Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

support.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 537 posts

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#491

Post by Sylos »

bigbugbag wrote: post #402
lenzm wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use add-ons to manage optional functionality a la Atom. Users can enable and disable add-ons to customize their browser and some come enabled by default. If you were migrating to this method of customization it would absolutely make sense to push an enabled add-on that replaces functionality you took out of the main app.

Is this a thing ? History shows mozilla removing functionality but never replacing it. And then it's up to volunteers to make an extension to fill the gap, until mozilla breaks the extension or drops the extensions engine altogether. For exemple australis and classic theme restorer.

This is bullshit and you know it. If you want to shittalk Mozilla, then at least try to be honest.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#492

Post by Sylos »

justizin wrote: post #364
zie wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have fun in Lynx. that's probably the only browser that wouldn't do something like this. Well maybe Safari, not because Apple wouldn't, but because they just don't care enough about ad revenue. Chrome: They leech everything they can get away with, granted it goes only to Google, but you know it's just to feed their never-ending ad-revenue goal. MS: They bypassed IE only ads, and went on to build ads into the entire O…

> Well maybe Safari, not because Apple wouldn't, but because they just don't care enough about ad revenue. Truthfully, this is why I use Safari. Apple makes money by selling me devices and services, Mozilla and Google are both driven by ad revenue. Even good actors within these companies are working within a framework where the customer is the product. .. also Safari saves like 15% on battery.

Christ, are you seriously arguing that Apple, who does operate an ad network, is less driven by ad revenue than Mozilla, a non-profit, who at best will get to continue working on Firefox, if there continue to exist search engines that make revenue.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#493

Post by Sylos »

bigbugbag wrote: post #443
djsumdog wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something that was a test that just got merged into production? It sounds like an honest mistake that shouldn't have gone out?

This would be a major blunder and showing that the merge into production process is lacking a lot. Luckily this is intended and seems to be a paid for marketing/advertising scheme

> This would be a major blunder and showing that the merge into production process is lacking a lot.

It's one flag, an entirely non-critical one at that, to either install this add-on hidden or not. It's not a major blunder to forget this once out of a few hundred times and it most definitely does not in any fucking way show that "the merge into production process is lacking a lot".

Absolutely no one would have minded, and there's no reason to either, if this would have been installed hidden.

You need to get the fuck down from those clouds and think about reality. Your comments are getting more ridiculous by the minute.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#494

Post by btrask »

ubernostrum wrote: post #446
gorbachev wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the most important person involved didn't get to review the plugin before it was installed on my computer. Me.

OK, I have to rant a bit on this. 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 sta…

As someone who could contribute technically to Firefox but doesn't, let me add my perspective.

First of all, Firefox is a huge and complex project notorious for its legacy code and architecture. It's not a project that I would find pleasant to work on without getting paid. The only reason I might start working on it for free was if I wanted a job at Mozilla.

Second, it seems to me (as an outsider) that the biggest problem with Mozilla is its management. Any work I contribute to the browser will just be a feather in their cap, and they will still be making bad decisions that I can't meaningfully push back on. The solution for me then would be to fork the whole browser (which has already been done multiple times). However now I'm no longer working with Mozilla, I'm basically fighting them. Without paid, experienced engineers familiar with the Firefox codebase (or a PR budget), there's no reason to believe those forks can "win."

Third, Firefox is just so large that I could spend my whole life and have a negligible impact.

Fourth, as an outsider I'd always be "the wingnut who doesn't work at Mozilla." Perhaps if there were several companies sponsoring Firefox development, there would be more of a social place to fit in.

In conclusion, the state of the web today has left me feeling powerless. If I do nothing it's not necessarily because I'm lazy, but because I see nothing to be done.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#495

Post by michaelmrose »

bigbugbag wrote: post #460
WhitneyLand wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

non sequitur. either it’s right or it’s wrong, whether or not you like the org as a whole doesn’t change that. even so to briefly chase your point, do you believe they are doing net good, and some things are looking more positive, like the servo work? my only point is that criticism works on a relative scale. i agree there are things they could do better, but i still prefer they exist.

right/wrong or good/bad are concept derived from organized religions to control populations' beliefs and they are inappropriate in most cases if not all because they are relative to your own beliefs. If you are the good guy then your enemy is the bad guy but from the bad guy point of view he is the good guy and you are the bad guy. No one is ever the bad guy in the movie of her own life. servo, or whatever else they…

Pulse seems pretty functional now. Did you know it was still possible to build firefox with alsa support?

https://github.com/Monsterovich/firefox-fuckpa

It seems like a lot of addons are being ported to the new apis too. Maybe you are too hasty?

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#496

Post by Sylos »

SpliffnCola wrote: post #467
confounded wrote: post #184

While I agree that releasing this as an undocumented extension was a poor PR move, in practical terms, I don’t see how this is any more insidious than the ‘no internet’ dinosaur jumping game built in to chrome. Both are first-party. The difference seems to be that the dinosaur game keeps you entertained, where as this hopes to promote awareness of privacy/security.

>"I don’t see how this is any more insidious than the ‘no internet’ dinosaur jumping game built in to chrome." You don't see the difference between a built-in game (included in the installation of Chrome) vs. Mozilla pushing an add-on to a Firefox installation using a channel meant for helping to improve the browser?

Mozilla could have just as well pushed this as part of the binary via auto-update.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#497

Post by Sylos »

lozenge wrote: post #195
calcifer wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the deep Pocket integration was just too offputting You mean the single button that does literally nothing until and unless you click on it?

Add a couple more buttons and hey, you've got a toolbar going. Why can't they just make a web browser that's... just a web browser? Chrome has never had buttons to email pages with gmail, record videos onto YouTube, share pages on G+ etc.

It pays off for Google to develop Chrome, because:

* they can feed Chrome Sync data into their advertising databases.

* it means that they don't have to pay other browser vendors quite so much to make them the default search engine.

* they can take control over webstandards for their other profit-driven purpose.

* they can hinder the blocking of their ads.

Mozilla can't or chooses not to rely on any of these profit schemes, so they need other ways of making money.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#498

Post by Sylos »

jordigh wrote: post #307
callahad wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's FUD. Mozilla is a 501(c)3 non-profit, and our audited financial statements and IRS Form 990 can be found at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/

Mozilla is... both. There's the Mozilla Foundation which is a nonprofit and the Mozilla Corporation which is very much not. I've never quite understood what each Mozilla does, but AIUI, the Firefox development is all done by Mozilla Corp and the nonprofit does stuff like make those cute videos about how Firefox is going to save the world and make us all smiley and multiethnic. I've talked to a number of Mozilla emplo…

The Mozilla Corporation is 100% owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, so any earnings that the Corporation makes, they either have to reinvest, put it to the side to reinvest it later or pay it out to the Foundation, where it's again in non-profit hands (i.e. forced to invest into their specified mission).

The only way that the Corporation could do shenanigans, is by paying their employees higher wages than would be necessary to hold them or is considered reasonable for the job that they do.

It was set up, because there's limits to how much money a non-profit is allowed to put to the side, which would have limited Mozilla's strategic flexibility.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#499

Post by GrayShade »

callahad wrote: post #367
GrayShade wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll try to answer in the parent's place, since I've been watching this issue. > Can you explain what you mean by "unknown Mozilla developers?" Unknown to whom? Unknown in the sense that this extension wasn't documented at all, there was no Bugzilla issue for it and it's not clear whether it was properly vetted by QA. Whether you argue that this kind of silent push updates is good or bad, I think they aren't tested a…

Thank you for your responses. The comment about the visibility of the add-on (Bugzilla, QA process, documentation, etc.) is well taken, as are those regarding the naming of system add-ons, Pioneer, etc. I've got an intercontinental flight coming up soon, and I'll do some grepping around to try to understand the prefs mentioned. If someone else beats me to it and posts a specific set of steps to reproduce a pref flip…

I can confirm that extensions.ui.experiment.hidden gets reset to true on Nightly after opening about:addons. It seems to have no effect, though it might have if one uses lockPref.

Re: Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

#500

Post by bkdbkd »

scrollaway wrote: post #469
bigbugbag wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me suggest you a browser aptly named waterfox, that could be described as firefox without mozilla nonsense. [1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

Waterfox is nonsense, no offense to the people behind it. Removing some stuff from Firefox and calling it a day does not make a better Firefox, it just makes for a preconfigured one. You might as well just run Chromium. The problem is that Mozilla is a good company, that has had a true net positive effect on the world, especially in tech, and continues to do so today with wonderful projects like Rust etc. If Mozilla…

Heaven forbid the decisions about what features an application gives and takes away are decided by lowly users. The free in free software means libre still, right? So if someone forks over 1 change or 10 they are still libre to do it, or is that passe? Its free as in liberty, as in freedom of thought, or is that also passe?

Forking a project, and adding features and removing pulls that you don't want and/or need is kinda the idea behind the whole 'open source' thing.. cause what else would you do with the source code, but compile it.

Speaking of Firefox, a build or two ago, without warning, Firefox deprecated (broke) every add-on. Because [insert-old-architecture-security-justification]. It's not like anybody was doing anything real with a browser anyway.

Post reply on HN