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It's actually ok for you to feel that way! It's also ok for Mozilla to do this, because Mozilla aims to use this to protect users! The internet is already a ya

by ygjb 3y ago

It's actually ok for you to feel that way! It's also ok for Mozilla to do this, because Mozilla aims to use this to protect users! The internet is already a yard full of rakes for folks, I appreciate things that make it easier for users to protect themselves online. Yes, the feature can be abused, but frankly, at least Firefox is an open source project, and there are methods that can be used to disable this feature, up to and including using or creating a new Firefox fork.

xcdzvyn 3y ago
I'm happy to presume it wasn't your intent, but I thought I'd share that this reply comes across, to me at least, as pretty condescending and preachy.
- ygjb 3y ago
  Nah, it was meant as preachy, but not necessarily condescending. It's absolutely important to challenge Mozilla and other open source projects, especially in this era of enshittification[1]; Mozilla and Firefox operate in a position of trust on behalf of their users. That said, the parent post positioned this as an abomination of a feature, but acknowledged it makes sense as a user feature. The ability to disable add-ons by domain is a great feature for user control, but it's functionally useless on it's own as a mechanism to protect users. In order for that feature to actually protect users, you need a mechanism to turn it on and off remotely so that if a new threat is identified (or there is a serious regression in Firefox that makes specific extensions higher risk), that users don't need to act to do the right thing. This isn't a meaningful loss of user control, and I already said elsewhere that Mozilla should have communicated more about this new feature, but ultimately it's the right kind of feature. [1] https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/ https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/
xg15 3y ago
> Yes, the feature can be abused, but frankly, at least Firefox is an open source project So open source that the first thing they did was marking the ticket as confidential.

by ygjb 3y ago

xcdzvyn 3y ago

I'm happy to presume it wasn't your intent, but I thought I'd share that this reply comes across, to me at least, as pretty condescending and preachy.

ygjb 3y ago
Nah, it was meant as preachy, but not necessarily condescending. It's absolutely important to challenge Mozilla and other open source projects, especially in this era of enshittification[1]; Mozilla and Firefox operate in a position of trust on behalf of their users. That said, the parent post positioned this as an abomination of a feature, but acknowledged it makes sense as a user feature. The ability to disable add-ons by domain is a great feature for user control, but it's functionally useless on it's own as a mechanism to protect users. In order for that feature to actually protect users, you need a mechanism to turn it on and off remotely so that if a new threat is identified (or there is a serious regression in Firefox that makes specific extensions higher risk), that users don't need to act to do the right thing. This isn't a meaningful loss of user control, and I already said elsewhere that Mozilla should have communicated more about this new feature, but ultimately it's the right kind of feature. [1] https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/ https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/

xg15 3y ago

> Yes, the feature can be abused, but frankly, at least Firefox is an open source project So open source that the first thing they did was marking the ticket as confidential.