LWN: Comments on "Firefox 73.0"

Firefox 73.0

flussence — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 04:57:59 +0000

This is an excellent answer, thank you. I actually learned something from it.

Minor nitpick on the IRC thing: quite a lot of servers and clients support a de-facto standard for IRC-over-Websockets, so they didn't necessarily get rid of it for its lack of firewall circumvention ability. It makes sense from the “one program to rule them all” angle though.

Firefox 73.0

notriddle — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 20:47:27 +0000

Their marketing has been focusing in privacy and freedom, but their development efforts have focused at least as much on enterprise deployments and management, which includes complying with regulatory requirements and offering lots of hooks for internally modifying the browser.

Firefox 67 improved keyboard accessibility of the toolbar UI, another accessibility requirement that was probably mandated on a regulatory sheet somewhere [1], Firefox 68 added a bunch of new enterprise policy toggles [2], Firefox 69 made the macOS binary signed (they specifically advertised this as a way to help people who use automated tools to provision macs), Firefox 71 added kiosk mode, and Firefox 72 added security.osclientcerts.autoload.

Why did they ditch IRC? Enterprise firewalls block IRC ports. Why does Mozilla want HTTPS everywhere? They don't want middleboxes to be the tool for enforcing policies; they want policy enforcement to be done directly in the browser where they can offer product differentiation. Firefox also wants ad blocking to be done in the browser, because it gives them product differentiation from browsers that can't offer ad blocking at all (cough, cough, Chrome). Firefox does not want the browser to be replaceable, no browser vendor does, in spite of web page authors who very much want browsers to be interchangeable cogs in a highly competitive market [3].

Mozilla will undermine your privacy, as long as they can give it back to you again in a way that requires you to use Firefox specifically. This sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory, though there's no actual need for anyone to plan it this way: it's just how the incentives line up. Just like Google has no institutional drive to support uBlock Origin, and this causes support for the interfaces that it needs to rot away, Mozilla has great reasons to support uBlock Origin, because it can be a potential reason for someone to use and contribute to Firefox.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/access-toolbar-funct...

[2]: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates

[3]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Firefox 73.0

flussence — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 05:52:02 +0000

The religious mania of techbros rushing in to vitriolically defend rich Silicon Valley corporations that exploit OSS as a magnet for gratis advertising and contributions never ceases to amuse me.

I'll carry on “unbelieving” in things like EME and DNS-over-Cloudflare, tyvm.

Firefox 73.0

scientes — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 10:45:53 +0000

The unbelievers that despise what they get for free are deaf, dumb, and blind. They will never change their ways, so please don't feed the trolls.

Firefox 73.0

sdalley — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 11:56:13 +0000

The clockwork regularity of Firefox releases is matched by the clockwork regularity of flussence, slagging off Mozilla.

We get that you hate them, because something something something. Why not give it up, and become a happier person? Stop using firefox if it upsets you so much.

Firefox 73.0

flussence — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 17:26:28 +0000

I wonder what prompted them to suddenly care about accessibility. The zoom one was a 14 year old bug.