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I wish someone with the time would start producing a "De-Mozilla'ed" fork a la Chromium. I think Firefox has gotten to that point, things like this and the Mr. Robot fiasco indicate the project needs to be saved from itself.
The basically idea is not to "fork" Firefox per se, but to maintain a set of patches that are appropriate for a user-respecting privacy friendly browser. If a true fork one day becomes necessary, this would be a nice starting point. For now, I'm just trying to completely remove all bad code.
You do have to build the source yourself, however, since binaries can't be distributed without violating Mozilla's trademark.
Well, it's trying to be. It's still millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of design decisions made by Google.
The same would be true for your wish of a Firefox-fork, though I'm not sure there's that much sense in it, since what Mozilla has been doing has not infringed on privacy. You'd be patching out things that are harmless.
An extension popped up in the extension list, which did nothing at all, but had a weird name that made people panic they had somehow gotten malware.
And it was pushed as part of an unpaid marketing campaign for Mr. Robot. Which people thought was Mozilla cashing in big time by installing an extension they didn't want. It was done on a friendship basis. Mr. Robot has been pushing Firefox and so Mozilla wanted to give something back.
Which was a fun little easter egg that Mr. Robot fans could have activated. It would have flipped some words on webpages upside down as reference to Mr. Robot. Which, again, it didn't do, it did nothing unless you specifically went into about:config and activated it there (which is what Mr. Robot fans should have figured out themselves).
This also resulted in a discussion of how it's unthinkable that Mozilla can install an extension without asking you.
...in their browser that people are ok with them auto-updating, through which they can push even less restricted code than in an extension, and that completely invisible.
So, it was a fuck-up on Mozilla's part (in that the extension was visible in the extension list; if that wouldn't have been the case, it wouldn't have been a problem at all), but man was it blown out of proportion by journalists and know-it-alls, who just have to show that the innocent-thought Mozilla is evil.
>This also resulted in a discussion of how it's unthinkable that Mozilla can install an extension without asking you.
You snark, but at the end of the day, they really shouldn't be installing stuff silently and without affirmative consent. The character of the stuff is irrelevant to this principle.
does pocket suggesting stories somehow generate revenue for Mozilla?