7 ms·

I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality. A lot of people though

I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality. A lot of people thought the Mr. Robot stunt meant that they had been hacked. Well, you know what? They were hacked. Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent. (Side note: I also discovered last night that Firefox Quantum does not use or support userContent.css - maybe this is a Stylo thing but it really annoyed me.) (EDIT: per the below, my experience with userContent.css doesn't seem to be shared. I may have messed it up on my end. Will report back when I get a chance.)

mrec 9y ago
I'd never used userContent.css before, but just tried it and it works fine. 57.0.2 (64-bit) on Win7. I'd suggest raising a bug.
Sylos 9y ago
> Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent. Auto-updating software has been the norm for a while. This is nothing new, just because it was put into an extension instead.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Except this wasn’t an auto update - it’s a completely different infrastructure pushing stuff into the browser without affirmative consent or even knowledge. And in true malvertising fashion, this system is both opt-out and turns itself back on sometimes.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
    Also auto-update has a changelog. Users can get an idea of what changed, what the new buttons do, etc. This was unannounced and hidden from users.
- electrograv 9y ago
  Auto-update doesn't carry the implicit moral right to install anything company behind it wants. Auto-update is a consensual agreement with the user. If you use auto-update to deploy something that a vast majority of your users do not want and did not expect, and intentionally so (refusing to roll back a 'mistake'), then you have broken that agreement or moral code. You cannot use the excuse of "oh well if they don't like it they can uninstall it and use another product" to condone this bait-and-switch behavior. Just because the behavior is legal does not make it moral. This behavior is absolutely immoral and must be condemned.
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    >refusing to roll back a 'mistake' Did they refuse to roll it back? It's marked as "complete" on my Firefox installation and is no longer present on the Extensions page.
s4vi0r 9y ago
Both userChrome and userContent work just fine on ff57(+). I'm using both right now with the nightly build. What are you having issues with?
sounds 9y ago
Perhaps Stallman and the FSF are right? We can fork Firefox, but I agree with many other commenters that a fork isn't sufficient. It is the underlying concept I am trying to shine a light on: software should serve the user. When Mozilla becomes user-hostile, we can establish new guards for our future security. But if we, the software writers, become user-hostile, then there will be no one left.
- Xylakant 9y ago
  The fundamental problem is that the software that serves the user needs to be paid for. If every FF user would chip in a small sum, that might work, but people would rather switch to chrome.
  - sounds 9y ago
    That's a common misconception: software that is Libre can be bought and sold. It just comes with the source code. (Libre is not the same as Gratis.)
    - Xylakant 9y ago
      It’s not a misconception. Firefox could be sold, the problem is that nobody would buy it. Opera tried to sell a browser, people stuck with the cost-free alternatives. People would rather use chrome than pay for FF.
- figurehe4d 9y ago
  Do people actually think Stallman was wrong?
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    Stallman's issue is that he comes across as a fundamentalist extremist, and most of his suggestions require making huge sacrifices to one's quality of life. Take Stallman's own website[1]. It is mostly text. While this makes it fast, it doesn't make it readable at all. And finding specific stuff is nearly impossible. Yeah, there is a search feature, but is extremely rudimentary and very user-hostile. If it were up to Stallman, the entire Internet would look and work like this. This was OK in 1990. It no longer is. Sorry. [1]https://stallman.org/ https://stallman.org/
alexasmyths 9y ago
"I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality." PAY. FOR. IT. What can you expect from a group of people working for you for free, trying to scratch together their salaries from wherever they can. The answer is not 'fork it' - because the existential question remains: who will develop the fork? You? Me? A magical person who works without income? More likely - someone who needs an income, and will have to find creative, weird ways like 'Mr Robot' to make it work. A simple answer is 'pay for it'. A company / non-profit can still be committed to those things you mentioned.
- lamlam 9y ago
  Maybe that worked in the past, but these days, time and time again we see companies offering paid software and services with an extra layer of advertising on top. Old adages like "you're either a paying customer, or the one being sold" no longer apply, you can be a paying customer and sold for extra profit. Companies, by their nature, will try to maximize profits, and that translates to them using any means they can get away with.
  - alexasmyths 9y ago
    I don't agree. This is entirely the choice of the team. The idea that 'you are being sold' is not fair either. You choose what to use, for how much, and the resulting product. So if you want to pay $ a month AND have ads. Well, then do that. If not - don't. If Mozilla wants to have an 'add free non-profit' they can do that. But they can't because for whatever reasons - people won't pay. Some people won't pay because they simply don't want to - and are willing to live with the alternative choice of 'having a sideload now and then'. Other people use insufferable intellectualizations about all of it. But mostly it's kind of greedy and irrational. We get immense value out of web browsers. A $1 a month fee would enable Mozilla to forge ahead being the best browser, free for those who can't afford it - and ad free. But we can't have that because we are not as intelligently organized as we need to be.
    - chefandy 9y ago
mikedilger 9y ago
> Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent. this is what was wrong about the whole thing. What Jascha Kaykas-Wolff heard from the community, that "the experience [we] created caused confusion" is NOT the point.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  That was my initial reaction too, but I think it misses a subtlety. Mozilla installs software on our computers without our explicit consent all the time, each time you update Firefox; or when you visit mozilla.org and your browser downloads some JS. It would be impossible for most people to give genuine informed consent, because they'd have to understand what each part of the software does. Most people have not learned to read source code and don't want to. (And the source is available for people sufficiently motivated.) Practically, there isn't time to personally code-review every software update on your system. We defer this to distributors we trust. And in this case, Mozilla genuinely didn't run any questionable code. They could have done (and arguably have in the past), but didn't. They installed software that actually does nothing. (about:mozilla at least engages the CSS parser; this doesn't even do that.) I think the problem is just that they're messing with our stuff. Like if someone rearranged the books on your bookshelf to spell out the name of your least favourite whatever, they haven't actually done you any practical damage, but it's really annoying and rude. On principle, it's my stuff and they should leave it alone. Stop being a bad roommate, Mozilla!
xtracto 9y ago
This is nothing new. There has always been "sell offs" in the Open/Free Software sphere. An old-ish example that comes to mind is SourceForge. When it started, it was the place to host and search for Open Source or Free Software. It was amasing. Little by little, the service started to rot, became full of ads and just felt sketchy. Then GitHub arrived, and a fresh platforfm for hosting open source software was born.
torstenvl 9y ago
(After others here said userContent.css was working for them, I fiddled a bit more. Found an earlier rule in the file that I had somehow mangled and it seems that somehow affected the parsing of the file. Removed the earlier lines, everything works great. So yeah, my fault, not Firefox's.)

mrec 9y ago

I'd never used userContent.css before, but just tried it and it works fine. 57.0.2 (64-bit) on Win7. I'd suggest raising a bug.

Sylos 9y ago

> Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent. Auto-updating software has been the norm for a while. This is nothing new, just because it was put into an extension instead.

Karunamon 9y ago
Except this wasn’t an auto update - it’s a completely different infrastructure pushing stuff into the browser without affirmative consent or even knowledge. And in true malvertising fashion, this system is both opt-out and turns itself back on sometimes.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  Also auto-update has a changelog. Users can get an idea of what changed, what the new buttons do, etc. This was unannounced and hidden from users.
electrograv 9y ago
Auto-update doesn't carry the implicit moral right to install anything company behind it wants. Auto-update is a consensual agreement with the user. If you use auto-update to deploy something that a vast majority of your users do not want and did not expect, and intentionally so (refusing to roll back a 'mistake'), then you have broken that agreement or moral code. You cannot use the excuse of "oh well if they don't like it they can uninstall it and use another product" to condone this bait-and-switch behavior. Just because the behavior is legal does not make it moral. This behavior is absolutely immoral and must be condemned.
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  >refusing to roll back a 'mistake' Did they refuse to roll it back? It's marked as "complete" on my Firefox installation and is no longer present on the Extensions page.

s4vi0r 9y ago

Both userChrome and userContent work just fine on ff57(+). I'm using both right now with the nightly build. What are you having issues with?

sounds 9y ago

Perhaps Stallman and the FSF are right? We can fork Firefox, but I agree with many other commenters that a fork isn't sufficient. It is the underlying concept I am trying to shine a light on: software should serve the user. When Mozilla becomes user-hostile, we can establish new guards for our future security. But if we, the software writers, become user-hostile, then there will be no one left.

Xylakant 9y ago
The fundamental problem is that the software that serves the user needs to be paid for. If every FF user would chip in a small sum, that might work, but people would rather switch to chrome.
- sounds 9y ago
  That's a common misconception: software that is Libre can be bought and sold. It just comes with the source code. (Libre is not the same as Gratis.)
  - Xylakant 9y ago
    It’s not a misconception. Firefox could be sold, the problem is that nobody would buy it. Opera tried to sell a browser, people stuck with the cost-free alternatives. People would rather use chrome than pay for FF.
figurehe4d 9y ago
Do people actually think Stallman was wrong?
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  Stallman's issue is that he comes across as a fundamentalist extremist, and most of his suggestions require making huge sacrifices to one's quality of life. Take Stallman's own website[1]. It is mostly text. While this makes it fast, it doesn't make it readable at all. And finding specific stuff is nearly impossible. Yeah, there is a search feature, but is extremely rudimentary and very user-hostile. If it were up to Stallman, the entire Internet would look and work like this. This was OK in 1990. It no longer is. Sorry. [1]https://stallman.org/ https://stallman.org/

alexasmyths 9y ago

"I am deeply disappointed in so much software lately, especially by the folks who once championed software freedom, privacy, and quality." PAY. FOR. IT. What can you expect from a group of people working for you for free, trying to scratch together their salaries from wherever they can. The answer is not 'fork it' - because the existential question remains: who will develop the fork? You? Me? A magical person who works without income? More likely - someone who needs an income, and will have to find creative, weird ways like 'Mr Robot' to make it work. A simple answer is 'pay for it'. A company / non-profit can still be committed to those things you mentioned.

lamlam 9y ago
Maybe that worked in the past, but these days, time and time again we see companies offering paid software and services with an extra layer of advertising on top. Old adages like "you're either a paying customer, or the one being sold" no longer apply, you can be a paying customer and sold for extra profit. Companies, by their nature, will try to maximize profits, and that translates to them using any means they can get away with.
- alexasmyths 9y ago
  I don't agree. This is entirely the choice of the team. The idea that 'you are being sold' is not fair either. You choose what to use, for how much, and the resulting product. So if you want to pay $ a month AND have ads. Well, then do that. If not - don't. If Mozilla wants to have an 'add free non-profit' they can do that. But they can't because for whatever reasons - people won't pay. Some people won't pay because they simply don't want to - and are willing to live with the alternative choice of 'having a sideload now and then'. Other people use insufferable intellectualizations about all of it. But mostly it's kind of greedy and irrational. We get immense value out of web browsers. A $1 a month fee would enable Mozilla to forge ahead being the best browser, free for those who can't afford it - and ad free. But we can't have that because we are not as intelligently organized as we need to be.
  - chefandy 9y ago

mikedilger 9y ago

> Someone installed software on their systems without their knowledge or explicit consent. this is what was wrong about the whole thing. What Jascha Kaykas-Wolff heard from the community, that "the experience [we] created caused confusion" is NOT the point.

gregknicholson 9y ago
That was my initial reaction too, but I think it misses a subtlety. Mozilla installs software on our computers without our explicit consent all the time, each time you update Firefox; or when you visit mozilla.org and your browser downloads some JS. It would be impossible for most people to give genuine informed consent, because they'd have to understand what each part of the software does. Most people have not learned to read source code and don't want to. (And the source is available for people sufficiently motivated.) Practically, there isn't time to personally code-review every software update on your system. We defer this to distributors we trust. And in this case, Mozilla genuinely didn't run any questionable code. They could have done (and arguably have in the past), but didn't. They installed software that actually does nothing. (about:mozilla at least engages the CSS parser; this doesn't even do that.) I think the problem is just that they're messing with our stuff. Like if someone rearranged the books on your bookshelf to spell out the name of your least favourite whatever, they haven't actually done you any practical damage, but it's really annoying and rude. On principle, it's my stuff and they should leave it alone. Stop being a bad roommate, Mozilla!

xtracto 9y ago

This is nothing new. There has always been "sell offs" in the Open/Free Software sphere. An old-ish example that comes to mind is SourceForge. When it started, it was the place to host and search for Open Source or Free Software. It was amasing. Little by little, the service started to rot, became full of ads and just felt sketchy. Then GitHub arrived, and a fresh platforfm for hosting open source software was born.

torstenvl 9y ago

(After others here said userContent.css was working for them, I fiddled a bit more. Found an earlier rule in the file that I had somehow mangled and it seems that somehow affected the parsing of the file. Removed the earlier lines, everything works great. So yeah, my fault, not Firefox's.)