How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?
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@bb36e said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
We should write our own browser
alternatively:
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).
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also, I know this is late, but what the fuck is this thing? bearpigbatgoatmountain???
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One of the 10 guiding principles of Mozilla's mission is that individuals' security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
YEAH, PRIVACY AND SECURITY MUST NOT BE OPTIONAL, THAT'S WHY WE JUST PUSHED AN AD FOR A TV SHOW RIGHT INTO YOUR BROWSER THROUGH A MECHANISM THAT'S ENABLED BY DEFAULT
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@parody said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
Another "great idea" from the Mozilla folks: today they decided to install an Extension named "Looking Glass" with a description of "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS" on a bunch of people's Firefox installs. The extension flips certain words upside-down, inserts words into websites, and sends an extra HTTP header to three specific sites, among other things.
It's apparently part of a Mr. Robot ARG. They've already expanded the extension's description to have actual information after users started asking support questions, filing bugs, and speculating about malware.
I'm not sure they wanted a good way to teach people how to turn off telemetry and opt-in random user studies, but they certainly found one.
Just checked, it magically appeared on my work computer. This is actually worse than Chrome disabling non-store extensions even in developer mode, because while that's annoying at least it doesn't silently install anything on me. Although, if Google did silently install some malware-looking extension, that'd be a double dose of fuckery on their part.
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@hungrier Ironically, if any fans of the show were paranoid about their security and noticed this thing, they'd already be stripping their computer, destroying their hard drives and microwaving all the ICs.
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@hungrier magically appeared on my computer also. WTF.
I went into privacy and disabled studies (
about:preferences#privacy
, under "Firefox Data Collection and Use").I'd actually be okay with them testing new features, but not this bullshit. It's not even testing a new feature; it's mucking with content on third-party websites, without any sort of permission from the user.
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@hungrier said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
Just checked, it magically appeared on my work computer.
Oh God, I didn't even think about that. I checked work computers and thank God, they don't have it. Though we have Firefox ESR, so it looks like studies aren't even an option (I don't see them in Preferences).
@blek said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
YEAH, PRIVACY AND SECURITY MUST NOT BE OPTIONAL, THAT'S WHY WE JUST PUSHED AN AD FOR A TV SHOW RIGHT INTO YOUR BROWSER THROUGH A MECHANISM THAT'S ENABLED BY DEFAULT
Fucking nailed it.
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@parody I have now met my falling-out-of-chair-laughing quota for the month, thank you. This is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever seen a tech company do, and that includes Google's catastrophic April Fool's 'drop the mic' feature.
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@anotherusername said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
"Firefox Data Collection and Use"
(quickly wanders off...) Whew.
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The mild fallout continues as tech news sites are starting to report on it. Mozilla's Chief Marketing Officer Jascha Kaykas-Wolff gave this statement:
Firefox worked with the Mr. Robot team to create a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users. Itâs especially important to call out that this collaboration does not compromise our principles or values regarding privacy. The experience does not collect or share any data.
The experience was kept under wraps to be introduced at the conclusion of the season of Mr. Robot. We gave Mr. Robot fans a unique mystery to solve to deepen their connection and engagement with the show and is only available in Firefox.
It may no longer be available in Firefox, however, as it appears they've pulled the plug on it.
Not sure what the Mozilla folks were thinking, but I hope they got some money out of it. They certainly didn't get much else.
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@parody said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users
gross, marketing speak
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@parody said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users
Perhaps it would have delighted fans of the show and users who chose to install the extension. For those who didn't, seeing random words turned upside down/inserted in your Web pages is extremely alarming.
They should apologize, but it doesn't sound like they're going to.
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I've never heard of Mr. Robot before this shit, and now all I know about this show is that I won't be seeing it out of spite.
So congrats on that negative publicity.
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@zecc I will. I doubt Mozilla's fuck-up was their fault.
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@parody said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
Another "great idea" from the Mozilla folks: today they decided to install an Extension named "Looking Glass" with a description of "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS" on a bunch of people's Firefox installs.
Their explanation of why they did this:
"The Mr. Robot series centers around the theme of online privacy and security. "
So they installed a plugin into your browser without your consent and without telling you about it.
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@zecc You're missing out, it's a good show.
Anyway I much prefer this tie-in that they did:
https://gfycat.com/DishonestDiscreteAfricanfisheagleEdit: Why does Iframely/NodeBB shrink that to a postage stamp sized area with blank space around it?
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FF is on like the third brain right now. I wonder what will push them into the fourth.
Perhaps adding sponsorships to the new tab page when it detects you're on something like McD's/Starbucks' Wi-fi?
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@hungrier said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
this
The resolution is poor so I can't tell, is the second render code too?
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@tsaukpaetra Yes, the second one is code, not quite the same as the code in the Firefox one, but producing the same result.
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@hungrier said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
producing the same result.
That's... disappointing.
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@tsaukpaetra I don't know for you, but I've always found quines rather fascinating.
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status: wheee!
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While looking for alternatives, I stumbled across luakit. Unfortunately, it doesn't run on Windows, so I might have to stick to Firefox (Waterfox?) there. Otherwise happy with the initial impression of luakit.
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Something that hasn't happened to me for quite some time. I just pressed Ctrl+Q instead of Ctrl+W.
It's surprising that it warns me when I try to close a window with multiple tabs, but it happily closes the whole browser without warning.
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https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/ said:
Over the course of the year Firefox has enjoyed a growing relationship with the Mr. Robot television show
How exactly does that work? How does a browser create a growing relationship with a tv show over the course of a year? Have they been going out on dates?
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@heterodox said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
Perhaps it would have delighted fans of the show and users who chose to install the extension. For those who didn't, seeing random words turned upside down/inserted in your Web pages is extremely alarming.
I wonder how many actual fans of the show got the extension vs non-fans. It seems like they must have gotten vastly more non-fans. I mean...an obscure cable TV show? Seriously?
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@boomzilla Oh, I dunno about obscure. But you have a point.
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The idea that the people behind my browser wanted to 'surprise and delight' me via some promotional deal with a TV show is pretty gross. Reminds me of EA's marketing speak.
At this point I'll be surprised and delighted if mozilla manages to go one year without pulling this sort of stuff (pocket, cliqz, ...) again.
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@pie_flavor said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
@boomzilla Oh, I dunno about obscure. But you have a point.
Not very many people watch it:
It looks like season two went up about a half million from there.
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@boomzilla Is USA Network popular? I can't think of any other shows that originated there, besides Duckman.
Edit: According to Wikipedia, two of their other shows that I've at least heard of are Monk and Burn Notice.
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@boomzilla
I mean, 1.75 million is like 300% the size of Firefox's user base. So you can see how they might make the mistake that all of their users watch the show.
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@hungrier It's a decent cable channel. The larger point here is that just because you and a bunch of your friends are really interested in something doesn't mean that most people are even aware of it. Especially stuff on cable TV.
Even something as apparently ubiquitous as Game of Thrones doesn't get much more than 30 million viewers. Which is a lot of people, but nearly so many as the people who aren't watching it. The Superbowl gets over 100 million viewers.
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@hungrier said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
@boomzilla Is USA Network popular? I can't think of any other shows that originated there, besides Duckman.
Part of the reason the show got a lot of interest from critics early on is that they were baffled that it was on USA and also was reasonably good. Very different from USAâs usual.
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@boomzilla said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
@pie_flavor said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
@boomzilla Oh, I dunno about obscure. But you have a point.
Not very many people watch it:
It looks like season two went up about a half million from there.
A quick search turned up this:
Mr. Robot just barely makes the top 25 and is beaten by such powerhouse programming as House Hunters and Garage Rehab.
(unable to capture the entire chart due to their fucked up CSS)The following week, October 25, Mr Robot is not even in the top 25.
Extra bonus , they can't be bothered to do any sorting of their charts (I would expect them to be sorted highest rating to lowest, but I guess I'm just weird)
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@heterodox said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
@hungrier said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
@boomzilla Is USA Network popular? I can't think of any other shows that originated there, besides Duckman.
Part of the reason the show got a lot of interest from critics early on is that they were baffled that it was on USA and also was reasonably good. Very different from USAâs usual.
Really? I've enjoyed a lot of USA shows over the years. We've found them to be pretty good. The Mr Robot commercials made the show look retarded, though, and we never bothered with it.
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@el_heffe said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
(unable to capture the entire chart due to their fucked up CSS)Extra bonus , they can't be bothered to do any sorting of their charts (I would expect them to be sorted highest rating to lowest, but I guess I'm just weird)
It looks like it's sorted by the 18-49 rating, from what I can see. Because those are the people most likely to be spending money or whatever.
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@boomzilla said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
The Mr Robot commercials made the show look retarded, though, and we never bothered with it.
I don't know anything about the commercials but you should give it a try.
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@boomzilla said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
Really? I've enjoyed a lot of USA shows over the years. We've found them to be pretty good. The Mr Robot commercials made the show look retarded, though, and we never bothered with it.
Personally I think youâre missing out, though it took me a damned long amount of time (about eight episodes) to get into it. I didnât have any other (TV) shows going on, so that was fine. If you do, I suppose you can continue giving it a pass. As someone in IT I think itâd get a +1 from you and as someone with your political views I think it might get a bit of a knee jerk -1 (I have to resist the urge myself to take the premise too seriously and use it just as a framing device). So its promise kind of balances out.
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@heterodox said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
Personally I think youâre missing out, though it took me a damned long amount of time (about eight episodes) to get into it.
Yeah...I doubt we'd make it that far then.
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@boomzilla Iâd be interested in hearing from others whether I was unique in that respect. I think the storytelling style is just so unusual that I was convinced the writers didnât know what the hell they were doing until they dropped a few bombs to prove it.
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So I've been telling Firefox daily to not update to Quantum for about a month now, because Tab Groups.
Well today it just went ahead and installed it without giving me any prompt.
Where are my tabs groups, Mozilla? Where are they?? GRMMRLGMLRB
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The dialog box for unlocking the password manager is now narrower. Why?
And dammit, it seems like the taskbar buttons are screaming at me.
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@zecc said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
So I've been telling Firefox daily to not update to Quantum for about a month now, because Tab Groups.
how? I disabled checking for updates and it has shut up perfectly.
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@marczellm I'm guessing he declined the 'restart for updates'. And now his windows decided to reboot for updates while he wasn't using it, and the few applications he leaves open were restarted, but in firefox case it started as the new version instead of the old one.
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I have Firefox set to check for updates but not install them automatically.
Previously, when there was an update, it would open a non-modal dialog asking whether I wanted to update.When Firefox 57 was released, this changed. Instead there was a popup panel in the right corner of the active window, much like the popups that appear when a website wants to use an API like Notifications or Geolocation and I need to give them permission, except on the other side. I've always said "No". This was a daily event, on Firefox launch (I turn off my PC every night).
Today there was no such popup. It just opened to FF57.
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Crap! I know what happened.
I used an alternative profile and that profile had the default "Automatically install updates".
:360°_table_flip:
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@zecc If you want to stay pre-57 for now, you should use the ESR version or switch to a pre-57 variant. (Waterfox?)
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@zecc said in How will you deal with the coming Firefox apocalypse?:
:360°_table_flip:
Impressive. I'm too old to picture that.
Second using the ESR version. You wouldn't have these problems.