Mozilla's massive lapse in judgement causes clash with uBlock Origin developer
Mozilla has removed uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox's addon store after a review found issues with the extension.
The discourse about Mozilla is ridiculous, here and most everywhere. You've got people taking every perceived opportunity to attack them for things they do, things they didn't do, and things it's imagined they might've done. And then another crowd of equally determined people doggedly defending them for every idiotic blunder they make, such as this one.
Meanwhile Mozilla itself has nothing substantial to say. This is not the first time a prominent extension has mysteriously gone missing from amo with Mozilla telling us nothing about its role in the incident. @mozilla@mozilla.social needs to be in the discussion giving us a real explanation of what happened, why they got it wrong, and what they're doing to improve things.
Correct, this two-sided discourse is due to a massive lack of communication on Mozilla's part, leaving room for speculation.
The best I can think of is that the explainer language used to justify the extension's removal was just boilerplate language that got copy+pasted here because someone clicked the wrong button. But even that makes a mockery of the review process.
I think "oops clicked wrong button" would be slightly more defensible, but not by much. If they truly rejected the extension for content in it that it does not have, it's hard to see how a human could make that mistake even accidentally. But maybe there's something I'm missing.
True in a way. However, there is a rather large collection of speculation on the Internet that is quite an undertaking to correct. And a large population of people and bots willing to speculate. Also, having once been speculated, each speculation takes on a life of its own. If it gets much more substantial, forget Skynet, we're busy creating Specunet and its sidekick Confusionet -- an insidious duo.
We have collectively agreed that Mozilla is a) not reviewing extentions enough, and b) reviewing too much.
Mozilla.social no longer exists, Mozilla took it down
Yep, which further highlights the problem: @mozilla@mozilla.social 🔗 https://mozilla.social/users/mozilla/statuses/113153943609185249
We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024. Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17. Before that date, you can download your data here (https://mozilla.social/settings/export), and migrate your account to another instance following these instructions (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-social-faq).
Oh so ublock origin lite. A manifest V3 compatible adblocker for chromium browsers.
The original ublock origin is unaffected
Just curious, how does uBlock Origin Lite compare to regular uBlock Origin? I’ve heard from the Chrome crowd that it’s not as good as blocking ads due to the V3 limitations, but how’s the speed? I might consider it for lower-end hardware if it’s not too compromised.
Probably due to automatic extension reviews by Mozilla.
Sad that it happened, but at least it doesn't impact the actual uBlock, only the lite version for which I honestly see no purpose in Firefox anyways.
It was a manual review conducted by an actual person that in the end admitted they were wrong
I honestly see no purpose in
It's to circumvent ManifestV3.
I thought that was the shit Chrome was doing to block adblockers and antimalware plugins, if Firefox is doing the same thing what browser do we use now? :-(
I don't care about all the browser wars stuff, I lost interest when it was Netscape Vs IE, I just want a browser that I can configure fully myself and have it be as safe and secure as one can make it, within reason.
Theoretically, the browser executes the Mv3 blocking rules, so it could be optimized and more efficient than js ever could.
Mozilla isn't google. They took it back and encouraged the guy to reach out in the future if any issues arise.
BFD, it's not like they banned his account, just one gimped extension that doesn't do the whole ad blocking experience and even then only because he didn't do anything to try and reverse it. Then after it's restored he throws his tantrum and removes it.
With all the extensions out there false positive detections of malicious apps are going to happen. Nobody has unlimited resources to hire boatloads of devs to review every single line of code of every extension for every update done. That's an insane expectation.
Is it me or is mozilla kinda turning into a cunt lately
There is fairly substantial rumor that there may be a smear campaign against firefox lately because they are still supporting manifest v2, which our owning class does not care for.
Mozilla has made their fair share of stupid decisions lately, but they are still leagues ahead of Google, Amazon, and the other FAANG-type companies in ethics and trustworthiness. Definitely something to keep a pulse on, but nothing to throw the baby out with the bathwater over. And if it really bothers you, use LibreWolf/Fennec.
It’s you.
That poor dev is just getting so much shit thrown their way constantly having a short temper about it makes sense. They are fighting against an entire industry to make the internet usable for people. I hope everyone who has the means to donates to support the developer
Edit: donate to block list maintainers thanks to lemmyvore below for the correction
The dev has not made available any means to donate to him directly. He asks that people donate to the maintainers of the block lists instead.
thank you i updated my comment
This is more likely someone fucking up and not having a second pair of eyes look at the presumed problem than anything else.
I almost had a panic attack until I realized this was for UBlock Origin Lite rather than the normal, manifest v2 version. Still mad at Mozilla,though.
There's a dozen Firefox extensions that really matter, at any given time. Mozilla has never appeared to give a particular shit about any of them. Paying special attention based on popularity wouldn't be ideal, but for fuck's sake, their passive-aggressive treatment keeps burning out the developers who fuel their ecosystem, and it would take vanishingly little effort to shield their keystone plugins.
If their active neglect had ruined both uBlock and DownThemAll - I'm not sure I'd be using Firefox anymore, and I've been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Why the fuck would anyone normal even consider it?
DownThemAll is one of those extensions which get installed immediately for me. If I didn't have DownThemAll and uBlock origin, I'd might as well just use edge smh
And the author spent a year hassling Mozilla about how killing XUL plugins would make his wildly popular plugin nearly impossible. Did they move one iota to help that? Nope. Did they adopt DTA functionality natively, like they'd absorbed Pocket? Did they fuck. Their mantra for two straight decades has been "just rewrite!" and they cannot imagine why they kept hemorrhaging devs and plugins and users once Chrome slimed its way into everyone's options.
my votes are for nusensor, popupblocker, dark reader, nuke anything
This one is completely on Mozilla. TBH I'm not very happy with their governance either. Stop spending money on bullshit and start working on the damn browser. Stop hassling devs like him who have had an immense contribution to not only open source, but your fucking browser's usage metrics.
I wish another browser standard comes up and we can say goodbye to this google-infested shit-bucket that is mozilla.
Ok, but "google-infested shit-buckets" are also Chrome and all the chromium poop cups, even more so one might say.
Not disagreeing, especially with the sad sentiment of what's happening at Mozilla, just trying to keep in mind the other 95% of the browser picture.
Not to disagree but mozilla and firefox are not the same thing
I didn't say they were. For the most part, if a third option really comes up, I'm OK with Mozilla not existing at all.
As I've said elsewhere: I wonder what controls Mozilla has in place to prevent gradual takeover of their board by those with an interest in removing Firefox as a competitor. We've watched the sleeper cell in the Supreme Court transform that body into an illegitimate partisan puppet. Mozilla's actions over the last few years would make much more sense if it were being manipulated into self destruction.
I dont get why you would run that on Firefox. Users will find the corrent one, all good.
Btw is the uBlock without Origin addon still there?
That's a real bummer about Mozilla and uBlock Origin clashing. It's weird 'cause their values seem pretty aligned with privacy and user control. Hopefully they can smooth things out soon—users like us just want our browsing to be smooth and ad-free!
Gorhill is free to do whatever he wants, of course, I thank him for all the good work. But his reaction is honestly childish and dangerous for the community. Once again his decision to pull the plug opens the door to abusers. Now when you go to the addons page and search for uBlock, you may find illegitimate extensions pretending to be uBlock which are trying to collect your data or worse. Less tech say people don't know any better.
then someone with much more talent can step up, rename the plugin, and carry on.
The challenge is choosing the next maintainer user handle.
https://github.com/msftcangoblowm/sphinx-external-toc-strict
Good choice?
It's probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they "accidentally" remove an ad blocker.
They made an error and quickly corrected. It's the addon author who threw a fit and removed the addon.
This just makes me worried to rely on uBO but more because what if the author just fucks off because someone else pissed them off.
It would seem that the ubo lite version was made specifically to cater to chrome and manifest v3 if I'm not mistaken...
In the end the author may have just felt it was too much energy keeping a pared down chrome version on Firefox when the full version is present and working. Especially after this particular drama.
This just makes me worried to rely on uBO but more because what if the author just fucks off because someone else pissed them off.
That is very concerning to me, also.
Large parts of the internet relying on one or two tiny one-man FOSS projects? (UBO and ADguard are often cited as the only two reliable-ish and safe adblockers)
If he can't be bothered with that nonsense, how secure is UBO's future? How secure is the future of adblocking?
I would bet that advertising companies are rubbing their hands now and planning to ramp up pressure against these poor devs.
Mozilla can't be trusted to host the addon, so the author is taking on the responsibility of hosting it himself. How is that his fault and not Mozilla's?
Whether Mozilla acted out of malice or incompetence is irrelevant. The report was false and the findings were incorrect, they have to be held responsible either way.
Lite is barely relevant for Firefox anyway. Gorhill (along with host list maintainers) is one of the saints of modern day open source; if he felt overwhelmed by Mozilla's actions, and chose to just take Lite down from the extension store, he has every right to. No one should shit on someone who has given so much to the community.
then someone with much more talent can step up, rename the plugin, and carry on.
The challenge is choosing the next maintainer user handle.
https://github.com/msftcangoblowm/sphinx-external-toc-strict
It’s probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they “accidentally” remove an ad blocker.
I mean I'm of two minds here. One, there's an epidemic of intellectually lazy, kneejerk Mozilla hate and it's time to turn the tide on that.
But on the other hand, even as a Mozilla fanboy I can see how this is a really bad look, and really indefensible. I think it's more of a huge error of judgment, and if there are other huge errors, I can begin to see a problem, but I think they have too much of a positive track record in their history to just go reaching for the tinfoil hats so quickly.