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Comment by takluyver | Hacker News Reader

I think there's been some concern that people compare the speed of Firefox with a bunch of random extensions against Chrome with none. I wonder if the 'refresh' is an attempt to get away from that at the point where someone might be giving Firefox another chance.

I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.

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it is—it uninstalls all of your bloat

the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one

“bloat”

Adblockers aren’t bloat; they make the web faster and more secure.

“ridiculous”

Mozilla’s paymasters are an advertising company.

that seems to me like a bad faith interpretation of what I wrote—I'm using "bloat" to mean all additional changes beyond the vanilla ff installation

re: "ridiculous", do you think it's likely that there's a deep conspiracy within mozilla (at the behest of google) to make users watch ads? or were you hoping that they'd write a whitelist of adblockers that should never be removed, even when wiping the browser?

By far the biggest hog of resources for me is Dark Reader. I don’t think any other extension even comes close. I still use it though because adding 300ms to a page load to me doesn’t phase me.

I only mention this because the effect of those things could be more effectively curtailed... if the users weren't encouraged to hide the shortcomings from the application.

Sweeping things under the rug, you know?

A browser should have history, data, and extensions. Getting rid of those things doesn't qualify as a fix. It's a diagnostic step!

I would agree in general, but arguably uninstalling ublock makes the web much slower.

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