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Comment by TiredOfLife | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla is not a single person in a basement with a 20 year old second hand computer. They spend hundreds of millions $ per year. uBlock origin has 8+ million installs. The second extension by install count has 4 (four) times less. If if anything to do with gorhill and their extensions is not priority one in their review system, then something is really wrong at Mozilla.

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This was for uBlock lite, a much lesser used plugin

> This was for uBlock lite, a much lesser used plugin

Sure, but it's published by the same developer and has existed for a while. It's not a brand new extension under his account, or published on a different developer account.

I've built review systems before, and you typically have safeguards in place to prevent mistakes that impact your biggest users. No matter how you cut it, this isn't a good look for Mozilla.

And behind the scenes is one human being maintaining both.

If you make maintaining one of them more stressful than the other, the maintainer dropping one to focus on the other is a predictable consequence.

If they piss off a dev they risk losing all the plugins of that dev. So they must not look at uBOL, the subject of the review, but at uBO, the most popular plugin of that dev. And it turns out that it's Firefox's most popular plugin among all its plugins. They should immediately escalate the review even if gorhill submitted a plugin to log Hello World in the console.

> They spend hundreds of millions $ per year

Most of which coming from Google, whose web enshittification created the need for Ublock Origin and later Ublock Origin Lite. If Mozilla, which takes boatloads of money from Google, does something absurd that would please nobody else but Google, how could one not assume something fishy is going on?

https://archive.ph/jQPTt

( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go... )

...and the extension this article is about had about 5000 (five thousand) installs before being taken down. That doesn't really scream "priority" to me.

It may be true, but your point of view isn't the sole possible. Many people have to use more than one browser and for them, the Google decision (effectively forcing the creation of uBOL) was really painful so Hill's new product is of big value. Also, there are people who don't know anything about uBO since they never used Firefox but they probably will start to use uBOL as other blockers for Chromium-based browsers are incomparable to it. Thus 5k downloads of uBOL are no measure of its importance.

How is that relevant to hosting on AMO?

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