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On the one hand, I understand the point you're trying to make. On the other hand, I'm going to be honest, I have trouble reading your post without thinking thi

by saulrh 7y ago

On the one hand, I understand the point you're trying to make. On the other hand, I'm going to be honest, I have trouble reading your post without thinking things like "If you are literally trusting your life to FoxyProxy, you might want to rethink your entire internet safety strategy." Another favorite was "Defense in depth." I've had dozens of different experiences where my extensions silently and unexpectedly malfunctioned. Configurations getting erased, new extension releases with breakage or different behaviors, maximum compatible versions in the manifest, new permissions, botched keystrokes in the extensions page, profile corruption, incompatibilities between extensions, internal bugs that cause them to crash-loop without doing anything, the works. Like, I run a ton of addons, some of which are a bit esoteric and a couple that I compile from head every few days, but even taking into account my outlier-sized surface area it's a bit silly. I'm not going to claim that this isn't a problem. That said, blaming Mozilla for a life-threatening failure of FoxyProxy, of all things, is like blaming Cessna because a journalist flew one of their planes into a combat zone. There just wasn't any way it was going to end well.

Karunamon 7y ago
If the nature of this problem didn't also break turnkey distributions like Tor Browser (this kills Noscript, which means your identity can be leaked), I'd agree with you. There's only so much defending you can do against a failure like this (running Tor Browser is already pretty uncommon) and the blame for it has to be laid squarely at the feet of Mozilla for the way they chose to centralize their plugin architecture. This is one of those low likelihood/high impact events that tend to catch everyone by surprise.. if you spend all your time as a user thinking about these failure modes (you don't.. nobody does), you'd be unable to get much else done. I'd wager the fact that the browser would suddenly gimp itself is not something the average user (even the average Tor Browser user) thinks about or plans for.

by saulrh 7y ago

Karunamon 7y ago

If the nature of this problem didn't also break turnkey distributions like Tor Browser (this kills Noscript, which means your identity can be leaked), I'd agree with you. There's only so much defending you can do against a failure like this (running Tor Browser is already pretty uncommon) and the blame for it has to be laid squarely at the feet of Mozilla for the way they chose to centralize their plugin architecture. This is one of those low likelihood/high impact events that tend to catch everyone by surprise.. if you spend all your time as a user thinking about these failure modes (you don't.. nobody does), you'd be unable to get much else done. I'd wager the fact that the browser would suddenly gimp itself is not something the average user (even the average Tor Browser user) thinks about or plans for.