Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

So much for the advertised protection of user privacy.

The world doesn't need another browser that sacrifices principles for market share. Chrome, IE, and Safari are perfectly good browsers for that. What I wanted was a browser (and software in general) that promotes security, privacy, open standards, and open source. You can accuse me of misinterpreting the situation, but that's what I thought Firefox was 10 years ago. It's not what Firefox is today. It's turned into just another organization that's optimizing for the continuation of the organization over it's own founding principles.

I worked at Mozilla for about four years (2011-2015), on MDN. It's built as a wiki, with wiki features open to everyone. The code is all open source and on GitHub. Its issues and tasks and roadmap are tracked in a public bug tracker. We operated in a public IRC channel. We didn't have to do that. We could have just built something targeted to only be used by the technical writing staff at Mozilla, and never bothered to open it up or make the code available or make it transparent about who wrote articles and when. In fact, it's much more work to do all the things we did (and not just in terms of implementing features, but also in terms of dealing with spammers and trolls and other malicious people who wouldn't have had access in a less open system), but we did it anyway because Mozilla is a radically open and transparent organization. But... in four years, not many people from outside Mozilla ever joined in and got involved with actually contributing (either code or articles or edits to articles or housekeeping or suggesting/arguing for ideas of how to improve MDN).

And I've been doing open source for much longer than that, and I see exactly the same pattern: a handful of folks do all that work, and go to the trouble of being open and transparent and providing ways for people to see what's going on and get involved... but people don't.

And then those same people willingly install the software and use it every single day, and complain that they were never consulted, or never got a chance to review, or never got to provide input. You had chances to look at the source code, to see what was being checked in, to read the referenced Bugzilla bugs on commits, to leave comments on them, to submit alternative ideas. You didn't. You did install Firefox, though (assuming your claim is correct that this was installed on your computer). By installing the software while not participating in the process, you absolutely gave your "review" of it, and your "review" was "just make a browser for me for free and don't bug me about how".

Now, if you want to be involved, go start watching Bugzilla and the Mozilla project wiki pages, and CC yourself on stuff and join mailing lists. Because it's Mozilla. You can do that. If you don't want to do that, or you don't think it's worth your time to do that, then don't do it. But don't then come charging onto HN to complain that nobody consulted you. People practically got on their hands and knees and begged you to join in the process of making Firefox and other open source software, and you decided not to.

Actually talking of good/bad dichotomy is inappropriate here, automatic updates are a tool that can be useful and comes with benefits and downsides. Firefox automatic updates is among the first things I disable when I install firefox because it caused me more issues than it solved.

Starting firefox to discover it has auto-updated itself and had broken half the extensions you rely on to make the browser usable is not nice, specially when there are no option to undo the update other than removing and reinstalling.

But when the autoupdate installed a new firefox that simply broke audio in the browser and now forces you to install something you've been actively avoiding or that is not available in this specific distro is something else.

I have a working update hygiene I'd rather deal with updates myself, thanks.