Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbuk2013 | Hacker News Reader

gbuk2013

> No phoning home. No telemetry, no data collection. No "light" version of the same, no "privacy-respecting" what-have-you. No means No. Nada. Zilch. Try and shovel any of that down people's throats and the idea of Firefox as a user's browser will die.

https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785

And now this :-(

I have been using Firefox since before it was called that. I develop my apps in it, even though most of my colleagues have switched to Chrome years ago. Even though it is (or was for a while) slower than Chrome for things like Canvas.

But I use because I believe in Free Software. But Mozilla keeps disappointing. DRM, bundled 3-rd party apps, analytics, tracking... It is just so very sad. :-(

Also, I have 17 add-ons installed (11 active). At present, of these 17, only 2 will continue working after November when the switch to WebExtensions is enforced.

Where to go from here?

View on HN

> DRM

Mozilla fought DRM until the very end and lost. If Firefox is to have any chance at remaining a mainstream browser it needs to support Netflix and the likes. You can't seriously blame them for this, because they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

EME is implemented as unintrusively, securely and privately in Firefox as possible. No DRM is downloaded or run on your computer until you specifically consent to it, and the DRM components run in a sandbox.

> Mozilla fought DRM until the very end and lost. If Firefox is to have any chance at remaining a mainstream browser it needs to support Netflix and the likes. You can't seriously blame them for this, because they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Yes I can, and I will, because they sold out. They sold out their principles for the sake of market share. (And looking at their marked share, fat lot of good that did for them anyway.)

I'd suggest you research the topic of negative and positive liberty. I'm all for a free and open source experience but what about the liberties of content creators? What about my right to as a user to be offered content with the knowledge that I won't and don't want to know its inner workings as long as it's passive non-malicious code?

I will be happy to do so, once consumers and content creators (and specifically the companies they sell rights to) are on a level playing field in terms of legal protections and lobbying powers.

This isn't about the money or power you or I have. This is about freedom to distribute content and the agreement between the user and the creator while you're asking the browser to be the ideological arbiter of this transaction. If you're all for freedom, you should logically see that not including the DRM option is inhibitive of both the user's and the creator's freedoms. As a browser, it should be ideologically agnostic to my downloading of an executable or zip file that goes against freedom, privacy and all that we hold dear and it should still be my right and freedom to download and view as I legally please. The Richard Stallman approach does have its limits.

I don't buy that argument, sorry. Because it requires something as anti-freedom as DRM to exist in the first place.

> Yes I can, and I will, because they sold out

Excuse me, but did you support Mozilla with time/money?

> They sold out their principles for the sake of market share.

12% is still better than 1%, and the thing that mostly changed the landscape was the fact that mobile Internet heavily disfavors Mozilla (e.g. Android ships with Chrome, iPhone with Safari), and Google has a heavy advantage when it comes to advertising and engineering.

> Excuse me, but did you support Mozilla with time/money?

Yes, I have done. Thank you for the snark.

That's different. Netflix is optional. The AdSense and the telemetry discussed aren't.

Also, Firefox has been adding things like Pocket while removing simple options that have been part of Firefox since the beginning claiming that it should be part of an add-on (like the option to disable javascript) and they are also adding privacy invasive options like "Block dangerous and deceptive content"... Firefox is still my favorite but that can always change...

Even worse, in that discussion, it appears that there's a backdoor built into Firefox so that WebExtension-based ad blockers can't block Google Analytics. Only old-style add-ons can block it.

"It's as if the order to block/redirect the network request was silently ignored by the webRequest API, and this causes webext-based blockers to incorrectly and misleadingly report to users what is really happening internally."[1]

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785

This is a specific issue with that preference page. You can easily observe that the WebExtension version of uBlock does block Google Analytics, just not on the about:add-ons page.

There are probably security reasons why add-ons can't modify about:add-ons. Imagine an add-on that could hide itself by modifying that page.

Please don't spread FUD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com