This has been boiling over at reddit for the last couple of days. Very ham-handed action by Mozilla causing them to lose some of the goodwill earned by Quantum.
Yes I agree, not a good decision from Mozilla. Installing something without user consent can be considered as malicious by their users. I didn't notice it getting installed on my system, but since I use Sandboxie deleting all data after each session, I probably would missed it anyway.
Yes, they messed up, totally unacceptable stuff. What we need is a third party tool that can block browser extensions from being installed.
You mean some 3rd party extension to block mozillas extension? Because I don't see any other way how it could be done other than maybe hacking the mozilla source code itself and either removing extension support completely or doing a whitelist approach by user level (that's is each user decides what to allow and not mozilla) Mozilla itself does not seem to offer much help... checked with "extensions." filter from about:config and only interesting thing was extensions.blocklist.url (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extensions.blocklist.url) that maybe could be leveraged by users to to block stuff they want (like this new mozilla extension). Another option is extensions.enabledAddons but I remember using it mostly for preinstalled extensions when porting firefox to my uClibc based liveCD long time ago .... so not sure if it's any use in this case. EDIT: Hmmm.... there are two interesting things extensions.update.enabled and extensions.update.autoUpdateDefault ... maybe juggling with these two settings users could stop mozilla pushing their stuff into their browser ... and also extensions.update.url ....hmmm... maybe if setting it to empty string ... but then users would have to manually check updates for their extensions ... of f*ck! Somebody else take a look I am too busy with my own browser right now....
Chrome offers great option to set whitelisting mode for extensions using their group policy templates. It's one of features I miss now that I use Firefox.
I honestly thought things were improving at planet Mozilla. I must have been in a rare optimistic mood lol.
https://gizmodo.com/after-blowback-firefox-will-move-mr-robot-extension-t-1821354314 “Our goal with the custom experience we created with Mr. Robot was to engage our users in a fun and unique way,” Mozilla’s chief marketing officer, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, told Gizmodo. ~ op cit “Our goal with the custom experience we created was to engage our users in a fun and unique way by being honest and sincere with them, not data mining, nor doing anything considered or mistaken for anything underhand, surreptitious, furtive and sneaky.” Mozilla’s chief marketing officer, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, told Gizmodo. There, fixed that for you Mr Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.
How can "pushing an add-on to users" be OK. As for "MY REALITY..." it's nothing other than agenda pushing. There's nothing benign about this.
Firefox is on a slippery slope https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-slope.html
Maybe the reason it wasn't installed here is because I've gone to Options > Privacy and Security > scrolled down and unchecked all under Firefox Data Collection and Use, especially the middle one, Allow Firefox to install and run studies.
Mozilla have avoided criticism because up to now what they have been doing is facilitating as opposed to actively participating. Facilitating is extremely difficult to prove and only obvious to those who are scrutinizing and know what to look for.
oh for **** sake...and I was about to to update from 52 to 57 because the stories how fast and all it is.... Now Im not so sure anymore
I'm currently running 52 ESR but I have had a couple of Linux installations that automatically updated to 57. The first one, about a month ago, broke almost all my extensions except Noscript. The second round a few days ago, went better. More extensions have updated to the new Firefox but I'm still not all that happy. The new Firefox does seem to be faster and smoother but I don't want to loose the extensions I've been using for years. 52 has all kinds of minor bugs and hangups with the new eBay server side code which is what I mainly use it for. Because of a fairly complicated printer setup where I've adapted an industrial printer designed to work with proprietary software to work with Firefox, I don't want to switch browsers and burn through another roll of labels before I get it working again. I'm hoping the new Firefox will work with the printer but I'm not in a hurry to test it. Shipping labels cost money. I haven't seen the extension but it is the least of my worries. Not having labels print correctly throws a big monkey wrench into my operation. An unwanted extension is easily disposed of.
Not an extension, but a tool that simply blocks extensions from being added. Weird that no HIPS that I know of offers this, perhaps because browsers made it hard to control?
If not from the inside of the browser with extension or some magic settings that could maybe found from about:config then the only option I could think of is route your firefox throught some filtering proxy (like privoxy) that runs on the same machine (or alternatively on your router) and then either keep track of bad extensions and block them or alternatively whitelist of extensions what to allow.
Aren't all extensions stored on disk? So if you could monitor this folder, you would think you could control extension loading.
The amount of time and effort a user must spend on taming *fox is already beyond the pale - no casual user would likely know about it even less so doing it. I`ve said it before, [imo] Firefox started going downhill from version 4 and has continued to do so..... and the decline seems to have gained momentum somewhat over the past year or two. This does not surprise me whatsoever.
Hmmm...good point. Yes, installed extensions can be found under profile folder. (On Linux $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/somerandom_gibberish.default/extensions/ no clue what it is on Windows) So yes, that could be other way of blocking EDIT: That's with firefox 52 I don't know if they changed things with 57 ?
