4 ms·

Is some of the responsibility on the browser (company)? Or should there be an extension consortium which all browsers fund that vets extensions?

miohtama 7y ago
Like Mozilla? :)
- donclark 7y ago
  Like any browser that allows for extensions or addons. Chrome, Mozilla, Opera, etc.
  - cxr 7y ago
    Mozilla is not a browser. Firefox is. In the early days of mozilla.org and even well into Firefox's heyday, Mozilla was more akin to a co-op. It was a neutral ground where folks associated with different vendors and institutions participated from all corners. Students. Independent researchers. Engineers from Google. Engineers at HP. Engineers at Red Hat. Even folks from Opera. Some people were being paid to work on Firefox full- or part-time, but most of their paychecks were signed by those other companies, not Mozilla. People who were on Mozilla payroll were generally employed by the Foundation with an official job title that involved keeping mozilla.org infrastructure running. Some people might superficially look at the Mozilla Corporation and assume that this all ended there, but they're wrong. When Mozilla Corp. got spun up and Google signed a deal for search engine royalties, employee numbers stayed in the very low hundreds for years, and the search deal was largely seen as similar to another donation of sorts—Firefox had already defaulted to Google before the deal, because it was the only thing that made sense for the developers and other people actually using Firefox. Somewhere along the way, though, between Google pulling engineers off Firefox and launching Chrome, to the introduction and rapid adoption of the iPhone and mobile Safari, the powers that be at Mozilla decided to make a business play, which is more or less where the stillborn FirefoxOS came in. Whereas before Mozilla was a vendor-neutral org working on what amounted to a reference implementation of a modern user agent as its contribution to the digital public infrastructure[1], the company began pursuing a role as a Bay Area bit player, formed a business plan, and began competing for part of the pie, both on the desktop and mobile. It went on a hiring spree, shifted most things out of the mozilla.org governance model to live underneath the Corporation's org structure, othered contributors not employed @mozilla.com, and hired execs from places like Adobe—folks with with business experience to try and run the show and make it all work. Of course, it didn't really work. It just destroyed the Mozilla that used to exist. So now we have Mozilla today, which is still limping along in that space. It's got the same name, but it's really just running on steam and trading on that name and the goodwill that the Mozilla community fostered in the earlier era. But that doesn't mean when you see people talk about "Mozilla" that they're referring to the floundering business that we see today. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22389779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22389779
gnicholas 7y ago
Chrome and Firefox both vet browser plugins on their platforms. I've found Firefox to be much more thorough in this regard, to a fault. In some ways they are even more difficult to deal with than the Apple App Store, in my experience. For example, they sometimes decide to re-review your add-on, even if you haven't submitted a new version in months. At least with Apple, you can (mostly) control when your software is and is not reviewed.

miohtama 7y ago

Like Mozilla? :)

donclark 7y ago
Like any browser that allows for extensions or addons. Chrome, Mozilla, Opera, etc.
- cxr 7y ago
  Mozilla is not a browser. Firefox is. In the early days of mozilla.org and even well into Firefox's heyday, Mozilla was more akin to a co-op. It was a neutral ground where folks associated with different vendors and institutions participated from all corners. Students. Independent researchers. Engineers from Google. Engineers at HP. Engineers at Red Hat. Even folks from Opera. Some people were being paid to work on Firefox full- or part-time, but most of their paychecks were signed by those other companies, not Mozilla. People who were on Mozilla payroll were generally employed by the Foundation with an official job title that involved keeping mozilla.org infrastructure running. Some people might superficially look at the Mozilla Corporation and assume that this all ended there, but they're wrong. When Mozilla Corp. got spun up and Google signed a deal for search engine royalties, employee numbers stayed in the very low hundreds for years, and the search deal was largely seen as similar to another donation of sorts—Firefox had already defaulted to Google before the deal, because it was the only thing that made sense for the developers and other people actually using Firefox. Somewhere along the way, though, between Google pulling engineers off Firefox and launching Chrome, to the introduction and rapid adoption of the iPhone and mobile Safari, the powers that be at Mozilla decided to make a business play, which is more or less where the stillborn FirefoxOS came in. Whereas before Mozilla was a vendor-neutral org working on what amounted to a reference implementation of a modern user agent as its contribution to the digital public infrastructure[1], the company began pursuing a role as a Bay Area bit player, formed a business plan, and began competing for part of the pie, both on the desktop and mobile. It went on a hiring spree, shifted most things out of the mozilla.org governance model to live underneath the Corporation's org structure, othered contributors not employed @mozilla.com, and hired execs from places like Adobe—folks with with business experience to try and run the show and make it all work. Of course, it didn't really work. It just destroyed the Mozilla that used to exist. So now we have Mozilla today, which is still limping along in that space. It's got the same name, but it's really just running on steam and trading on that name and the goodwill that the Mozilla community fostered in the earlier era. But that doesn't mean when you see people talk about "Mozilla" that they're referring to the floundering business that we see today. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22389779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22389779

gnicholas 7y ago

Chrome and Firefox both vet browser plugins on their platforms. I've found Firefox to be much more thorough in this regard, to a fault. In some ways they are even more difficult to deal with than the Apple App Store, in my experience. For example, they sometimes decide to re-review your add-on, even if you haven't submitted a new version in months. At least with Apple, you can (mostly) control when your software is and is not reviewed.