81–90 of 340 posts
How about we praise the positives as well? They listed a slew of performance improvements and a battery usage improvement on macOS.
Firefox team: keep it up.
>On Windows, there will now be fewer interruptions because Firefox won’t prompt you for updates. Instead, a background agent will download and install updates even if Firefox is closed. How considerate of them, I felt I didn't have enough auto-updating background agents yet.
They've had the MozillaMaintenance service for several years on Windows already, what has changed now?
It was the first thing I'd nuke before allowing my PC to reconnect to the internet, the second was to nuke every talk-home-Mozilla link that about:config would allow to either be changed or deleted. This worked, as updates wouldn't even work when clicking 'updates' in the menu.
Mozilla has a damned hide to automate updates, not to mention gathering data about users' habits without telling them what's been gathered, and also not allowing users to turn off that collection if they wished.
(BTW, we know the depth of this surveillance just by looking at Mozilla's comments on v94's webpage. There's no way Mozilla would know that data unless Firefox's surveillance of its users had been all-pervasive.)
By going the way of the rest of the industry, Mozilla is shooting itself in the foot. People who've used Firefox in the past have done so because they want an alterative - not more of the same.
I expect Mozilla will go defunct soon, it's now been on its self-destruct path for too long for it to be rescued.
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I wonder if any of them read HN or feedback from the feedback page or anything?
No, they only pay attention to feedback from their telemetry. HN users mostly disable telemetry, right?
If that's true, it probably explains why they're bleeding users. Why stick with a company that ignores your complaints?
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If you’re lucky, some friendly malicious website will compromise you for the sole purpose of updating your copy of Firefox before someone else compromises you for a more nefarious purpose.
It is a risk, but one I have chosen to take in the short-term. I really dislike the direction Mozilla is going and I will probably have to switch browsers in 2022.
I'm just curious because as much as I disagree with many of Mozilla decisions, I still can't honestly compare it to other browser vendors like Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
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I'm sympathetic to this, and usually find these sorts of things annoying, but in this case I'm not so sure. If there is any application I want to autoupdate, it's my web-browser. It's a giant bundle of security vulnerabilities whose main purpose in life is to hit untrusted servers that might be sending me malware, and when an update is available to me, the list of security fixes is also available to attackers.
If you already read HN, why would you need an update reminder? Using HN I was able to find out about a new Firefox release sometimes even before "Check updates" feature was able to find one ;)
> With 94, you’ll find a selection of six fun seasonal Colorways (available for a limited time only). For a limited time only? What the heck? Feels like Starbucks. Otherwise great release of course.
- Excellent performance and reliability. Quantum delivered a lot of performance wins, and work continues at a rapid rate on reliability. Unfortunately, to be competitive on performance and reliability given Mozilla's funding required dropping XUL :(
- A simplified, modern UI. It's fair to argue about specifics here like "tabs as buttons", but not about simplification overall. This may frustrate power users, but power users are the vast minority.
Then, to out-compete the other browsers, Firefox needs exceed the other browsers in those areas, or use marketing tactics on non-technical axes to grow the userbase.
Chrome has tons of first-party themes (see https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/themes), so it makes sense for Firefox to try to drive some engagement here too
>On Windows, there will now be fewer interruptions because Firefox won’t prompt you for updates. Instead, a background agent will download and install updates even if Firefox is closed. How considerate of them, I felt I didn't have enough auto-updating background agents yet.
If I wanted an auto-updating key-logging tool on my systems, I'd have sold my soul to Chrome already.
I had upgraded before seeing this ... In preferences, you have the following options:
> Allow Firefox to:
> --------------------------------------------------------
> [x] Automatically install updates (recommended)
> [ ] Check for updates but let you choose to install them
> This setting will apply to all Windows accounts and Firefox profiles using this installation of Firefox.
> --------------------------------------------------------
> [x] Use a background service to install updates
How about "don't ping home"?
For some double-speak, read the Manifesto: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
In a sense, they are very open about their goals, if you have read the classics by Kafka, Orwell, and Bradbury.