4 ms·

10 years too late. I'm never going back. These days I try to use my browser as vanilla as possible so I don't get my heart broken.

motorest 1y ago
> 10 years too late. I'm never going back. These days I try to use my browser as vanilla as possible so I don't get my heart broken. Pray tell, which usable browser do you believe provides better assurances than Firefox? Certainly it's not Chrome or Edge, is it?
- msgodel 1y ago
  tbh it's a lot easier to install ad-hoc extensions in Chromium than Firefox.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- akkartik 1y ago
  Oh I use a Firefox fork. I just don't develop extensions for it anymore. Firefox could have been the chosen one, the hackable browser. But it's just another hermetically sealed product.
  - arp242 1y ago
    > It's just another hermetically sealed product. Everything is open source, mostly under a fairly permissive license. You can still do quite a lot with extensions or various tweaks (more than most programs, including open source ones). It's demonstrably not "hermetically sealed".
    - akkartik 1y ago
      "Everything is open source" does not contradict "hermetically sealed product". I built myself an extension. Just for myself, nobody else. It worked great, then in one of these "policy changes" I couldn't use it anymore. Just for myself. That is a betrayal of trust. If I could use it before, and now I need to hack/mod Firefox by building it on a machine with umpteen hundreds of gigabytes of storage, that is a betrayal of trust. Firefox is "demonstrably" a hermetically sealed product. As demonstrated by my lived experience.
      - arp242 1y ago
        You can use private extensions; you just need to use web-ext to sign it. Doesn't need to be published. Also the "developer edition" allows installing unsigned extensions. No need to build your own.
        akkartik 1y ago
        Hmm, I'm not familiar with web-ext. I'm not sure it existed 10 years ago, back when Firefox went through their Quantum transition. Looks like web-ext came out in 2016: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-firefox-48 https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-.... My extension is at https://github.com/akkartik/spew https://github.com/akkartik/spew, and it looks like there might have been a period of a year when I wasn't able to use it. When software auto-updates and stops working, we consider that breakage. When software auto-updates and code I wrote stops working, we say "oh, it affects just 0.01% of users." For me, the inescapable lesson is to not write code for extension eco-systems, because they're all too immature for serious use. At least as of the year 2015.
- gr4vityWall 1y ago
  > which usable browser do you believe provides better assurances than Firefox? I think they meant that they are not going back to publishing Firefox extensions/add-ons. That doesn't imply they started writing extensions for another browser.

motorest 1y ago

> 10 years too late. I'm never going back. These days I try to use my browser as vanilla as possible so I don't get my heart broken. Pray tell, which usable browser do you believe provides better assurances than Firefox? Certainly it's not Chrome or Edge, is it?

msgodel 1y ago
tbh it's a lot easier to install ad-hoc extensions in Chromium than Firefox.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
akkartik 1y ago
Oh I use a Firefox fork. I just don't develop extensions for it anymore. Firefox could have been the chosen one, the hackable browser. But it's just another hermetically sealed product.
- arp242 1y ago
  > It's just another hermetically sealed product. Everything is open source, mostly under a fairly permissive license. You can still do quite a lot with extensions or various tweaks (more than most programs, including open source ones). It's demonstrably not "hermetically sealed".
  - akkartik 1y ago
    "Everything is open source" does not contradict "hermetically sealed product". I built myself an extension. Just for myself, nobody else. It worked great, then in one of these "policy changes" I couldn't use it anymore. Just for myself. That is a betrayal of trust. If I could use it before, and now I need to hack/mod Firefox by building it on a machine with umpteen hundreds of gigabytes of storage, that is a betrayal of trust. Firefox is "demonstrably" a hermetically sealed product. As demonstrated by my lived experience.
    - arp242 1y ago
      You can use private extensions; you just need to use web-ext to sign it. Doesn't need to be published. Also the "developer edition" allows installing unsigned extensions. No need to build your own.
      - akkartik 1y ago
        Hmm, I'm not familiar with web-ext. I'm not sure it existed 10 years ago, back when Firefox went through their Quantum transition. Looks like web-ext came out in 2016: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-firefox-48 https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-.... My extension is at https://github.com/akkartik/spew https://github.com/akkartik/spew, and it looks like there might have been a period of a year when I wasn't able to use it. When software auto-updates and stops working, we consider that breakage. When software auto-updates and code I wrote stops working, we say "oh, it affects just 0.01% of users." For me, the inescapable lesson is to not write code for extension eco-systems, because they're all too immature for serious use. At least as of the year 2015.
gr4vityWall 1y ago
> which usable browser do you believe provides better assurances than Firefox? I think they meant that they are not going back to publishing Firefox extensions/add-ons. That doesn't imply they started writing extensions for another browser.