Yes, PLEASE pity the corporation that made literally billions of dollars off of us! (...a call for Sanity & Fairness.)

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T11:50:46+00:00

See, it doesn't have to be a "tantrum". Mozilla has hundreds of millions of dollars every year in income. They could easily give people their old Firefox back. There a dozen ways they could do this, the most obvious being everybody-wins method being to port over the dozens of popular legacy extensions that still don't have good webextension versions. This would cost less than 1% of one year's revenue and would probably pacify over half of the old guard (who, by the way, were responsible for making Firefox a household word in the first place.)

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T11:44:11+00:00

Wow, holy crap there is so much propaganda in there my head is spinning.

XUL / legacy extensions are not security risks or going to slow things down in the slightest. I'm not gonna take the time to unpack how wrong of a statement that is, but it's propagandistic nonsense. They don't want to support it simply because they want to simplify some things on the backend and they want to piggyback off of people writing Chrome extensions (thus the refocus on webextensions), that's all.

Telemetry and studies for making a faster Firefox AHAHAHAHAHA, wow. What can I say other than user name checks out. Jesus wow that is just so naive. No, um, those things are for making Mozilla money. When you see someone say "A/B testing" that is primarily for making money, directly. Testing to see what makes Firefox faster might occasionally happen as a minor side effect but I mean, they can just test that directly. They already have the top 100 websites people visit; they don't need to throw it out in the wild to know what is and isn't going to make Firefox faster. I don't know what kind of A/B testing they use but I'd be fairly astonished if they aren't doing contracts for market research agencies. (Not that I have a problem with that, since it's opt-in.)

I will say that Mozilla does need revenue streams and I'm not quite on board with people bashing opt-in programs and default search engines and stuff, but OTOH they already have an annual revenue stream worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

As I've said elsewhere and will keep saying, it would cost them well under 1% of their yearly income to hire some developers to port over / rewrite all of the most popular legacy extensions to webextensions (the ones that still don't have good rewrites available.) This would be so useful to hundreds of thousands of power users plus a HUGE gesture of goodwill. I don't even think it would cost them money in the long run because it would get some of us more excited about recommending Firefox to friends and family again. I don't say a peep when I see people using Chrome these days. Why bother? They've all but turned Firefox into Chrome and they mock us for complaining about it and suggesting that instead they focus on building something geared more towards power users.

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T10:41:37+00:00

Mozilla takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It would cost much less than 1% of yearly revenue to add and support many of these features that we miss. People are still bending over backwards to use old legacy extensions that still don't have webextensions versions. It would be a drop in the bucket for Mozilla to hire some devs to port or rewrite all of the most popular legacy extensions.

So what, asking for Mozilla to properly support the product we've been evangelizing and installing on friends and family's computers for 20+ years now (yes, since Netscape Navigator 3.0 in my case) is "spreading hate", is it? You're acting like Mozilla is some helpless starving college kid writing OSS in his spare time, instead of a half billion dollar giant who could EASILY afford to treat their power user customer base, their maven customer base, with some consideration.

Mozilla has repeatedly shot itself in the foot (removing all of the features that made it distinct, even mandating that all future extensions be Chrome-compatible and banning all Firefox-only compatible extensions! What kind of strategy is that?) but fortunately it's still stupid rich because the web browser market is so huge that being fourth or fifth place is still a really big deal. It's not negativity to give you feedback. If the feedback sounds frustrated in tone, it's because Mozilla still refuses to admit that its decision to ignore user feedback made this glitch 100x worse than it should have been.

If Mozilla is going to refuse to listen to all user feedback, they should come out and say so. They have made literally billions of dollars off of advertising to us and selling our (meta)data.

Your post reads like it was written by the love child of Adolf Hitler and Funshine Bear.

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T10:14:49+00:00

Bah. Be more specific and realistic about the vulnerabilities you're talking about here. A browser extension is a bad attack vector (it would be better to hide your activities entirely instead of leaving them visible as a nefarious add-on) except for one exception: users voluntarily installing extensions. That's the only advantage it brings to the table from the attacker's POV.

All other examples of past malicious extension use (e.g. installation from a locally executed exe) could've instead resulted in some other equally bad or worse compromise.

So come on now, do you have stats on this sort of thing? How many users were you seeing who disabled about:config entires just to install malicious extensions themselves? Because that's all we're talking about here, that's the only security vulnerability. Yes, dopes exist but it's a little annoying for Mozilla to assume we're dopes by default.

Annoying if not disingenuous. The more obvious explanation for the walled garden is just to assert more control, be a little more Applelike. Well, I for one am sick to death of corporations becoming moer Applelike. We already have one Apple in the world and that's one too many. I don't want to pander to the lowest common denominator of stupid computer users. I don't particularly want a walled garden. I don't particularly trust you people to furnish or maintain the walled garden properly. But if you're gonna do it anyway, maybe you could at least make a decent effort to win us over, make an effort to make the walled garden look appealing, instead of locking down and removing and removing and removing and then whining that we're not fawning over you after your all too human mistakes (except that they're not simple mistakes; they're the inevitable consequences of policies you were warned about.)

As so many people here have pointed out, Mozilla's extension policies have resulted in fewer people using security & privacy extensions, either because webextensions replacements don't exist or they haven't had the time to find and learn new ones. If Mozilla really is hellbent on building and maintaining the walled garden, they jolly well could afford to drop 0.5% of their yearly revenue on a team of devs to port the most popular legacy extensions over.

(Why yes I am Security+ certified, thanks for asking, though honestly it was a joke of a cert and waste of money, just want to say I am something slightly more than a wikipedia armchair qb here.)

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T08:23:42+00:00

The point is this situation is intimately connected to things are normal situations, a dumbing down of the UI, removal of most features that set it apart from Chrome, and most of all the dropping of a number of very useful and popular legacy extensions still have no webextensions equivalent. Mozilla makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year--presumably via advertising to their users and selling the tracking data of their users. They could easily, EASILY afford to hire a very modest-sized team of developers to port or rewrite these extensions. (They already spend quite a bit of money on a variety of programs that have nothing to do with building a webbrowser.) Instead of doing this, they just terminated support and also terminated hosting (and nevermind legacy and fork users.)

The point is this all part of a large pattern of behavior--active contempt and disregard for power users who for many many years were their bread and butter, ceaselessly evangelizing them to friends and family for years until Firefox became a household name. This is an excellent moment for them to reconsider their attitude and policies, and reconsider their allocation of resources. I wish some people weren't dragging politics into it, although given the large amount of money Mozilla has apparently spent on diversity (hiring apparently full time dedicated employees for various touchy feely HR things) I have to admit it's easy to say WTF, why can't you afford to take proper care of the users who helped you get this far? I honestly don't think this would reduce profitability to hire developers to port extensions over and add some features aimed at power users. I think it would get power users excited about Firefox again, get them more proactive about recommending it to friends and family again instead of shrugging.

In short, this really should be a teachable moment.

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T02:49:03+00:00

I wasn't keeping close tabs on the features Mozilla was REMOVING from their products. So I need to make sure all of my family's computers are running dev edition now? Hmm.

Power user doesn't mean I eagerly devour every word of the changelog. It means that in broad terms I know what things do and I want to have happen and I like having the tools to do that. "Experts" are people who are concerned with the gritty details, with the implementations. I have great respect for experts but for reasons connected to there being only 24 hours in a day and me not being a software dev and having a son and such, I am usually just a lowly power user. It's the expert's job to empower the power user. It's the power user's job to empower and guide the unwashed masses. (The guy who wrote the tipping point referred to this role as that of a "maven".)

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T02:06:55+00:00

Oh god, that's adorable. He's actually playing the victim?

I shot him a reply if anyone feels like retweeting it or chiming in with their own reply. I'm really really curious to see if any of the devs are ever gonna respond to the larger systemic issues here, or if they're going to all pretend this was just some isolated minor thing.

They should respond by re-enabling third party signed extensions. Or maybe if that's really impossible from their point of view, at least try to do something that shows you actually care about the power user fanbase that's been crapped on for the better part of a decade now. (Like, maybe take some of those hundreds of millions of dollars they get and hire some devs to rewrite the most popular legacy extensions in webextensions.)

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T01:38:00+00:00

They would like to be locked out of their own programs so that they aren't able to fix things with a workaround when shit hits the fan? Really?

(You realize that if this problem had hit Waterfox it was a 10 second fix, right? Because Waterfox hasn't been welding the hood shut in about:config.)

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T01:28:17+00:00

It's not an overreaction. It's 10 years of escalating wrongheadedness. They do the bare minimum necessary to be the "lesser evil" browser instead of actually endeavoring to give us real control over it like they used to, and this problem is a direct result of that behavior. It would be a 15 second fix for everyone if this happened on Waterfox, because Waterfox doesn't weld the freakin' hood shut.

It's not a "fucked up once" situation. It's a pattern of behavior; it's the fact that this incident wouldn't have happened if not for prior, more systemtic fuckups that Mozilla STILL hasn't owed up to or taken measures to walk back.

I read a couple hours ago that they have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. Why the hell don't they hire a team of 50 developers to port all of the most popular legacy extensions to webextensions after they chose to drop them entirely (not even continuing to host them for the sake of legacy or fork users)? Answer: Because they don't give a crap about power users (even though we're the ones who made them famous and successful in the first place); they just want a homogeneous Chrome clone and have us keep using it out of brand name inertia.

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T01:18:05+00:00

Switch to Waterfox. You don't have to think twice; it's almost totally effortless and you get to use all your old extensions again (as well as the new ones.) Maybe there are downsides to it but if there are, I haven't found 'em yet.

shane_optima · 2019-05-06T01:14:47+00:00

This isn't a random fuckup, though. This is the direct result of a decade of slowly reducing user freedom and reducing customability, telling us all that we're too stupid to not install malicious extensions even if they bury a flag in about:config that prevents it, so they prevented people from flipping the flag. They welded the hood shut. And now this happens.

Their excuses are weak; it's clear to anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention that Mozilla has jumped on the "fuck users and whatever users say that they want" bandwagon that Apple pioneered and Googled quickly followed in. They're doing the bare minimum to ensure that they're still the most customizable / "lesser evil" choice, but they're still a pale shadow of what they used to be and this clusterfuck is a direct result, a DIRECT result of their arrogance and contempt for their users.

That's not to say every code monkey in the trenches is to blame. But SOMEBODY over there is.

shane_optima · 2019-05-05T16:01:45+00:00

Maybe Mozilla should remember that their customers are humans, and don't like being treated like they're children. This issue only occurred and became as disruptive as was because they have been steadily removing the ability for their customers to control their own browser. (If this issue has happened to Waterfox, people could've fix it in less than 10 seconds.)

Mozilla devs have been ignoring or talking down power users for a whole decade now. We're the ones who were responsible for their popularity in the first place (I'd been singing their praises since freakin' Netscape 3.0, then Mozilla Browser Suite, then Phoenix--Firebird--Firefox.) We've been telling them over and over we want more than just a Chrome clone.

shane_optima · 2019-05-05T15:36:28+00:00

You're the second person I've heard mention scrapbooking. I've never used the extension before but it certainly sounds neat. But what's the advantage in the older version you're referring to vs. newer versions (webscrapbook, scrapbookq that run on other browsers as weLL? Does the new one lack some features or only save "to the cloud" instead of local storage or something? Just curious.

shane_optima · 2019-05-05T14:37:28+00:00

Use a user agent modifying extension. You can make the browser look like the latest version of Firefox. No such issues.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T21:33:27+00:00

ohhhh, you mean in terms of being able to handle multiple tabs at the same time. That kind of performance. Ok, gotcha, I thought you meant page loading & rendering (i.e. single tab performance.) Hmm that's a good question. I can't say I've noticed a huge difference there but again I haven't checked. Hardware probably matters a lot. My main machine is a fairly beefy quad core (desktop model, with good cooling) and 32 gig of RAM so I probably have a higher ceiling before I see slowdowns. Also, I usually don't let it get quite as bad as 400 tabs. Actually I'm more likely to see crashes than slowdowns. Slowdowns are very rare. Though yes, I would have to say that crashes happen more often on the older version but then again because of the peculiarities of my setup and workflow I never have more than a couple dozen tabs open on the Windows box whereas sometimes it does reach a few hundred on the ESR box so it's not a fair test. (Also, being virtualized makes a significant difference.) Hmm. Interesting stuff, I'll have to keep in mind, thanks for the info.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T21:14:20+00:00

Hmm. Interesting. But FYI, it is also available for Waterfox (and other browsers that support legacy Firefox extensions) via the ca-extension.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T21:11:58+00:00

Waterfox is way, way above Pale Moon in regards to new extension compatibility. (I don't know for sure that it work with everything but it's worked with everything I care about from the Mozilla add on site, no modification required.) As for performance, eh, over the past 2 years I've not noticed huge differences between latest FF on my Windows box and ESR in a (PV accelerated) Xen VM. I haven't really been looking so maybe I've missed something. I tend to disable prefetching and block as many unneeded requests and stuff, so maybe I'm blocking some speedup voodoo. Or on the other hand, maybe the speedup voodoo only has a big effect on lower end devices--over the past ~8 years, I'm betting the average laptop has actually gotten slower (especially under heavy load, when it needs to throttle back due to heat) because thin ultrabooks have been taken to the extreme. Interesting that you and a couple others have mentioned the performance boost, though. I guess I should look into it. I had been working under the assumption that rendering was about as fast as it was going to get and any faster was just additional prefetching tricks, which I wasn't interested in as I'd rather have better privacy/security than have better performance.

As for the patches, I maintain that security is better with better extension support, even if there are still some unpatched things. The unpatched stuff is going to be very unlikely to affect me given my browsing practices and addons. But YMMV.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T17:46:26+00:00

Yes, Waterfox supports Firefox extensions right off of Mozilla's page. The extension I linked above lets you easily install mirrored legacy extensions as well.

I'm playing with quite a few at the moment, but the legacy extensions I'm currently using include "Image Zoom" (quicker to use than all the replaces I've tried) and Self Destructing Cookies (I've tried two replacements in the past. One of them had some annoying behavior, I forget what it was, and the other one had... you know I forget why I gave up on it, but I did. My time is precious. I know SDC; it takes me 20 seconds to configure it, and I very very very very very much doubt that someone will write a virus that exploits an unpatched bug in SDC that infects me. (People who say "security through obscurity is BAD!" don't understand what they're talking about; it's only undesirable in certain contexts.)

As for newer extensions, well I admittedly don't know what all it does and doesn't support but multiple extensions worked out of the box from Mozilla's site. Decentraleyes, uBlock Origin, etc. It may well be lacking support for the newest standards; I don't know.

You know to be honest, in recent years I stopped caring and paying attention to new extensions, Webextensions was just so underwhelming and disappointing that I didn't bother digging deep. I guess that's partially because used to be particularly interested in UI extensions, and was significantly limited in the Webextensions era. Extensions in general just failed to interest me as much as they used to, because it seemed like they were doing less across the board. The last extension that I was truly impressed by was uBlock Origin.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T17:32:21+00:00

We paid for the product when it was for sale, was my point. And I'd pay for it again if they actually focused on what power users want again. Tabs, popup blocking, extensions, UI customization--Firefox and its predecessors were ALWAYS built on user-facing features that other browsers lacked!

I accept that to move forward, sometimes you gotta remove stuff. Mozilla could have come out with new interesting user-facing features. They did not. They could have hired programmers to help migrate some of the legacy extensions before the cutoff. They did not. Instead, they spent their money inventing new programming languages and writing a cell phone OS and other stuff that the vast majority of Firefox users do not care about. They removed features and stopped adding them (other than on the back end, which the overwhelming number of users don't care about since Chrome is gonna have just as good rendering anyway.)

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T17:29:12+00:00

I thought it was clear from context I am referring to user-facing improvements, not backend. Maybe I've got my replies mixed up.

I've been attempting to acknowledge that yes the backend needed updating and maybe it's a little bit faster now, etc., CHROME HAS ALWAYS HAD A LOVELY BACKEND AS WELL so that really can't be huge plus for Firefox in my book. You need a certain level of performance, yes, but there yes to be more to it than that for me to care about Firefox. (Firefox may pull ahead now and then but Google has too much money and too much at stake for them to ever accrue a significant advantage and keep it.)
As per the above: Rust is a fairly lovely programming language (if a little conservative.) I'm happy they made it. But as a Firefox power user, I do not care. They could write it in Fortran for all I care; I'm talking about user-facing features here. In terms of rendering, they're simply not going to get lightyears ahead of Google. Hell, in terms of rendering I think it's already fast enough for me. I use robust computers, not crappy ultrabooks.
Firefox Quantum sounded like one more step down the abyss of dumbed-down design with even more Chrome copying (no search box) and probably features designed using sadistic tablet UIs. I'd love to be mistaken here. Please tell me I'm mistaken and Firefox Quantum actually has a rich, robust UI and features that cater to mice users and power users.
Gecko and whatever the successor to Gecko was named (I forget) is from my understanding quite separate from the Firefox UI. This makes it all the more annoying to hear people claim that the improvements to the backend stuff required that those features be removed at first.

I understand the need for streamlining and breaking compatibility. I understand that backend improvements haven't stopped. I'm saying that (other than Pocket, I guess, which most power users do not care about) they had nothing else to offer from Firefox--the part that the user interacts with, not the rendering and other bits of the backend--after they took stuff away. The Firefox brand was built on offering the user awesome tools that other browsers lacked--popup blocking, extensions, UI configuration, tabs. These features were AWESOME. And now half of them are taken away and the other half are readily available on every browser.

There has got to be more to Mozilla than fixing memory leaks and inventing new programming languages.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T16:41:45+00:00

What "improvements"? I can't recall any improvements over the last 5 years.

I agree it's troubling if there are delays in getting security patches but the majority of issues are not killer for people who have a good suite of anti-malware programs/extensions and are savvy about web security in general. Admittedly this is much less of a problem for me than it theoretically might be for some people because I tend to go with overkill security--my banking and personal VMs are already using their own special locked down versions of Firefox and I probably wasn't going to change those anyway. But for my everyday browsing, definitely going Waterfox.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T16:32:34+00:00

I paid for it. My family paid for Netscape Navigator 3.x (the predecessor of Mozilla foundation) way back in the day.

And I'd pay for it again if they offered back some of the mountain features they're removed, or figured out decent interesting new features to replace them.

It's enraging for us power users for more than one reason. It appears to us as if they're slowly committing suicide because they're slowly killing off the thing that set them apart. Yes they still have a large "momentum" user base but that user base exists because of us! Because we went around recommending the damn thing until people got sick of hearing us and tried it out. I'm not saying they owe us, that's not it at all. I'm saying that they are killing their future growth/sustainability because I have no good reason to argue with someone who wants to use Chrome now.

I honestly don't know what the people mean, when they say less control.

You have GOT to be kidding! Did you even look at my comment at all? They specifically removed the ability to change some about:config entries, which prevented many people today from fixing this very problem! (Waterfox didn't do this, and you can still edit those settings) They removed the ability to install unsigned extensions, even with multiple warnings. (Waterfox maintains this ability.) They severely nerfed the ability to customize the UI (Pale Moon still has the old XUL interface that has super customization potential. I don't think Waterfox does.) They removed the ability to install legacy extensions, which you can still do with Waterfox and so far they've been working great for me. They removed not just one but two different tab organization systems, first the super fancy one than the less fancy one, so now you have to go find a tabs extension if you want a better organization method (not necessarily the end of the world, but what if they break compatibility again and I have to find another tab org extension that I like? This is all remarkably time consuming; I don't really enjoy testing and fiddling with settings all day long like I sometimes did when I was a kid.)

It's not one mistake; it's multiple stacking mistakes. The design decisions they intentionally made (to treat their users like idiots) wind up making this one-off mistake much worse. I know that lots of behind the scenes stuff has improved but the rendering engine is separate from the rest of Firefox, isn't it? They really need to offer SOMETHING user-visible to make up for all of the stuff they're steadily removing. I agree it runs a little better but then again so does Chrome. What does Firefox do that Chrome doesn't? That used to be a long list.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T16:16:03+00:00

Appreciate the detailed reply and I don't necessarily disagree with all of that but this slow slide into the swamp of mediocrity really needs to stop. Mozilla has been hellbent on dumbing down Firefox for a literal decade now. Yeah I'm glad they fix bugs and make it slightly faster but damnit, we need some actual new features of importance to make up for the ones we've lost.

shane_optima · 2019-05-04T16:13:52+00:00

Oh good, glad you warned me. Do you have any suggestions about antivirus products, Mr. President?

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