Comment by pmlnr
9 years ago
> I'm not concerned that Mozilla might push malware into Firefox installations
Nobody is concerned about that, in my opinion. I'm concerned someone will push malware through Mozilla into Firefox installations. Pushing addon installs should not be possible at all.
> I'm concerned someone will push malware through Mozilla into Firefox installations.
Mozilla installing a bunch of addons that look like viruses ends up preventing users from being able to identify actual viruses.
End users being users prevents them from identifying actual viruses.
I'm concerned about Mozilla pushing software written by the Mr Robot marketing department.
I'm not entirely comfortable with how this all went, but it's at least worth noting that the add-on was written entirely by Mozilla engineers.
This is the opposite of comforting
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Is the plugin opensource, where can we vet it? I can't find it on github or anything like I can with the other plugins I use
The source lives at https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/
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This thread needs to lighten up. It's one goofily named add-on pushed to a miniscule number of users in an opt in program. Firefox and their judgement are fine.
it was an opt-out program actually.
Studies are enabled by default.
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They can also push new browser releases though. They are also auto-installed by default.
The exception is that an addon can do slightly less damage than a compromised browser itself.
I deeply hate this update methodology. Some hippster fresh from university decides that the gui, approach, functionality i use daily is no longer needed and pushes his rewrite into a release. One click later im stuck with this, because all the bundled crap is hijacking the "security" for a ride.
If any software developer would truely respect users, he would offer updates as seperate packages, where users can opt out of non-security ones- and those updates humanity votes with there feet against, vannish into the bin of useless software.
Imagine the complexity of maintaining the software when every patch must anticipate a fragmented mess of different pieces of patches being installed on target systems. Imagine the explosion of testcases required.
At that point, it’s probably better to just stop feature development and do nothing but security patches, which of course will lead to stagnation and which will also lead to fragmentation as many more incompatible releases of the same software will be out in use.
This will make it even harder for developers to adapt new technologies. Imagine how bad the already messy caniuse.com would look when every single browser version would be supported forever and could be individually configured feature by feature.
Especially as people somewhat versed in technology (I think it’s safe to call HN audience that), I think there is advantage in going with the flow and adapting to new releases and UI paradigms.
Otherwise we'd still be running on DOS and us developers would still have to support it.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
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I suspect it's a plan to make some functionality optional... Or opt out..
Ie. code spitting and reducing bloat, and speeding up development by providing some features as add-ons...