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Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

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

#501
post #248
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not concerned that Mozilla might push malware into Firefox installations Nobody is concerned about that, in my opinion. I'm concerned someone will push malware through Mozilla into Firefox installations. Pushing addon installs should not be possible at all.

> I'm concerned someone will push malware through Mozilla into Firefox installations. Mozilla installing a bunch of addons that look like viruses ends up preventing users from being able to identify actual viruses.

End users being users prevents them from identifying actual viruses.

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

#502
post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about otter ? waterfox ? uzbl ? poseidon ? netsurf ? falkon ? k-meleon ? Iron ? Iridium ? Liri ? Min ? To cite some of the browsers you overlooked in your snarky comment.

It was definitely snarky, but I did try to qualify the snark to be useful-snark, and not just plain snarky. As for all these browsers, all of them(unless I'm mistaken) are based off of one of the big 3(Chrome, FF, Safari) so you still have to trust the big 3 to run these, for the most part, as they are all single-developer or maybe a very small team, and would be very hard pressed to catch underhanded attempts from a…

For the record, of that list NetSurf is an independent browser with its own rendering engine (and is correspondingly less… full‐featured).

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

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of decent suggestions in the rest of this threaed, like the various un-mozilla'd versions of firefox.

a bit like saying, "your problem is your expectations about mozilla's commitment to privacy, transparency and choice"

kind of, but more "your original complaint is about a release channel intentionally designed to give you all the latest features turned on by default, including experiments", which has been true since the release/beta/nightly channels were set up. If you don't like something Mozilla did to the browser in nightly, you file an issue in bugzilla, and if you missed this and discovered it too late, then that's a consequence of being a single human being who can't discover every single that is introduced every single day when nightly gets updated.

If your problem is with the actual _release_ version of firefox, that's a completely different complaint, and you have lots of choice in terms of getting the Firefox codebase but without some of the stuff that Mozilla feels is appropriate to put on top. If that's the level of control you want, then there are actually several options for you.

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

#504
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You chose to install Firefox, and you chose not to participate in the process that creates it. What happened next was not "without your consent". What happened absolutely had your consent. You consented by deciding that the whole messy process of producing the software was going to be someone else's problem, and you just wanted the sausage without having to see or take part in how it got made. You consented by delega…

Actually, according to comments on one of the Bugzilla reports about this issue (#1424977), the original bug implementing the feature is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423003 As you'll see, this bug is marked as private (at least as of writing this comment). So, as a matter of fact, it does not appear that even the most diligent user had the option of reviewing what's going on. So far, it has not even…

Correct. Even when logged in, the normal user gets:

"Access Denied You are not authorized to access bug 1423003."

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

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood. I don't want to review the damn source code. I don't have time to do that. I am pretty sure the Mozilla developers are all better developers than I am as well, so my contributions there would be a complete waste of time. However, when you decided that the source code I could review would be installed on my computer without my consent, then I do object. It's my computer. It runs things that…

You chose to install Firefox, and you chose not to participate in the process that creates it. What happened next was not "without your consent". What happened absolutely had your consent. You consented by deciding that the whole messy process of producing the software was going to be someone else's problem, and you just wanted the sausage without having to see or take part in how it got made. You consented by delega…

Again, I did not have a chance to review whether or not the add-on would be installed and run on my computer, because you installed and ran it without my consent.

This is not hard. Don't automatically install stuff on your users' computers. You're defending something every other software company has found themselves in trouble for previously. I really don't understand why. The fact that Firefox is open source in no way excuses it.

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

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to point us towards where ... on Bugzilla and the Mozilla project wiki pages and the source code and all the other things you mentioned ... this addon was discussed?

Firefox is open source. Someone had to have committed code to make this happen, which you can use to go dig up the history if you want to. But you're not going to do that. Which is your right; it's just hard to complain about not being consulted/not getting to review/etc. when you're talking about a piece of open-source software with public repositories and trackers. Anyone on earth is allowed to see what's going on…

Sure, users want to have their cake and eat it too: a free browser, open, produced by invisible elves.

But so does Mozilla. They're a big enterprise when it suits them, and a scrappy upstart otherwise.

The Mozilla brand is looking mighty shabby. Privacy is the one thing they've consistently pushed, and yet I can't recall any serious innovation or stance they've taken on recent years that actually puts their money where their mouth is.

Private browsing was invented by Chrome. Brave shields you from script bloat. Safari's adding machine learning to that end.

Which leaves Mozilla... pushing adware onto its users. Qué?

It's disingenuous to say that users should be able to intuit how it's all organized and how they can contribute, when something like this clearly only happens because of privileged first party involvement with real revenue attached.

Unless you're suggesting that anyone who wishes to spam a campaign to Firefox users can just get that done by opening up an issue and submitting a patch...?

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

#507
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would assume that it doesn’t pass through the same review process? None of your assumptions are obvious to me.

Why would you assume that it does? Have you ever seen how big products like core Firefox binaries are written, reviewed and tested? I took part in that, and this doesn't look at all as part of that process. I see it's even not in the same repository where the "serious stuff" is. It's not the part of that process. This looks like "let's give litte Perry and these marketing departments something to play, whatever, it's…

> [...] the extension gets silently pushed to all the US users(!)

Non-US user here, my Firefox got it, too.

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

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There would be "rioting in the streets" of the internet if Mozilla ever decided to drop support for ALSA in Firefox.

There are distros, Void Linux (which I am using right now) for one, which ship without pulseaudio (or systemd for that matter) installed by default, thank goodness.

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

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software companies are like music bands. You might like their current album but next year they could totally sell out and go pop :) Me, I keep it underground (qutebrowser at the moment) but I'm constantly in search of something better

At the moment I'm using waterfox, but also uzbl, netsurf, otter.

yo thanks for the tip i'll check waterfox out for sure

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

#510
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you assume that it does? Have you ever seen how big products like core Firefox binaries are written, reviewed and tested? I took part in that, and this doesn't look at all as part of that process. I see it's even not in the same repository where the "serious stuff" is. It's not the part of that process. This looks like "let's give litte Perry and these marketing departments something to play, whatever, it's…

> [...] the extension gets silently pushed to all the US users(!) Non-US user here, my Firefox got it, too.

It's not what you are but what your settings are, please go here and check what your browser reports under ACCEPT_LANGUAGE. If it is "en-US" you are considered a "US user" enough:

https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-http-headers-is-...

BTW: the extension we all talk about here has exactly this site that is used for checking the headers hardcoded inside, obviously in order for the developers to test their newly coded functionality with which they add an additional header entry in the request to some specific sites, specifically, the "main target" is a brand (I've given the link earlier on in this thread). It's obviously an advertisement for the US as that "main target" site is only meaningful to the US public. But it's obviously not the whole story.

If your language is not en-US it's worse than what I've understood.

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