Firefox, again



  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Addons/Extension_Signing

    Starting in Firefox 40, you'll be warned if the add-on is not distributed through the Mozilla add-on store. By Firefox 42, you won't be able to install an add-on from anywhere but the store.

    The last time we tried to get an add-on into the Firefox store, it was submitted on May 25 - Mozilla still has not bothered to perform a review in order to list it in the store. Thanks Mozilla!

    I know what add-on platform we are dropping.

    BWAHAHA it gets even better:

    ##FAQ

    ...

    • What about private add-ons used in enterprise environments?
      • We haven't announced our plan for this case yet. Stay tuned. In the interim, ESR will not support signing at least until version 45, which won't come out until 2016.

  • Banned

    They're also planning to drop support for HTTP. Cool, huh?



  • @Gaska said:

    They're also planning to drop support for HTTP. CoolDiscotastic, huh?

    FTFY


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    It's like they're not even pretending they want market share any more.



  • It's Springtime for Hitler all over again, isn't it? I mean it's got to be.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    It's Springtime for Hitler all over again, isn't it? I mean it's got to be.

    Maybe they believe all that SJW stuff and are the first group ever to try to kill themselves off first?



  • Files submitted for signing will go through an automated review process. If they pass this review, they are automatically signed and sent back to the developer. This process should normally take seconds. If the file doesn't pass review, the developer will have the option to request a manual review, which should take less than two days. This is not the same process that currently applies to AMO add-ons, which has been typically slower.



  • So glad I'm not working on a company whose product was a browser add-on anymore.

    Both Chrome and Firefox have basically completely and utterly destroyed the enterprise market for browser add-ons. (Which, believe me, was actually pretty damned healthy before. It's incredible how ignorant web browser makers are of their own customers.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    pretty damned healthy before

    It... was? Huh, TIL. Browser add-ons have always been synonymous to me with "so many Ask Toolbar variations you can't see your screen anymore".

    I don't think I've ever seen anyone in IE6-ish days with a browser addon they wanted to have.



  • Web analytics companies used them to overlay analytics data on pages, multivariate testing companies used them so people could "preview" different creatives, etc.

    The problem is browsers are made by ivory tower geeks who hate "SCARY COOKIE TRACKING OMGOMGOMOGMOGJMRDLthsie hesf uE" and so will never work with that industry whatsoever. Even though all those products are at worst harmless.



  • The only non-development add-ons that I've ever found to be worth much trouble were ad blockers and script blockers. And even those can be a serious PITA at times.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Even though all those products are at worst harmless.

    Now I know you're just trolling us. No one in their right mind would claim this in sincerity.



  • Oh great. I get to be lectured about how horrible multivariate testing tools are by people who don't even know what they are.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    It's incredible how ignorant web browser makers are of their own customers.

    Given the attitude of the FF devs towards Enterprise, when the latter first complained about the former going on their "new version every 6 weeks, and fuck you if you want stability" spree, I don't think the word "ignorant" applies. They know, and they don't give a fuck.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @ScholRLEA said:

    The only non-development add-ons that I've ever found to be worth much trouble were ad blockers and script blockers.

    Agreed. I also like them because they tend to block everything that blakey still champions, for some reason, even though he left the industry of malware a long time ago.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Even though all those products are at worst harmless.

    Really? You cannot say that with a straight face?



  • No no no! I switched from Chrome to Firefox because of this and now they're doing it too what the fuck.

    What's everyone's fucking problem with me running whatever I want in my computer?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The problem is browsers are made by ivory tower geeks who hate "SCARY COOKIE TRACKING OMGOMGOMOGMOGJMRDLthsie hesf uE" and so will never work with that industry whatsoever. Even though all those products are at worst harmless.

    Browsers have actually added several new ways to store data. WebSQL, IndexedDB, the Caches API, localStorage, sessionStorage...

    I have an adblocker, but only because I don't want to be bothered by crappy websites that I visit once having hundreds of ads all over the page. I have it disabled on most sites I go to, including this one.

    Web browsers have a "do not track" option, which sets an HTTP header. It doesn't erase cookies or break your scripts. If that happens, it's your fault. In every web browser I've ever seen, it's opt-in.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    What's everyone's fucking problem with me running whatever I want in my computer?

    Ask Stallman. He's probably been shouting the answer to that into the coming storm for longer than anybody else.


  • BINNED

    He is a zealot, only cares as long as it furthers his own political agenda. They do not accept Debian to be free enough! So yes ask him if you can run a binary blob on your own computer.



  • Chrome did this a while back, and now I have to click "Cancel" on a dialog box every time I start it since I use developer mode to run an extension that's no longer on the Chrome store (because it allows you to download YouTube videos, among other features).



  • @flabdablet said:

    Ask Stallman. He's probably been shouting the answer to that into the coming storm for longer than anybody else.

    In between sessions of eating his own toe-jam.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Really? You cannot say that with a straight face?

    Explain to me how a multivariate testing tool has harmed you.



  • @dse said:

    political agenda

    dolan's political agenda seems to be "make the political Discourse as confusing as possible" and I support him for that because the one thing the US government is good at is disagreeing on petty issues. That's something we can all agree on, regardless of party lines.



  • @dse said:

    He is a zealot, only cares as long as it furthers his own political agenda.

    Quite so. And a fundamental pillar of that particular agenda is a belief in the right of every person to do as they please with their own computing machinery. So if you want an informed opinion on what everybody's fucking problem is with running whatever you want in your own computer, Stallman is the man to ask. Whether or not you agree with his worldview or his proposed solutions, one could scarcely dispute that coming to grips with those exact problems has been his life's work.

    @dse said:

    ask him if you can run a binary blob on your own computer.

    I would be astonished to learn that his answer would be anything substantially different from "of course you can, but I think you'd be ill-advised to make relying on such things part of your computing strategy, and you should be aware that doing so will have negative political consequences".

    Yes, he's pretty vehement in opposition to the bundling of binary blobs in what purport to be distributions of free software. The decision to bundle such blobs for distribution is not the same as the decision to run them on your own machinery.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Web analytics companies used them to overlay analytics data on pages, multivariate testing companies used them so people could "preview" different creatives, etc.

    The problem is browsers are made by ivory tower geeks who hate "SCARY COOKIE TRACKING OMGOMGOMOGMOGJMRDLthsie hesf uE" and so will never work with that industry whatsoever. Even though all those products are at worst harmless.

    Cookies are utter shit because of how much shit people try to store in them. Fuck cookies, there are newer and better replacements.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    sessions of eating his own toe-jam

    What have you got against locally-grown organic produce?



  • The worst thing is I'm using the FF 64bit beta and Flash (oh shut it - it's useful every now and again) won't install. I'm thinking now that's why Chrome (64bit browser) develops their private version of flash JUST FOR CHROME.

    As for add-ons.. I love 'em.. I just don't install all the various toolbars that many apps want all to themselves.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    I was wondering what happened.
    I was in a remote session with a friend and he got a prompt to update FF. When it restarted (granted, it only took a few seconds), his theme was summarily disabled and apparently lost his s*%t. Was kinda funny actually...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @delfinom said:

    Fuck cookies, there are newer and better replacements.

    Like what? Literally how are you going to pass a token to the server indicating what session you're talking about? (You can't use the TCP connection itself; proxies belgium that to hell and gone.)



  • I think the point is cookies should not be used to store anything else.
    People who make "fat" cookies ruin the experience.



  • @TwelveBaud said:

    > Files submitted for signing will go through an automated review process. If they pass this review, they are automatically signed and sent back to the developer. This process should normally take seconds. If the file doesn't pass review, the developer will have the option to request a manual review, which should take less than two days. This is not the same process that currently applies to AMO add-ons, which has been typically slower.

    We are past day 70 waiting for our review ... so clearly the process is working.



  • Are there any good browsers left?

    :hanzo: Were there ever?


  • FoxDev

    @hungrier said:

    Are there any good browsers left?

    elinks still works a treat. 🚎



  • @hungrier said:

    Are there any good browsers left?

    :hanzo: Were there ever?

    Clearly, it's Opera. Or Edge.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @blakeyrat said:

    Explain to me how a multivariate testing tool has harmed you.

    It touched me in an inappropriate place. I found out it was made by blakeyrat, so you are a pervert.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Explain to me how a multivariate testing tool has harmed you.

    Someone dropped a computer that was running one on my foot and broke two toes, you insensitive clod!


  • BINNED

    @flabdablet said:

    So if you want an informed opinion on what everybody's fucking problem is with running whatever you want in your own computer, Stallman is the man to ask. Whether or not you agree with his worldview or his proposed solutions, one could scarcely dispute that coming to grips with those exact problems has been his life's work.

    Yes, I guess we can use fundamentals to scale everyone else and see where they are in the worldview spectrum. So I agree with you about asking him, in the same sense that studying marxism is necessary in any balanced economy course.

    @flabdablet said:

    "of course you can, but I think you'd be ill-advised to make relying on such things part of your computing strategy, and you should be aware that doing so will have negative political consequences".

    That would be fine, if he would not go on and actively hamper the progress of free software, for political reasons. gcc may become irrelevant because it was not let to evolve, fortunately Linux is too strong to get hit, but it does not mean they did not try to make it stall.

    It is best for software if lawyers stay out of it, and leave it to software programmers. If a former software programmer spends more time writing licensing mambo jumbo, and giving talks prophesizing the future of computing and its perils, than actively writing code, they are not in the latter group any more.



  • @dse said:

    mambo jumbo,



  • @dse said:

    It is best for software if lawyers stay out of it, and leave it to software programmers.

    Sounds like Stallman's fundamental position.

    The GPL is essentially an attempt to make all the lawyers cancel each other out. It amuses the hell out of me for being exactly the kind of legal hack you'd expect a programmer to devise, revealing a rather touching faith in the integrity of the legal process that's rather akin to the programmer's faith in the integrity of the underlying hardware.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    What's everyone's fucking problem with me running whatever I want in my computer?

    That this makes it possible to run things that don’t make anybody any money, or even things designed to stop people making money off you.


  • BINNED

    What is FSF, if not a group of lawyers? Do they produce a single line of useful code?

    Meritocracy is when the best technology evolves, without the need to be tainted by lawyers hackery. Open source is slow but ultimately will be superior, if zealots (of both side) do not meddle in.

    GPL was a nice and simple license before it got too complicated by lawyers gibberish nonsense that requires me wasting time reading about their :wtf:y jargon, and special conditions.
    I never had any interest in humanities studies in the school, and rather read 100x more math (or science fiction/fantasy) than a single line of this legal non-sense, but now that is a lost dream, software engineers need to know the nuances of GPLv3 and AGPL and other species.

    GPLv2 is still fine, but why bother in a new project when there is BSD, it is simple and honest.

    @flabdablet said:

    an attempt to make all the lawyers cancel each other out

    More lawyers to cancel lawyers, like adding more shit can cancel the smell.

    Nope it is just lawyers seeing a big opportunity to make job safety for their profession, at the expense of real software engineers and technological progress. Not much better than leeches in the patent-troll industry.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dse said:

    What is FSF, if not a group of lawyers? Do they produce a single line of useful code?

    They used to. I've not been paying attention for the past few years so I don't know if it is still true.

    @dse said:

    GPLv2 is still fine, but why bother in a new project when there is BSD, it is simple and honest.

    When you pick one of the GPL variants over BSD (or its relatives) or the other way round, you're making a kind of political statement over the types of freedom that you wish to enforce. You can't force all of them in a license; some have to be subsidiary to others, and some have to be entirely by social convention. (Or maybe you're a clueless idiot and just picked a license because you didn't know better. That's just stupid, but I've seen it happen too often for me to discount it.)

    I like the BSD license. I think it values the things I actually care about.


  • Banned

    @dkf said:

    types of freedom that you wish to enforce

    If you enforce something, it's not freedom.



  • @Gaska said:

    If you enforce something, it's not freedom.

    I see that line of argument a lot, and I don't think it holds water. Freedoms often conflict with each other. Your freedom to lock me in a cell conflicts with my freedom to wander as I please.

    In the case of licenses conferring various grades of freedom on the use of source code, the conflicting freedoms are that of the end user to have full access to the source code of software they use, and that of the software developer to build on existing works and then distribute the resulting executables under conditions that restrict access to their source code.

    By specifically denying the second of those freedoms, the GPL attempts to enforce the preservation of the first.

    Most of the informed objections I've seen to the GPL come from software developers who resent its restrictions on their ability to pick and choose whatever existing ingredients they like in order to make something commercial and closed-source. Which is completely understandable: not only does that feel like the denial of a freedom, it is the denial of a freedom.

    The FSF would argue that the freedom so denied is simply not as important as the freedom of all people to inspect, understand and modify the software that runs on their own devices (or, by implication, the freedom of trusted agents skilled in the dark arts to do so on their behalf).

    Clearly there is plenty of scope for reasonable people to disagree over the relative merits and overall commercial, political and technological consequences of these freedoms and the degree to which various software licences affect them. But blanket slogan-based Freedom Good Restrictions Bad dismissal of the GPL and its creators and promoters is empty partisan barracking, not reasoned argument.



  • @dkf said:

    I like the BSD license. I think it values the things I actually care about.

    The BSD licence is all about giving credit where credit is due. It's a friendly, collegial, developer-centric licence and lots of developers approve of it for that reason.

    In and of itself, it makes no attempt to ensure that end users will always retain the ability to choose software that is both up to date and free. That ability relies on the ongoing willingness of developers to keep releasing stuff under permissive licences for no other reason than their own generosity. This is in contrast to the GPL, which explicitly says to the developer "you can build on this, but if you do, you are obliged to extend the same freedom to your end users as this licence does to you".

    Both BSD and GPL licences codify some unstated worldviews about the relationship between the software development community and the wider community it's embedded in. The GPL is largely a reaction to Stallman's perception that the software development community of which he was a part was moving away from a sharing, collegiate model to an isolated commercial silo model that threatened to become completely dominant; BSD is an expression of university research culture, which has long been reliant on information sharing as a means to progress.

    I think both have their place. As a working netadmin I've written loads of quick little hacks to scratch my own itches (e.g.) and I tag those with an even more permissive licence than BSD, because the thought that I might save another netadmin some time pleases me and there is essentially zero risk that somebody else might sell what I've done for loads of money and not give me any.

    If, on the other hand, I had poured years of my life into working on some large software project for the betterment of humanity (e.g.), and there was a significant risk that some commercial shark might swoop in, make a few superficial changes and then release an expensive closed-source version that freerides on all my effort, I'd probably pick the GPL as well.

    I have a lot of sympathy for what Stallman has been trying to do all these years, and I think the work he's done has made many valuable contributions to the software development environment. It's also undoubtedly true that the GPL's implicit distrust in the ongoing generosity of developers and the enlightened self-interest of their employers has created some political division that might not have existed otherwise. I don't think there have been enough human generations between the creation of the GPL and the present day to make a call on whether that matters.



  • @flabdablet said:

    software developers blakeywho resent its restrictions on their ability to pick and choose whatever existing ingredients they like in order to make something commercial and closed-source.

    <lalalajhdjfkdkdjdkdk post ain't empty



  • @swayde said:

    blakey who resent its restrictions on their ability to pick and choose whatever existing ingredients they like in order to make something commercial and closed-source that spies on the end user, under ideal conditions undetectably.


  • Banned

    @flabdablet said:

    I see that line of argument a lot, and I don't think it holds water. Freedoms often conflict with each other. Your freedom to lock me in a cell conflicts with my freedom to wander as I please.

    I would call the latter a right rather than a freedom. For me, freedom is when there's no restrictions on actions, and right is when you're restricting others' actions via law (as opposed to physically) to make some person's life easier.

    @flabdablet said:

    In the case of licenses conferring various grades of freedom on the use of source code, the conflicting freedoms are that of the end user to have full access to the source code of software they use, and that of the software developer to build on existing works and then distribute the resulting executables under conditions that restrict access to their source code.

    Again - end user having full access to source code is right, not freedom - it's restricting what developers can do to make users' life easier. The FOSStards' demagogy is akin to what communists did - they've redefined what justice is to make it look like they're doing the good thing when they plundered whatever wealth the nobles had.

    @flabdablet said:

    Most of the informed objections I've seen to the GPL come from software developers who resent its restrictions on their ability to pick and choose whatever existing ingredients they like in order to make something commercial and closed-source. Which is completely understandable: not only does that feel like the denial of a freedom, it is the denial of a freedom.

    It's also slowing down the technological progress of humanity, because it forces everyone not wanting to share their business secrets to reinvent the wheel. Imagine what would happen if <whoever it was to invent light bulb> prohibited anyone wanting to make money on it to use his invention.



  • @dse said:

    if zealots (of both side) do not meddle in

    And you’re going to make sure of that how, exactly?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @flabdablet said:

    I have a lot of sympathy for what Stallman has been trying to do all these years

    I understand it too, though I wouldn't make the same decisions as he does. It definitely seems to be partially related to ones politics and social attitudes, as well as the history of people you've dealt with in the past. My experience with commercial developers is that they are keen on adding value, not just rebadging something that exists. That's just my mileage though.

    The real threats come when there's a single source for the software in question. What happens if that source goes away? This can happen for both commercial and open source, even with something that's GPL (e.g., if there was essentially only one team that understood the code). Or code can just cease to be relevant because it doesn't work with all the other things that you use. Licensing is not the only problem.

    The commitment to keeping things going and useful is, at its core, a social commitment rather than a legal or commercial one. If the willingness to have a community is there, and there is a desire to participate in that community for the betterment of that group, the software can be sustained. If we look at long-term successful software systems, the core unifying feature is the presence of a community of users. This is why I think that licenses are only a part of things, why I explicitly called out social convention.

    Why do people submit patches to the FSF? Social convention. They don't need to do that. They certainly do not need to assign copyright to them. Nor does anyone need to get their software from the FSF (and in fact, using the FSF's website is a PITA as we're not in Kansas 1995 any more, Toto). That people do these things despite not needing to is absolutely social convention.


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