Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Oof. I get gorhill is pissed about the whole thing, but, this feels like cutting off your nose to spite your face. It's going to be much trickier for people to get uBO Lite onto their Firefox for Android installations now, or even if they can, they might just not bother.

And, while I suppose gorhill could make the case that he's protesting this egregious process on behalf of the little guy, the fact is, he's not the little guy as far as Firefox add-ons go. uBO was one of the first (if not the first) 3rd-party addon to be offered as part of Firefox for Android after Mozilla's reorg started rolling out. He clearly has Mozilla's attention. I'm not sure what he gains from continued intransigence offers after Mozilla admits their mistake and apologizes.

View on HN

> It's going to be much trickier for people to get uBO Lite onto their Firefox for Android installations now, or even if they can, they might just not bother.

Why would they bother? Firefox - Android or desktop - runs full/regular uBo just fine.

> Why would they bother? Firefox - Android or desktop - runs full/regular uBo just fine.

gorhill himself stated[0]:

> This is unfortunate because despite uBOL being more limited than uBO, there were people who preferred the Lite approach of uBOL, which was designed from the ground up to be an efficient suspendable extension, thus a good match for Firefox for Android.

[0] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/197#issueco...

He gains by not having to interact with them for UBOL.

When you waste people's time sometimes an apology is not enough for them to want to continue to work with you ...

An outlook like that will really limit who you work with in the future. I don't know anyone, corp or otherwise, that doesn't mess up from time to time. What matters is the acknowledgement of the mistake and taking steps to rectify it.

IMO, as much as I highly respect his products, the dev pulled a hissy fit over a mistake.

So, half of what you say matters seems to be missing.

They restored his extension (until he removed it again), what more do the Mozilla-haters want?

An apology, a post mortem, and lessons learned and implemented so it doesn’t happen again.

The unpaid dev who produces something of value to users of Firefox. Removing the addon doesn't hurt him, and may hurt Firefox if people switch to Brave over this. Mozilla need to make changes to their review process or risk losing users.

> I'm not sure what he gains from continued intransigence offers after Mozilla admits their mistake and apologizes.

What would he gain from submission to Mozilla? Either way he gains $0 for all the work he's done to improve the Internet for millions of people.

He gains Mozilla's distribution model and audience, which allows users of Firefox to download add-ons from their browser's UI and updates automatically, rather than having to manually pull an extension file from a Github page for each new release and install it.

That's a long-winded way to say $0

Time and effort are usually considered to be worth some amount of money.

Time and effort is what he spends, $0 is what he gains.

You gain $0 for uploading your Linux package to yum/apt/dnf as well, but you recognize that there's value in being able to install such packages easily through a well-curated repository, no?

Well you, the programmer, usually don't upload it. Some package maintainer does it since they want your software and ideally they should handle the bug reports for their package as well.

> allows users of Firefox to download add-ons from their browser's UI and updates automatically, rather than having to manually pull an extension file from a Github page for each new release and install it.

only because mozilla is gatekeeping that away otherwise.

For extensions which have full access to all websites, I appreciate that. That is one of the main reasons for ManifestV3 because not all extensions can be reviewed.

I agree with one exception:

> [...] and audience [...]

If you take into account small market share of Firefox and even smaller percentage of Firefox user needing uBOL then "audience" isn't anything important in this case. Perhaps this whole story will increase popularity of uBOL more...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com