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Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions

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Re: Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions

#71

Post by greendestiny_re »

cbreeden wrote: post #68
greendestiny_re wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are using quotation marks as if though I said those words. quote (kwəut) verb 1. to repeat the exact words of a person as they were said or written. My point was about not giving the user enough information to make an informed decision yet demanding a decision anyway.

It's still not clear to me. Are you suggesting that uses not be notified of a potential yet not verified security hole or not?

In short, I would like to see Firefox empower and inform its users.

The current implementation of the Adobe Flash plugin warning does neither, and by the looks of it, add-on permissions mentioned in the OP will be the same.

Re: Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions

#72

Post by greendestiny_re »

ben0x539 wrote: post #69
greendestiny_re wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are using quotation marks as if though I said those words. quote (kwəut) verb 1. to repeat the exact words of a person as they were said or written. My point was about not giving the user enough information to make an informed decision yet demanding a decision anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio... suggests that quotation marks are valid here (which is clearly the most important aspect of this dispute)

I'd cede the point if the topic was abstract philosophy or my comment was intentionally vague, but neither of those are true.

What I said and what pcwalton argued against have nothing in common, except two out of 13 words: "any" and "them", which means pcwalton simply made up 84.62% of that statement. Why? It makes for a handy strawman so he can appear intellectually superior.

Re: Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions

#73

Post by dhruvkar »

kettl2 wrote: post #22

Having spent some time looking at the code of popular Chrome extensions recently I was left really shaken about whats happening under the hood. Google's position seems to be, if a website can track you and monitor your behavior when you are on the page, then an extension should be able to do so too. But the extensions have a whole lot more capability. They can look at my history, bookmarks, all the fucking tabs I hav…

We need a transparency extension, one that provides a report each day detailing what, of yours, was sent to who by what extension.

*edit: spelling mistakes

Re: Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions

#74

Post by duskwuff »

robryk wrote: post #30
deno wrote: post #11

Even if they copy the warnings verbatim, I’d like to at least suggest adapting some sort of icon set. Preferably with color coding: yellow for frequently requested permissions, red for infrequently requested permissions. Anything really, that let’s you know at glance what you’re about to install, without having to read a bullet point list. Colors are fine but unique icons would be even better. If it potentially affec…

> If it potentially affects user’s privacy anything but a scary looking big brother eye would be inappropriate. Well, what permissions don't?

A few examples. (I'm not sure why a lot of these are treated as permissions at all.)

* Running in the background

* Displaying desktop notifications

* Using the OS's text-to-speech engine

* Storing more than 5MB of data in local storage

Re: Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions

#75

Post by Sylos »

appleflaxen wrote: post #38

Chrome's permissions are not a panacea, but this article doesn't provide a convincingly better alternative. "code review" doesn't scale, especially at the level of a nonprofit, when users are submitting their own add-ons. It may be that code review has a role (it's a compelling argument), but knowing exactly what an add-on is doing is really important. One way in which it could be better: instead of "internet access"…

Mozilla already has complete human code review in place, so that's why the article isn't specifying a better solution. Yes, it doesn't scale at all, but this is one of the things where non-profit actually has the edge, as Mozilla can just throw their huge community of volunteers at the problem.

Re: Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions

#76

Post by Sylos »

J_Darnley wrote: post #33
Manishearth wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like building a much more powerful, standardized, extensions API that is backwards compatible with chrome extensions (which offer relatively limited tools) It isn't copying, all the browsers want a standardized extensions system and they have agreed on using Chrome as a starting point.

More powerful? I though chrome's API was stupidly limited which is why firefox had better extensions (all of which they want to throw out).

What he's saying is that Mozilla is taking Chrome's API as the base and then adding more interfaces to it, to make it more powerful than Chrome's API and hopefully as close to Firefox's current add-on-capabilities as possible. For example Mozilla has already added an API, so that NoScript can now be ported to WebExtensions.

Re: Mozilla shouldn't copy Chrome's permission prompt for extensions

#77

Post by JadeNB »

cLeEOGPw wrote: post #34

> Also, Adblock Plus could also read data as a side-effect, but it doesn’t do anything like that of course. The latter isn’t because the permission system stops Adblock Plus from doing it, but simply because we are good people (and we also formulated this very restrictive privacy policy). Sure everyone believes you. Such an honest and genuine person.

> Sure everyone believes you. Such an honest and genuine person.

I think that this sarcastic tone is unproductive, but the downvotes are a shame, as it's true that there have been ethical issues with ABP in the past:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_...

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