Mozilla continues to destroy Firefox.
While on the surface this sounds like a good idea, it’s all about control. It’s not about protecting the users and it certainly won’t help me.
About 25% of the extensions I use are not on the AMO site and never will be.
One of the benefits of Firefox was its openness, how anyone can and did do anything with it. Yes, this sometimes includes bad actors but that’s the way open systems work.
I think when this finally becomes a reality it will be time to tell Firefox and all its variations goodbye. It’s been a good 10 years or so, but they have lost the plot and aren’t worthy of support any longer.
I’m not sure which browser I will switch to. Perhaps Chromium or some variant thereof.
While I think Chrome and its variants are pretty evil, it’s evil I can control and deal with. It’s predicable evil, in other words.
Firefox is just stupid, and wilfully stupid to me is worse and less comprehensible than evil because you can never be sure what misguided dumbass thing they will do next “for your own good.”
If Mozilla were a person, it’d be a 9/11 truther anti-vaxxer.
I downloaded IceCat last night. It’s distributed by Project GNU and is basically a “Firefox minus the anti-features” fork. It creates its own profile in
~/.mozilla/icecatbut I find that deleting that directory and replacing it with a symbolic link to~/.mozilla/firefoxmakes it a virtual drop-in replacement for Firefox. Their latest stable version is 31.2.0 (I’m using 31.4.0, which seems to be the latest available). It comes with a handful of add-ons which include HTTPS Everywhere and SpyBlock.Chromium seems OK, although I rarely use it (I usually use it for my fake name accounts etc.) It seems pretty stripped down feature-wise (no print preview, for example)
Oh, I should note that I got the idea of looking at IceCat (as well as Qupzilla) from you, via your posted link on the subject your other blog.
I thought if Mozilla were a person it would be a former campus activist who just got their first Real Job™, (now, I suppose, second, this time with Yahoo!) and so the content is all NDA/WFH/etc. and the style is all about holding onto something akin to hipster cred.
Ha, yeah, that might actually be a better description.
Or to veer and then extend the metaphor into grotesque and offensive absurdity, they’ve decided that they aren’t really Nazis, but still like the idea of being a concentration camp guard enough to start their own camp, meanwhile dressing in less severe uniforms to make it “better.”
I’m guessing you’re not a huge fan of Brendan Eich, but his latest project will be the end of any lingering relevance on the part of Mozilla/Firefox.