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- switching to a walled garden for extensions With respect, this argument falls flat on it's face. Both Firefox and AMO (old and new versions) remain open sou
by ygjb 11y ago
- switching to a walled garden for extensions
With respect, this argument falls flat on it's face. Both Firefox and AMO (old and new versions) remain open source. The additional requirement of signed extensions allows Mozilla to exert a light increment in control.
- Adding digital rights management black boxes
Fair enough, I didn't like the additional of EME either, but I also like netflix, despite the DRM constraints. As a user I am ok with this choice, because it enabled me, as a user, to choose to either consume DRM content or not, while using the browser of my choice.
- baking in commercial software like Pocket
Yep, that one left a bad taste in alot of peoples mouths. It would have been better if an API had been published and more than one provider had been supplied (cough cough social API, looking at you).
- intending to abandon XUL for better security of non-technical users
Palemoon does absolutely nothing to protect it's users. The Palemoon devs and project leads never miss the chance to take pot-shots at Mozilla and the Firefox engineering team, but the only reasonable claim they can make about security is "Pale Moon is based on the Mozilla release source code that has a large community of developers and security-aware people, next to having seen over a decade of development by now."
The problem, which the Palemoon devs have now stated clearly, is that they can't improve on the legacy version of Firefox they forked, and even when I still worked there were only able to take up security fixes with diminishing capabilities due to deviations in the code base.
Finally, Mozilla is not abandoning an old ecosystem, they are making a substantial investment in building out a new ecosystem while providing tools, documentation and an upgrade path. I recognize that there are still people who like to use old software, but at some point you have to take a good solid look at things and think: ok, lets try this again and apply the lessons learned.
Palemoon is an insecure knockoff browser that leverages open source in all of the worst ways without giving anything significant back, and even worse, they weasel around what they are doing and make claims about performance and stability that are flat-out indefensible (not that they could prove it since they have no mechanism to collect the data outside of their own build machines).
- superkuh 11y agoNot being able to install or edit my own extensions without Mozilla's approval is not a light increment in control. It crosses a very distinct line.
- ygjb 11y agoYou can, on developer or nightly. Regular users get a safety on the footgun. YMMV, but it really isn't the end of freedom that people like to play it up as...
- superkuh 11y agoUsing an alpha (developer) or unstable nightly is not a reasonable alternative. Now if they actually produce the unbranded version of Firefox like they keep saying they will it'll be a start.
- LordLestat 11y agoAnd Firefox is becoming more and more a Chrome imitation browser, because Mozilla thinks only following very close the Google Chrome train will bring them back all the users who they have lost towards Chrome. And for all this they abandon power users. If there is a real shame for all Open Source, it is Firefox.