Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store • Hacker News Board

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#371

Post by latexr » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 1:12 PM UTC

finnthehuman wrote: post #357

latexr wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An apology is an admission of wrongdoing and shows remorse for one’s actions. It means the perpetrator is committing to improving themselves and not make the same mistake. You can’t change a mistake in the past, but you can promise to do better in the feature. So yes, apologies matters. It is baffling, and honestly worrying, that this has to be explained. It is important to realise the people steering the apology are…

> It is baffling, and honestly worrying, that this has to be explained. Hey man, you’re the one that seems to be of the impression that the person sending form letter extension review responses is in a position in Mozilla to be able to do any of the shit you just said apologizes represent. I asked what’s it matter if they tick the apology box because they can’t actually apologize. I just don’t get why, in my previous…

> the impression that the person sending form letter extension review responses is in a position in Mozilla to be able to do any of the shit you just said apologizes represent.

Yeah, that’s fair.

> Rote apologies are not apologies, they’re simply someone saying what they believe are the right polite words for a situation.

I agree. And rereading the email I also agree that their apology was lacklustre to say the least. Initially that seemed to be to have come from a position of authority, but I see I was wrong.

My only disagreement is that I do think there is some apology that would be valid. Something like a personalised email (not from a form) from someone with a modicum of power (e.g. the manager of the add-ons division).

Note, however, I’m not saying a valid apology must be accepted.

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#372

Post by thoroughburro » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

Freak_NL wrote: post #5

I really hope Raymond Hill won't do the same for uBlock Origin (the manifest v2 version). I'm not too comfortable recommending others to install a self-hosted extension. It's a shame Mozilla and Raymond Hill can't/won't solve this together. I get that the review he got simply should not have happened for an extension like this (see the Github thread¹) and that he is simply done with bothering, but I worry about how t…

> I worry about how that will affect uBlock Origin's long-term stability as a project.

I wouldn’t be surprised if UBO has more users across all browsers than Firefox has users at all, and expect it’s at least within an order of magnitude.

To imply it’s in any danger at all because a minor platform is recalcitrant is ridiculous.

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#373

Post by latexr » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

amiga386 wrote: post #362

latexr wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, be realistic. They’re not going to grovel and humiliate themselves over it, especially on a first apology contact. Expecting that kind of response would be ridiculous. The other comment was much more plausible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711187 I’m interested in what the original commenter thought, though.

The anodyne ass-covering apology they did send out, is massively more humiliating for Mozilla than a sincere mea-culpa would have been. Hill made their initial emails public and the discussion of AMO's incompetence had already happened. Mozilla have been able to see this and formulate a response. Their response was not a full PR face-saving, it was a single further email from the AMO review system. That speaks volume…

Look, I’m not taking Mozilla’s side. As should be obvious by my other comments on this thread, I think Raymond Hill should do what they think is right for themselves and the project.

But I’m trying to have a productive conversation on what would be a realistic response that Mozilla could have plausibly sent that would show true remorse and constitute a proper apology.

Insulting them and giving absurd examples that would never happen does not advance the discussion. I’m not interested in unabashed mocking. There are people on the other side too, it doesn’t cost anything to have a little empathy. Yes, Mozilla is in the wrong here, no one disagrees. How about we discuss what they could’ve done right?

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#374

Post by thoroughburro » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 1:33 PM UTC

conor- wrote: post #174

internet2000 wrote: post #126

The sooner people realize Mozilla is not your friend, the better. They’ve been compromised by the Google money. Want an alternative to Chromium? Go support Servo or Ladybird, Firefox can’t be saved.

Blink is to Servo what Chromium is to Firefox. Supporting Servo on its own doesn't really move the needle a whole lot if it's missing all of the rest of the bits that make a comprehensive browser. Firefox is already using Servo (at least in the form of Quantum) under the hood and is still the best option available to prevent more of a complete Blink monoculture than already exists with every other major browser being…

This used to be true. The Servo project is actually building a full browser, now.

https://servo.org/blog/2024/09/11/building-browser/

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#375

Post by freedomben » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 1:44 PM UTC

cxr wrote: post #318

adrian17 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 9GB limit was not just the Rust stuff, that was for the entire docker environment with compiler, JRE, node, wasm toolkit, typescript, webpack etc. Yes, we need all of these to make a "true" reproducible build from scratch. > to build a browser extension It shares 99% of code with a desktop application; you can compile it to wasm while preserving most features. The extension wraps the wasm. For reference, when mak…

> The 9GB limit was not just the Rust stuff, that was for the entire docker environment with compiler, JRE, node, wasm toolkit, typescript, webpack etc. None of this is surprising or exculpatory. Demanding >9GB of disk space to build a browser extension is insane. > we need all of these to make a "true" reproducible build from scratch You need and them to reproduce your build. You definitely don't need all of them to…

You certainly are confident that you know more about GP's situation than they do.

When you took your desktop app and built a browser extension version, did you really rewrite the entire app in vanilla JavaScript just got the Mozilla review team as you seem to be expecting GP to have done? How long did it take you? What sort of opportunity cost was there from investing your time on that instead of adding value to your product?

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#376

Post by freedomben » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 1:48 PM UTC

adrian17 wrote: post #267

cxr wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything described here sounds like your team, your extension, and your software development process are the problem. Demanding >9GB of disk space to build a browser extension is capital F, capital I Fucking Insane. Go yell at the Rust folks about their shitty toolchain and your engineering lead for buying into it instead of blaming people who have enough problems as it is just coming into contact with the quagmire…

The 9GB limit was not just the Rust stuff, that was for the entire docker environment with compiler, JRE, node, wasm toolkit, typescript, webpack etc. Yes, we need all of these to make a "true" reproducible build from scratch. > to build a browser extension It shares 99% of code with a desktop application; you can compile it to wasm while preserving most features. The extension wraps the wasm. For reference, when mak…

Thank you for setting such a good example. If I were you, I don't know that I could have given such a good and dispassionate reply to such an arrogant, overconfident, and rude comment as you did. Your comments are not only technically interesting, but also epitomize. What a healthy online community should be. Thank you for doing what you do!

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#377

Post by cxr » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 1:50 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #375

cxr wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 9GB limit was not just the Rust stuff, that was for the entire docker environment with compiler, JRE, node, wasm toolkit, typescript, webpack etc. None of this is surprising or exculpatory. Demanding >9GB of disk space to build a browser extension is insane. > we need all of these to make a "true" reproducible build from scratch You need and them to reproduce your build. You definitely don't need all of them to…

You certainly are confident that you know more about GP's situation than they do. When you took your desktop app and built a browser extension version, did you really rewrite the entire app in vanilla JavaScript just got the Mozilla review team as you seem to be expecting GP to have done? How long did it take you? What sort of opportunity cost was there from investing your time on that instead of adding value to your…

For someone who opened their post with a first sentence like that, you're making a lot of (bad) assumptions on your end; most of your questions are unanswerable or have answers that you are clearly expecting to go the other way.

Demanding >9GB of disk space to build a browser extension is insane.

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#378

Post by breakingcups » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

greentxt wrote: post #57

wolpoli wrote: post #41

> The organization issued an apology for the "mistake" and recommended to Hill to reach out whenever he has questions or concerns about a review. It's unclear why the author of the article decided that the word 'mistake' deserved the scary quote treatment.

Because there was a privacy policy it's hard to understand how that could be a mistake. The insinuation is the reviewer was not acting in hood faith.

Lot of people in this thread not familiar with Hanlon's razor..

Obviously this could all just be incompetence. It's just a convenient excuse to do some more Mozilla-bashing, (lack of) facts be damned.

Not that any of this excuses the experience Gorhill had, of course.

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#379

Post by horsawlarway » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

Too wrote: post #340

horsawlarway wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reproducible builds and open source sounds like a good thing. I wouldn’t expect the reviewers to deal with every add-ons bespoke snowflake build. Even less so if it requires access to a private module. Mozilla should provide a baseline of how a build is intended to be done, then extensions just have to follow this template. Though yes, you would expect them to have some familiarity with basic stuff like yarn and that…

We use a relatively simple build. at the base of it, if you have node and npm, a complete build is as easy as

yarn npm login

yarn --immutable

yarn build

Personally - I don't really find it reasonable to place demands on build tooling for an external company.

I'm assuming you would also find it reasonable for Google to suddenly ship chromium with a requirement that you use "google-pack" for all js builds or they don't run it?

To be entirely blunt, what exactly do you think is going to change when we're already giving them bare JS? It's not like we're shipping a binary blob here, we're literally handing them a zip file with perfectly fine & inspectable javascript inside it.

Further, do you realistically believe that a single low grade QA/Support engineer who can't even install the correct tooling is going to catch malware?

Because I read their matrix chats and I can fucking promise they aren't catching the malware all that fast....

Re: Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

#380

Post by horsawlarway » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 2:47 PM UTC

Yeul wrote: post #364

ranger_danger wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what the review process for the Play Store is like, even worse for Google TV apps. Often times just re-submitting multiple times without changing anything at all will get it pushed through.

Yeah but despite how much HN hates Google everyone here will do whatever it takes to get on their app store. Google has the power to make the entire industry their bitch. Mozilla not so much.

So much this. Mozilla barely breaks 10k installs out of our total 1million installed base.

We had a really frank internal discussion about just dropping support for Mozilla because their review process is also the most expensive out of every client we currently ship (And not "reasonable expensive"... Useless time sink expensive, back and forths with folks who I would frankly not hire as a junior because they can't read a readme file and follow basic and clear instructions.)

They are acting like they have the position to demand these reviews... and they just don't.

Good devs just leave because they're a waste of time and money, and they're STILL rampant with malware on their store (Mozilla is literally the only one of the major vendors that will make a listing live with no vetting, and then 4 months later yank it because of "problems"...).

It doesn't make me feel secure, it makes me feel like they're trying to market security. It makes me really dislike mozilla, and firefox was a formative part of the my tech career early.