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Re: FYI: Mandatory extension signing in Firefox

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Stefan Weiss wrote:

> […]
> There has been a lot of debate about this, for example in this thread:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.addons.user-experience/slaKs943n4c[1-25]
> 
> Personally, I'm very disappointed that they're actually going through
> with this, after all the negative feedback. They acknowledge that most
> malware installers run with administrator privileges on Windows, and
> that in this scenario there's nothing at all that can prevent the
> compromise of installed software, but they still want to make it "harder
> to exploit".
> 
> There have been numerous complaints and counter-arguments:
> […]
> I would be very interested in getting feedback from this group... Are
> you affected by this in some way? What do you think about the problem
> they're trying to solve? Do you think their solution is adequate?

Well, I can say this for them: At least they are consistent.  This is only 
the next in a long line of bad decisions at Mozilla that started in about 
2003 with the irrational removal of MNG support.  So in my experience, 
Mozilla Drivers have stopped thinking like and listening to hackers (!= 
crackers) a long time ago.  As a result, hackers like me have stopped using 
Firefox/Gecko as primary development platform and target shortly after.  The 
developer tools in Firefox are unusable compared to Chrome DevTools; it’s a 
bad copy at best, and the 3D view does not mitigate that (you still need 
Firebug).  Off the top of my hat, to me Mozilla is only good for two things 
nowadays: MDN, for reference, and its “uncoupled” e-mail/news client, 
Thunderbird/Icedove.  Oh, and they are the only ones with decent MathML 
support.

Everything that Mozilla has been doing in recent years is claimed to be to 
the advantage of *users*.  What they either fail to realize or do 
intentionally (to keep their users docile) is that it is mostly to the 
advantage of *lusers*: clueless, stupid (Windoze) users.  Useful 
functionality is rather made *harder* to use or *stripped* from products 
than improved and developed (in a secure fashion).  Reiterating an argument 
in the cited discussion, they just do not seem to realize that there are not 
going to be users where there is nobody writing the software for them.

The record shows:

<http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-browser-ww-monthly-200812-201603>

[
  Market share for all browsers, all platforms, worldwide, in %

            2008-12   2012-05   2016-03
  -------------------------------------
  IE          67.27     28.87      7.65
  Firefox     25.16     22.98      8.73
  Opera        2.90      3.81      5.35
  Safari       2.49      8.68     12.55
  Chrome       1.25     29.15     47.36
]

Opera is the new Netscape (after the AOHell takeover), Apple is the new 
Microsoft [1], Mozilla is the new Apple, and Microsoft with its newly found 
sense for free software (which I think we have Nadella to thank for, but it 
does not seem to help IE) is something in-between those.  As concerning as 
that is, the real Web innovation happens at or close to Google now instead, 
in V8 and Chromium/Blink.

Node.js is based on V8, not *Monkey.  My fully customizable editor, Atom, is 
based on Chromium, not Gecko.  And despite its resource hunger, my primary 
Web browser is Chromium/Chrome; it is not Iceweasel/Firefox anymore because 
if I would do the things with Iceweasel/Firefox that I do with 
Chromium/Chrome (I need a lot of tabs open simultaneously), it would be even 
more resource-hungry to the point of OOM.  At least with Chromium/Chrome, 
one crashing tab does not take the whole browser with it, and I can kill 
(but not close) tabs if necessary, as they run as separate processes.

Screw Firefox.

[1] <http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/>

-- 
PointedEars
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FYI: Mandatory extension signing in Firefox Stefan Weiss <krewecherl@gmail.com> - 2016-03-08 02:46 +0100
  Re: FYI: Mandatory extension signing in Firefox Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> - 2016-03-08 08:45 +0100
  Re: FYI: Mandatory extension signing in Firefox Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2016-03-12 16:51 +0100

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