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Comment by vorpalhex

9 years ago

This is being added to the browser, outside the realm of security updates, through what is supposed to be a UX improvement program, for commercial purposes. It's written by a commercial company that produces advertisement content. It's not clear this code is audited.

Sorry, but I'm uninstalling firefox. They have broken the basic trust I have in them as a user to not push arbitrary code to my machine against my interests.

55 comments

vorpalhex

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zie  9 years ago

Have fun in Lynx. that's probably the only browser that wouldn't do something like this.

Well maybe Safari, not because Apple wouldn't, but because they just don't care enough about ad revenue.

Chrome: They leech everything they can get away with, granted it goes only to Google, but you know it's just to feed their never-ending ad-revenue goal.

MS: They bypassed IE only ads, and went on to build ads into the entire OS.

  • feelin_googley  9 years ago

    The truth is that there have been other text-only browsers both before and after lynx. I have tried every one I could ever find, since the 1990s. Some of them seem to have been forgotten. IMO, whatever is in todays package collections is not a true representation of all text-only browsers ever written. Most times when someone cites "lynx", as is common on HN, I interpret this as a signal they are not too familiar with text-only browsers. IMO, lynx is relatively big, slow and clunky with too many options; definitely not the best text-only browser I have used.

    I happen to like text-only browsers for viewing HTML (e.g HTML tables), tcpclients like netcat for making TCP connections, and my own software for generating HTTP requests. Almost all websites work[FN1], with zero "loading time" as one may experience when using "modern" browsers to do these tasks. I can easily get the content I want (text, with option to download images, PDF, video, etc.) and skip the stuff I dont want. No autoloading of resources. I choose what I want.

    Surprisingly, the web is actually getting more, not less text-friendly. Today I can often get text encapsulated in JSON, Markdown, etc. instead of wrapped in HTML, making parsing even easier.

    There is heaps of Javascript written by others available on the web today but as a user I have little interest in running it. I would rather write my own.

    FN1. "work" means I get the body the page that contains the content.

    • zie  9 years ago

      I agree, I just used lynx there as a stand in for all text based browsers, since it's the most well known, and easiest to get running.

      I'm not sure I agree the web is getting more text-friendly.. it is getting more JSON friendly, mostly, but actually visiting web-pages where JS isn't required is becoming increasingly rare. I've yet to find a text/console browser that can actually run JS. (I know there have been some experiments, but none that actually work last I checked)..

      1 reply →

  • geofft  9 years ago

    I'm running Firefox via Debian, and I intend to continue running Firefox via Debian - I trust that the outcry in the Debian community would be so huge if the Firefox maintainer (or any other maintainer) allowed this sort of code from upstream through.

    • zie  9 years ago

      Well FF did just get caught with their pants down, installing a Mr.Robot (tv show tie-in) Add-on(extension) to FF users, without their consent. Since it was an Add-On that was pushed after a debian install, Debian devs wouldn't have been able catch it before it reached end-users.

      That said, I still use FF, but I do make sure I keep all the opt-in telemetry and stuff off, since it was one of these settings that "let them" get away with installing the add-on without consent.

      Granted the add-on by default didn't do anything unless you enabled it, but still.....

      1 reply →

  • pweissbrod  9 years ago

    Software companies are like music bands. You might like their current album but next year they could totally sell out and go pop :)

    Me, I keep it underground (qutebrowser at the moment) but I'm constantly in search of something better

  • cjsuk  9 years ago

    Gopher. That was content focused and so inflexible that it was hard to be a dick with it.

    • smacktoward  9 years ago

      The original WWW was too. (It didn't have cookies, for instance, so there was no way to track a user from one page to another.)

      When it got popular, smart people started bending it to make being a dick possible, which is how we got the Web of today. I don't doubt the same would have happened to Gopher, if it had been the one to get popular.

  • justizin  9 years ago

    > Well maybe Safari, not because Apple wouldn't, but because they just don't care enough about ad revenue.

    Truthfully, this is why I use Safari. Apple makes money by selling me devices and services, Mozilla and Google are both driven by ad revenue. Even good actors within these companies are working within a framework where the customer is the product.

    .. also Safari saves like 15% on battery.

    • Sylos  9 years ago

      Christ, are you seriously arguing that Apple, who does operate an ad network, is less driven by ad revenue than Mozilla, a non-profit, who at best will get to continue working on Firefox, if there continue to exist search engines that make revenue.

  • bigbugbag  9 years ago

    what about otter ? waterfox ? uzbl ? poseidon ? netsurf ? falkon ? k-meleon ? Iron ? Iridium ? Liri ? Min ?

    To cite some of the browsers you overlooked in your snarky comment.

    • zie  9 years ago

      It was definitely snarky, but I did try to qualify the snark to be useful-snark, and not just plain snarky.

      As for all these browsers, all of them(unless I'm mistaken) are based off of one of the big 3(Chrome, FF, Safari) so you still have to trust the big 3 to run these, for the most part, as they are all single-developer or maybe a very small team, and would be very hard pressed to catch underhanded attempts from any of the big 3 to embed any nastiness.

      1 reply →

Ajedi32  9 years ago

> It's written by a commercial company that produces advertisement content. It's not clear this code is audited.

Do you have any evidence of this?

Assuming their normal processes for SHIELD studies were followed, a _lot_ of different people have to review the plugin before it gets approved: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies#Who_A...

Edit: Also, the contributors list on the plugin's GitHub repo lists exclusively Mozilla employees: https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/graphs/contributors

  • gorbachev  9 years ago

    Unfortunately the most important person involved didn't get to review the plugin before it was installed on my computer. Me.

    • ubernostrum  9 years ago

      OK, I have to rant a bit on this.

      I worked at Mozilla for about four years (2011-2015), on MDN. It's built as a wiki, with wiki features open to everyone. The code is all open source and on GitHub. Its issues and tasks and roadmap are tracked in a public bug tracker. We operated in a public IRC channel. We didn't have to do that. We could have just built something targeted to only be used by the technical writing staff at Mozilla, and never bothered to open it up or make the code available or make it transparent about who wrote articles and when. In fact, it's much more work to do all the things we did (and not just in terms of implementing features, but also in terms of dealing with spammers and trolls and other malicious people who wouldn't have had access in a less open system), but we did it anyway because Mozilla is a radically open and transparent organization. But... in four years, not many people from outside Mozilla ever joined in and got involved with actually contributing (either code or articles or edits to articles or housekeeping or suggesting/arguing for ideas of how to improve MDN).

      And I've been doing open source for much longer than that, and I see exactly the same pattern: a handful of folks do all that work, and go to the trouble of being open and transparent and providing ways for people to see what's going on and get involved... but people don't.

      And then those same people willingly install the software and use it every single day, and complain that they were never consulted, or never got a chance to review, or never got to provide input. You had chances to look at the source code, to see what was being checked in, to read the referenced Bugzilla bugs on commits, to leave comments on them, to submit alternative ideas. You didn't. You did install Firefox, though (assuming your claim is correct that this was installed on your computer). By installing the software while not participating in the process, you absolutely gave your "review" of it, and your "review" was "just make a browser for me for free and don't bug me about how".

      Now, if you want to be involved, go start watching Bugzilla and the Mozilla project wiki pages, and CC yourself on stuff and join mailing lists. Because it's Mozilla. You can do that. If you don't want to do that, or you don't think it's worth your time to do that, then don't do it. But don't then come charging onto HN to complain that nobody consulted you. People practically got on their hands and knees and begged you to join in the process of making Firefox and other open source software, and you decided not to.

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benbenolson  9 years ago

What browser are you going to use instead?

  • pweissbrod  9 years ago

    Firefox 57's sweeping changes ruined most of my vim-like ui customizations (vimperator, vimfx). For 2 months I've switched to qutebrowser and palemoon as a backup and dont miss firefox at all.

    If you're looking for a browser with first-class vim compatibility qutebrowser is outstanding.

    I've also found palemoon to be a perfectly boring/stable/functional variant of firefox without all the drastic/breaking changes (vim plugins work quite well also)

    • bigbugbag  9 years ago

      If you were a vimperator aficionado you might want to have a look at uzbl.

      Pale moon is not as good as waterfox, at least for me.