Anonymous Best Way To Get Mozilla To Improve Firefox Dec. 22, 2019, 4:32 a.m. No.435   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>474 >>504 >>641

As I'm sure many here have noticed, at some point over the last decade, Firefox has become what anons used to mock when they referred to Internet Explorer. How did this happen? I suppose it's like the cliche about how one becomes bankruptโ€ฆ very slowly, then all at once. Rather then continue the circle jerk about whether Firefox is the patrician's choice or just a pleb tier meme, let's just accept that for the sake of argument that it is a useful piece of software and that, as a product of the Mozilla foundation, it's configuration is perhaps more susceptible to public outcry then an explicitly for profit Microsoft or Google (INB4 Chrome flame wars) product. So, how could public outcry be leveraged against some of the more "problematic" features of Firefox? I'm not completely sure and would like to see if any anons would like to brainstorm regarding this ITT.

 

I'll start. One of the more annoying features of Firefox, out of the box, is that there is an ever changing array of about:config settings that a user, who doesn't want to be a slave to a botnet, might want to adjust. There is the telemetry problem and also the fact that it's security features rely on a seemingly ever expanding array of phone homes to various servers that the end user does not, out of the box, have the ability to authorize. The same goes for security features. I have noticed that, if one opens and closes Firefox regularly, nearly 1/4 MB can be used re-opening the browser, as it phones home to Mozilla and Google, etc. Now, in current year, one might say that, though there might be an argument to made over what degree of control an end user should have out of the box, 1/4 MB is an inconsequential amount of data to worry about in regards to an "unlimited" data plan and shouldn't be at issue. But, consider the following. If a poor person, living in the third world, had to put up with just a few MB a day, over the course of a year that could lead to many an overage charge on both shit hole country tier landline and mobile data plans. So, would it be worth it to try and start a public outcry regarding this implementation of botnet by using this as an angle of attack? Hashtag, "Mozilla hates poor people" for instance? Street shitters rise up? Try and get a Greta Thunberg to demand a consistent dark mode because of electric use and muh climate change? Explain how only paying lip service to things like canvasing and fingerprinting put both the endangered tranny species and BLM activists alike at risk when using web forums? Maybe we should try to re-frame the debate away from the traditional autistic demands of free software on principle that have been falling on deaf ears for so long? Weaponize current year COC, so to speak. If an astroturfed campaign fomented by anons could guilt Mozilla into handing user control over what servers it uses to implement it's security features and where and when those features might need or not need to be updated (like uBlocks filter lists), then might that be something worth getting behind? Something worth putting our collective hive mind behind?

 

How else could this asymmetric angle of attack be used against botnets, such as Mozilla is embracing, so that anons could more easily get what they want from their software?

 

TLDR: Could anons try and guilt the Mozilla foundation into giving us back the browser that we want?

Anonymous Dec. 22, 2019, 5:06 a.m. No.439   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun

That sounds like a dumb idea that's mostly going to support the groups running these cancer tactics ("arguing the conclusion while accepting the form of argument"). You see this sometimes with people using screenreaders as an argument against JS-heavy sites; everybody immediately knows it's dishonest because frankly nobody gives a fuck about the blind, so you only get superficial nonsolutions.

 

I know from painful personal experience what a meme the "it's open source, just fix it yourself" mantra is with respect to Firefox, so I definitely understand where you are coming from, but I don't expect it to work any other way for two major reasons. One of them is obviously Mozilla's sponsors. The other one is that without telemetry it is really hard to tell what users want, whereas with telemetry, you only get info on the dumbfucks that don't disable it, which in particular excludes power users. The Firefox developers sincerely believe that the majority of their users want this garbage because their sample is biased.

 

How do you fix this? Hell if I know, I could certainly use a solution for my own projects. But I doubt that fake public outcry is going to change a single thing.

Anonymous Dec. 22, 2019, 5:11 a.m. No.441   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun

The Mozilla Foundation is currently an advertising company so unless you have hundreds of millions of dollars they don't care what you have to say. Had they done the Mr Robot promotion outside of a slow week in tech news chances are they'd have gotten away with it and done many more of a similar nature. The only reason why they backed down was the blowback their client(Comcast) was experiencing.

 

Also everyone involved with making that browser desirable in the first place is long gone by now, it took them awhile but they've also managed to kill off the enormous addons and themes community they had built up over 17 years. There are several forks of it dating back over a decade now so you're better off looking at what they're doing and taking account of their history, goals, community/userbase and compatibility with the addons you want to pick the one that suits you best.

Anonymous Dec. 22, 2019, 5:37 p.m. No.474   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>475 >>482 >>487

>>435

>So, how could public outcry be leveraged against some of the more "problematic" features of Firefox?

Is this how far we've fallen? "How do we loudly complain about problematic things?" The first step is to die your hair, the second step is to cut off your dick. Stop complaining about the configuration, and use a fork with good configuration.

The actual features are more difficult, removing XUL/XPCOM was piss-annoying, and will eventually cascade into all the forks. But they did that because the developmental burden of that API was too heavy for their post-evangelism budget. It is very unlikely you'll get more out of them after an outcry than a sympathetic blogpost.

 

The whole fucking web is hosed, nobody can make a decent browser given that they need to stack on javascript cancer, tracking poz, and enough useless features that the only way to do it is to fork an existing engine. Aim your public outcry at how fucking cancer the modern web is, at least you'll be complaining about the right thing then.

Anonymous Dec. 22, 2019, 6:34 p.m. No.475   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>476

>>474

The reason they got rid of XUL was because they wanted better compatibility with chrome extensions it had nothing to do with code maintenance, just look at all the stupid shit they keep adding to their browser that nobody uses like WebVR. And the Palemoon fork kept XUL.

 

>Aim your public outcry at how fucking cancer the modern web is

Compared to back in the late 90's and early 2000's with the direction it was taking the modern web is surprisingly good now thanks to the early efforts of Mozilla at keeping it open. That trend didn't keep going but it was a huge improvement over what it was previously.

Anonymous Dec. 22, 2019, 6:54 p.m. No.476   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>571

>>475

>better compatibility with chrome

they could have kept both, nigger. Even their own blog posts confirm that they got rid of it to reduce maintenance burden

 

>palemoon

good for them, but I have serious doubt they'll manage to keep up with the shit being constantly added. WebASM is the latest form of poz, and very soon your browser will need to run binary blobs at near native speeds just to visit normal websites.

Anonymous Dec. 23, 2019, 1:03 a.m. No.479   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun

The real problem isn't even Fitrefox. The Internet is.

When a document parser and displayer is also a video player, interpreter, email client, photo viewer, image editor and game console, and only by being such inseparable pile of shit is considered feature complete, prehaps it's time to consider the document itself. Does this document format even make sense at this fucking point?

May as well download java applets and call jvm the new browser. At least it is marketed to be shit, rather than pretending to be not.

There is no word to describe how disgusting browsers are, because all they do is taking up even more disgusting shit allday everyday. Imagine bloating up a screw driver until it is also a hammet and an axe. This is everything wrong about it.

> wanna make a banking system

> wanna keep users stupid to keep them in the botnet

> don't want to spend a cent on this shit

> what do?

> heard Onion manage our webpage

> get him to do it

This is how we end up without things doing one thing and doing them well.

Anonymous Dec. 23, 2019, 2:13 a.m. No.482   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun

>>474

>Is this how far we've fallen? "How do we loudly complain about problematic things?" The first step is to die your hair, the second step is to cut off your dick. Stop complaining about the configuration, and use a fork with good configuration

think you missed the point in op. my reading was for foss anons to co-opt normie activist culture to save the double work of back engineering forking projects. to use them for our own ends and give another voice to the issue even if they just care about the meme and foss anons care about the principle.

Anonymous Dec. 23, 2019, 2:28 a.m. No.484   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>491

Stop using their stuff, and suggest to everyone you know to do the same.

Mozilla is controlled opposition almost entirely funded by Google so they won't write good software no matter what, but at least big G could kill them off if they stop being popular enough to justify the cost.

Anonymous Dec. 23, 2019, 3:29 a.m. No.487   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>571

>>474

Javascript-only cancer has definitely been on the decline lately, making ~~meme~~ classic browsers like Lynx and Links more of an option with Firefox playing the backup role. Once you remove Javascript, most of the cancer disappears, though definitely not all of it.

Anonymous Dec. 23, 2019, 5:30 p.m. No.528   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>546 >>556

i worry about all of these forks. zero day type vulns. as far as firefox you have to worry about what mozilla is doing or not doing behind the scene. then downstream you have to worry about the forks that are often labors of love. if they are on the level they don't have the devs to put in the man hours to maintain what is already a bloated tool. fuck what www has become. java shit. maybe there is still enough interesting gopher content to keep my paranoid ass occupied for the rest of my lifetime.

Anonymous Dec. 24, 2019, 2:05 a.m. No.546   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>696

>>528

Just disable Javascript. I tried to backport security fixes for Firefox once and quickly gave up after I noticed that basically all of them are in JS-related code and most of them are in brand new code.

Anonymous Dec. 24, 2019, 3:17 a.m. No.556   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun   >>571 >>697 >>746

>>528

Firefox is now so insignificant compared to Chrome that it's unlikely anyone will bother developing and deplyoing attacks against it.

Ironically, lack of popularity used to be the very same reason that made Firefox a viable alternative to Internet Explorer in terms of security.

Anonymous Dec. 24, 2019, 3:18 p.m. No.571   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun

>>476

>will need to run binary blobs at near native speeds

Yeah I'm already running into enough javascript bitcoin miners ublock origin isn't blocking nowadays.

We totally need more of that.

>>487

>Once you remove Javascript, most of the cancer disappears

I agree

>>556

Now chrome is the only browser. You don't surf the web, you surf chromeโ€ฆ or Webkit2.

Anonymous Dec. 28, 2019, 3:25 a.m. No.697   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun

>>504

Why not IceCat ? What's the difference ?

Plus it recenty started using Bing as a default search engine. Can anyone give me ONE (1) reason why they would do this ?

 

>>556

>Firefox is now so insignificant compared to Chrome that it's unlikely anyone will bother developing and deplyoing attacks against it.

>It was reported on 10th July, 2019 that a data breach of the archive server holding previous binaries of the Pale Moon browser had occurred and malware inserted into the executables. This breach was discovered on the previous day. It is unknown when the breach first occurred but it is estimated to have been as early as the 27th December, 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Moon_(web_browser)#Data_breach_controversy

 

Still, according to the dev, the attack only targetted Windows .exe installers.

Anonymous Dec. 29, 2019, 6:49 a.m. No.746   ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ.is ๐Ÿ”—kun

>>556

>Firefox is now so insignificant compared to Chrome that it's unlikely anyone will bother developing and deplyoing attacks against it.

what the fuck optics are you using?