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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

  > Given you can just go override Firefox and enable disabled extensions

No, _you_ can just go override Firefox and enable disabled extensions. The average user can not do that.

_I_ can bore out a V-8 0.030 over, choose a proper cam, match all my bearing clearances, assemble the thing balanced, and then tune 30% more power out of it than it came with from the factory. But not all automobile drivers can do that.

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I'm gonna wager by far the majority of people who will actually get affected or outraged by this have the technical wherewithal to click a little gear icon and re-enable an extension.

Everyone else is running maybe uBlock and a privacy extension that their kid installed for them, and those will be whitelisted.

This is a tempest in a teapot, just like every other "controversy" that Firefox finds themselves embroiled in.

> I'm gonna wager by far the majority of people who will actually get affected

We have no idea who will be affected, because Mozilla hasn't specified their plans for this "feature".

> Everyone else is running maybe uBlock and a privacy extension that their kid installed for them, and those will be whitelisted.

I'm an extension developer myself. I'm not ok with a world where a tiny number of lucky extensions get whitelisted, while my extension and everyone else's extensions get silently, remotely disabled by Firefox.

They literally wrote a blog post about how they're going to use this feature. In what way have they not "specified their plans"?

> I'm an extension developer myself. I'm not ok with a world where a tiny number of lucky extensions get whitelisted, while my extension and everyone else's extensions get silently, remotely disabled by Firefox

Ah, now I see the real concern.

Honestly, I'm not that sympathetic. Extensions have always been a potential security liability and anything that protects less savvy users when accessing online banking or other sensitive services is a good thing.

Heavy extension use is the hallmark of a power user. Power users can configure Firefox to enable these extensions (Mozilla has specifically said they plan to deliver more user controls in 116), so I personally don't see the problem.

> They literally wrote a blog post about how they're going to use this feature. In what way have they not "specified their plans"?

Which domains will be quarantined? And which extensions will be exempted?

Everyone seems to be assuming "banking" with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Mozilla hasn't said.

There are countless banks in the world. Is Mozilla going to maintain a list of every banking web site?

The fact is that nobody knows what the hell Mozilla is going to do with the quarantine list.

So you assume the worst because you apparently don't trust them.

I assume the best because I believe they have an exceptional track record.

I see what they say and assume the best intentions.

You look at what they don't say and assume the worst.

I guess at this point we'll just see how it shakes out.

After all the shit Mozilla has pulled why would you trust them?

Such as?

The Pocket integration and Mr Robot stunt come to mind as examples that infuriated Firefox users.

https://venturebeat.com/mobile/mozilla-responds-to-firefox-u...

https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/18/mozilla_mr_robot_fire...

Cool, so two examples, both more than five years old, one of which--the now eight-year-old Pocket integration--has in the long run been a complete non-event.

(I'll grant you that Mr. Robot thing six years ago was pretty damn stupid, though)

You'll forgive me if I don't find myself moved to outrage.

I’m not trying to “move you to outrage”. I’m not the person you asked nor a Firefox user, I have no stake on what you think about Mozilla. But you did ask what Mozilla has pulled that would get someone to distrust them.

Perhaps you trust Mozilla to the end of the world, but for some people all it takes is one particularly bad incident to completely lose faith. You have your own threshold, other people have theirs.

If Mozilla has completely lost someone's faith, that person wouldn't be using Firefox, and this new functionality won't be a problem for them.

They also artificially shut down the apparently fully functional extension ecosystem on Android for no given reason, despite repeatedly stating that they would not do so. There still is one purposefully complicated workaround to use all store extensions, so we know it's about power, not compatibility. The crucial ability to use non-store extensions was entirely axed during that transition, also no reason given. This is how they were able to ice out anti paywall extensions recently.

Mozilla management has a history of consistently steering Firefox towards being less and less of a user agent.

This is why I think that if you trust Mozilla as a steward of the Firefox browser, you have not spent much time following their behavior.

Reverting preferences such as browser.launcher.processEnabled every single time I install a new build, for example.

Mozilla used to be all about respect for the user. Not so much these days.

Just like you probably dismissed the significance of banning unsigned addons until Mozilla forgot to update the certs and we had that worldwide extension outage?

So because they screwed up in that circumstance I must now assume this new feature is a malicious power grab?

Sure. I guess that makes sense.

In the future I should use this entire situation when illustrating Hanlon's Razor...

No, you should recognize your miscalibration on the question of "what's the worst that can happen".

The margin between users who can't figure out how to re-enable the extension, and users who would have imagined the existence of a password-paste-enabling-on-bank-site extension and then sought out and installed it in the first place, has to be vanishingly small. I bet we are talking about tens of people worldwide.

What's your boring setup?

Sending it to Ricks ))

But I would check it meticulously at the top, middle, and bottom on every cylinder, in two axis, before bolting it together. Trust, but verify.

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