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To Firefox's credit, they are the last major browser to inject themselves into our computer's startup (and at least they are providing notice and a way to disab

To Firefox's credit, they are the last major browser to inject themselves into our computer's startup (and at least they are providing notice and a way to disable it). I find it not only annoying but arrogant how most other software companies assume our lives revolve around their particular tool. So much so that, obviously, we must want their software to leech our time, bandwidth and power running its setup caching (and checking for / installing updates) every damn time we boot our computers. No need to ask permission to inject your silent bloat into our daily lives or even offer a way to disable adding it! Ultimately, I blame the OS for allowing apps to inject startup cruft silently and without explicit user consent. Aside from increasing the security/privacy attack surface, that ever-growing pile of aging cruft-ware makes their OS slower and less stable. It's now a regular manual maintenance task to de-cruft each of my PCs. And since Windows has so thoughtfully provided over a dozen legitimate ways for apps to silently insert startup bloat, a special tool is needed: Autoruns (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...). Amazingly, many apps now go and check that all their startup cruft is intact and, if not, "fix" it every time they run (looking at you Chrome).

Steltek 2y ago
Moving PCs to a more mobile-like environment, where apps are always sandboxed and all permissions are explicit, sounds so tempting. But then you realize that manufacturers will always cross the line: MS and Apple apps get special privileges, the bootloader will be permanently locked, and you'll eat your DRM because you have no other choice. I prefer to curate my own apps and if they misbehave, they're uninstalled immediately. The downside there is this philosophy feels a lot like, "I don't need a virus scanner because I'm too good to get stung by a virus". Still, it seems better than the alternative hell.
- jwells89 2y ago
  The problem is, reliably catching programs misbehaving is non-trivial even for the technically capable, let alone everybody else which easily results in a lot of damage having been done by the time they’re caught, if they’re caught. I don’t think there’s a practical way forward for desktop OSes that don’t embrace sandboxing and tight permission controls, at least for the masses. Even for myself, I’d be more comfortable using an OS like that — if trust of the corporations making the OSes becomes an issue, the solution that’s apparent to me is to run a Linux distribution with deeply integrated permissions and sandboxing, not to run without either.
  - Steltek 2y ago
    I guess I wasn't thinking of my primary line of defense: webapps! Naturally sandboxed and least privilege'd. And many of them are locally selfhosted in containers too. Native apps for me tend to fall into a few narrow categories: * Professional software engineering tools * Videogames (on a Steam Deck these days) * CAD for 3D printing (FreeCAD) * A/V editing with Audacity, Gimp, etc
  - zzo38computer 2y ago
    I think that the way is to design an entirely new operating system, and I have some ideas how to do it (but not a name, yet). It will be FOSS, and the user can easily reprogram everything in the entire system. It uses capability-based security with proxy capabilities; no I/O is possible (including the current date/time) without using a capability. Also, better interaction of data between command-line and GUI will also be possible. Linux and other systems tend to be overly complicated; they need to add extra functions to the kernel because of the problems with the initial design; but, I think it can be done better in a simpler way. Webapps are also too complicated, and does not really solve the permissions issue properly (the set of permissions doesn't (and cannot) include everything, the possibility of overriding by the user is difficult and inefficient, etc), and also isn't very well designed either. There are sandboxing systems available on Linux but they have their own problems; e.g. many have no way to specify the use of popen with user-specified programs, or what needs to be accessed according to user configuration files and/or command-line arguments, user-defined plugins, or cannot properly support character encoding in file names (due to issues with D-bus), etc. (Using D-bus for this is a mistake, I think. The other things they have done (other than D-bus), also don't handle it very well.) There is also issue of being unknown what permissions will be needed before the program is installed, especially when using libraries that can be set up to use multiple kinds of I/O.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      Are you aware of genode ( https://genode.org/ https://genode.org/ )? It's a full-blown capabilities OS that is FOSS and already exists and AFAIK basically works today.
- pxc 2y ago
  > Moving PCs to a more mobile-like environment, where apps are always sandboxed and all permissions are explicit, sounds so tempting. But then you realize that manufacturers will always cross the line: MS and Apple apps get special privileges, the bootloader will be permanently locked, and you'll eat your DRM because you have no other choice. It's always worth emphasizing imo that technological prophylactics like mobile-style sandboxing are redundant on operating system distributions whose social processes of development take responsibility for things like this (auto-updating, startup behavior, default app associations, file type associations, etc.) away from apps and centralize it under the control of the user via the OS' built-in config tools. To be more explicit: free software distros generally lack software that behaves this way, and often actively patch such behavior out of ill-behaved cross-platform applications (who also sometimes lack it themselves, in builds targeting free operating systems). The problem is, as you note in your second paragraph, just as much that we're getting our software from untrustworthy distributors as it is that our desktop operating systems do too little to protect us from untrustworthy software. In some cases, the problem is rather that our software distributors have too little capacity to intervene, both for technical reasons (e.g., they don't have the damn source code) and social/economic ones (e.g., the model is to accept as much software as possible rather than to include a piece of software only after it is clear that there is capacity to scrutinize it, sanitize it, and maintain a downstream package of it). You can avoid 99.999% of this kind of crap just by running a free software base system and avoiding proprietary software. Better app sandboxing is great! We should demand it and pursue it in whatever ways we can. But installing software directly from unscrupulous sources and counting on sandboxing to prevent abuse is also an intervention at the least effective stage. Relying on a safer social process of distributing software goes way further, as does keeping shitty software off our systems in the first place! These should be the approaches of first resort.
- Propelloni 2y ago
  You may be interested in "immutable" distros like OpenSUSE's Aeon, Fedora's Silverblue or the kind-of-Debian Vanilla OS. If you go and try Vanilla, by all means try the beta.
abhinavk 2y ago
> a way to disable it It's disabled by default.
proactivesvcs 2y ago
Ironically, since I think Windows ME, Windows has been doing this anyway. It became smarter in Vista - I believe it would preload binaries at a time of the day when they were most frequently opened. Also how often are people logging in afresh? It seems a bit of a waste of engineering time, but then again I hope that Mozilla has used these resources as a result of data showing it was worth implementing.
bee_rider 2y ago
Agree that starting apps up at boot is normally pretty annoying. But, it seems like a nice feature for a web browser. A web browser might host a user’s whole universe of programs. I mean, it seems like a nice to have optional feature. After Ubuntu switched from a native package to Snap (I think it was), Firefox first startup times got bad. It is objectively not a big deal, but it feels awful, like using some crappy old pre-SSD computer. Anyway, starting the program before the user asks for it is a pretty hacky and ridiculous way of solving this artificial Snap-induced program (and I don’t think it was the motivation). But it would technically work I guess. What a mess.

Steltek 2y ago

Moving PCs to a more mobile-like environment, where apps are always sandboxed and all permissions are explicit, sounds so tempting. But then you realize that manufacturers will always cross the line: MS and Apple apps get special privileges, the bootloader will be permanently locked, and you'll eat your DRM because you have no other choice. I prefer to curate my own apps and if they misbehave, they're uninstalled immediately. The downside there is this philosophy feels a lot like, "I don't need a virus scanner because I'm too good to get stung by a virus". Still, it seems better than the alternative hell.

jwells89 2y ago
The problem is, reliably catching programs misbehaving is non-trivial even for the technically capable, let alone everybody else which easily results in a lot of damage having been done by the time they’re caught, if they’re caught. I don’t think there’s a practical way forward for desktop OSes that don’t embrace sandboxing and tight permission controls, at least for the masses. Even for myself, I’d be more comfortable using an OS like that — if trust of the corporations making the OSes becomes an issue, the solution that’s apparent to me is to run a Linux distribution with deeply integrated permissions and sandboxing, not to run without either.
- Steltek 2y ago
  I guess I wasn't thinking of my primary line of defense: webapps! Naturally sandboxed and least privilege'd. And many of them are locally selfhosted in containers too. Native apps for me tend to fall into a few narrow categories: * Professional software engineering tools * Videogames (on a Steam Deck these days) * CAD for 3D printing (FreeCAD) * A/V editing with Audacity, Gimp, etc
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  I think that the way is to design an entirely new operating system, and I have some ideas how to do it (but not a name, yet). It will be FOSS, and the user can easily reprogram everything in the entire system. It uses capability-based security with proxy capabilities; no I/O is possible (including the current date/time) without using a capability. Also, better interaction of data between command-line and GUI will also be possible. Linux and other systems tend to be overly complicated; they need to add extra functions to the kernel because of the problems with the initial design; but, I think it can be done better in a simpler way. Webapps are also too complicated, and does not really solve the permissions issue properly (the set of permissions doesn't (and cannot) include everything, the possibility of overriding by the user is difficult and inefficient, etc), and also isn't very well designed either. There are sandboxing systems available on Linux but they have their own problems; e.g. many have no way to specify the use of popen with user-specified programs, or what needs to be accessed according to user configuration files and/or command-line arguments, user-defined plugins, or cannot properly support character encoding in file names (due to issues with D-bus), etc. (Using D-bus for this is a mistake, I think. The other things they have done (other than D-bus), also don't handle it very well.) There is also issue of being unknown what permissions will be needed before the program is installed, especially when using libraries that can be set up to use multiple kinds of I/O.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Are you aware of genode ( https://genode.org/ https://genode.org/ )? It's a full-blown capabilities OS that is FOSS and already exists and AFAIK basically works today.
pxc 2y ago
> Moving PCs to a more mobile-like environment, where apps are always sandboxed and all permissions are explicit, sounds so tempting. But then you realize that manufacturers will always cross the line: MS and Apple apps get special privileges, the bootloader will be permanently locked, and you'll eat your DRM because you have no other choice. It's always worth emphasizing imo that technological prophylactics like mobile-style sandboxing are redundant on operating system distributions whose social processes of development take responsibility for things like this (auto-updating, startup behavior, default app associations, file type associations, etc.) away from apps and centralize it under the control of the user via the OS' built-in config tools. To be more explicit: free software distros generally lack software that behaves this way, and often actively patch such behavior out of ill-behaved cross-platform applications (who also sometimes lack it themselves, in builds targeting free operating systems). The problem is, as you note in your second paragraph, just as much that we're getting our software from untrustworthy distributors as it is that our desktop operating systems do too little to protect us from untrustworthy software. In some cases, the problem is rather that our software distributors have too little capacity to intervene, both for technical reasons (e.g., they don't have the damn source code) and social/economic ones (e.g., the model is to accept as much software as possible rather than to include a piece of software only after it is clear that there is capacity to scrutinize it, sanitize it, and maintain a downstream package of it). You can avoid 99.999% of this kind of crap just by running a free software base system and avoiding proprietary software. Better app sandboxing is great! We should demand it and pursue it in whatever ways we can. But installing software directly from unscrupulous sources and counting on sandboxing to prevent abuse is also an intervention at the least effective stage. Relying on a safer social process of distributing software goes way further, as does keeping shitty software off our systems in the first place! These should be the approaches of first resort.
Propelloni 2y ago
You may be interested in "immutable" distros like OpenSUSE's Aeon, Fedora's Silverblue or the kind-of-Debian Vanilla OS. If you go and try Vanilla, by all means try the beta.

abhinavk 2y ago

> a way to disable it It's disabled by default.

proactivesvcs 2y ago

Ironically, since I think Windows ME, Windows has been doing this anyway. It became smarter in Vista - I believe it would preload binaries at a time of the day when they were most frequently opened. Also how often are people logging in afresh? It seems a bit of a waste of engineering time, but then again I hope that Mozilla has used these resources as a result of data showing it was worth implementing.

bee_rider 2y ago

Agree that starting apps up at boot is normally pretty annoying. But, it seems like a nice feature for a web browser. A web browser might host a user’s whole universe of programs. I mean, it seems like a nice to have optional feature. After Ubuntu switched from a native package to Snap (I think it was), Firefox first startup times got bad. It is objectively not a big deal, but it feels awful, like using some crappy old pre-SSD computer. Anyway, starting the program before the user asks for it is a pretty hacky and ridiculous way of solving this artificial Snap-induced program (and I don’t think it was the motivation). But it would technically work I guess. What a mess.