatures and removing XUL were the worst things Mozilla has ever done. And yes, Google does…

> Imagine you would need approval from Microsoft to distribute software. You mean like how you need permission to distribute software on MacOS/iOS? More and more platforms are moving in this direction and I wouldn't be surprised if Windows goes the same way in the future.

>More and more platforms are moving in this direction and I wouldn't be surprised if Windows goes the same way in the future.

I think MS has already tried this several times, such as with Windows RT and the Windows store. It never caught on, and they pissed off the independent software vendors who make the Windows ecosystem valuable in the first place. Maybe they just didn't push it hard enough; maybe they could have just forced everyone to use it anyway, and maybe it would have worked because what are Windows users going to do, switch to Linux or Mac? But maybe the real danger was that users simply wouldn't upgrade to the new locked-down Windows in the first place and just stick with older versions forever, which is something they've been doing all along (look how mad people were when they finally killed XP).

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#345

Post by oxym0ron »

horsawlarway wrote: post #292
open-paren wrote: post #117

I manage a medium-sized browser extension at work. We also offer(ed) it on Firefox. But I have spent the past year struggling to get back into Mozilla store after a manual review. As far as I can tell, there are maybe two reviewers that are based in Europe (Romania?). The turn around time is long when I am in the US, and it has been rife with this same kind of "simple mistake" that takes 2 weeks to resolve. "You need…

Similar boat. I release an extension with about 1 million installs across Chrome/Firefox/Edge for work. Firefox (despite being the smallest usage) is utterly insane with regards to process. They demand a reproducible build, but then can't do things like install the right version of yarn (no - npm install -g yarn is not correct, our readme says it in bold like 5 times and provides the exact correct command to install…

Honestly I have to side with Mozilla team here. Kudos to them for trying to actually care about security and privacy. I can imagine the nightmare that people are submitting and trying to recheck everything and build those random extensions with private npm repos and whatnot.

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#346

Post by ciceryadam »

thisisit wrote: post #341
Izkata wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also don't forget it's an Indian dialect of English, with words and usages of English words that don't exist elsewhere in the world.

Indian dialect is derived from the colonial English. So, lot of words and usage can be found in British English.

I don't think that most of Brits are "doing the needful". Indian English has plenty of expressions that are exclusive to India.

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#347

Post by rightbyte »

Squeeeez wrote: post #284
rightbyte wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole extension change Mozilla forced on Firefox seems like some sort of sabotage. Mozilla sneaking in more and more spyware and ad friendly functionality seems in line with the same conspirators. And given how high profile all these changes are, it runs to the top of the company.

So, which browser are you using?

Firefox... I wont give up on them just yet :)

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#348

Post by seba_dos1 »

witrak wrote: post #146
seba_dos1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and the extension this article is about had about 5000 (five thousand) installs before being taken down. That doesn't really scream "priority" to me.

It may be true, but your point of view isn't the sole possible. Many people have to use more than one browser and for them, the Google decision (effectively forcing the creation of uBOL) was really painful so Hill's new product is of big value. Also, there are people who don't know anything about uBO since they never used Firefox but they probably will start to use uBOL as other blockers for Chromium-based browsers a…

How is that relevant to hosting on AMO?

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#349

Post by Aachen »

Sephr wrote: post #161

Doesn't this behavior from Mozilla staff indicate that using Firefox extensions at all is a security issue? This shows that the reviewers may not be competent enough to catch actual malware uploaded to their add-ons site.

Yes. I never took the review process seriously, I assumed people could publish pretty much whatever. Today I learned it's meant to be tight as well as that you can't run your own code anymore; that it needs to go through review or you get to reinstall every time you start your browser.

I've held out for a long time with Mozilla, trusting they thought it's a useful thing to do when they partner with Facebook to make privacy preserving adtech. This is a big ask of me though. I don't use it myself but I'm constantly running into limitations on Android and, at work, iOS because you can't simply do what you want on the devices without all sorts of hoops and fearmongering surrounding having actual access to your own device—the stuff I use my phone for simply doesn't run without root and one can't even make a full system backup without. It's not your device. Learning this about Firefox makes me feel it's not my browser...

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#350

Post by Etherlord87 »

adrian17 wrote: post #213
open-paren wrote: post #117

I manage a medium-sized browser extension at work. We also offer(ed) it on Firefox. But I have spent the past year struggling to get back into Mozilla store after a manual review. As far as I can tell, there are maybe two reviewers that are based in Europe (Romania?). The turn around time is long when I am in the US, and it has been rife with this same kind of "simple mistake" that takes 2 weeks to resolve. "You need…

> We cannot reproduce your source This is the biggest issue we had, and we had to add a decent bit of complexity to our builds to support reproducible builds in the exact way they want. But the silly part is that our extension involves building a wasm file from Rust, and after some back and forth it turned out that they don't require it to be reproducible (despite being core of our extension and containing 99% of our…

What kind of harmful code could you put in WASM? You could return a string that you eval on the javascript side, so the reviewers could possibly ask for the WASM source if they saw the eval, but other than that the purpose of WASM is to be a safe sandbox after all, right?
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