It’s probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they “accidentally” remove an ad blocker.
They made an error and quickly corrected. It’s the addon author who threw a fit and removed the addon.
This just makes me worried to rely on uBO but more because what if the author just fucks off because someone else pissed them off.
It would seem that the ubo lite version was made specifically to cater to chrome and manifest v3 if I’m not mistaken…
In the end the author may have just felt it was too much energy keeping a pared down chrome version on Firefox when the full version is present and working. Especially after this particular drama.
Some say the Lite one was good for mobile since it was lighter weight but I didn’t notice a difference tbh.
This just makes me worried to rely on uBO but more because what if the author just fucks off because someone else pissed them off.
That is very concerning to me, also.
Large parts of the internet relying on one or two tiny one-man FOSS projects? (UBO and ADguard are often cited as the only two reliable-ish and safe adblockers)
If he can’t be bothered with that nonsense, how secure is UBO’s future? How secure is the future of adblocking?
I would bet that advertising companies are rubbing their hands now and planning to ramp up pressure against these poor devs.
I know looking at it from the outside can look like throwing a fit, but as a software dev I can assure you our professional life is a constellation of papercuts and stumbling blocks on the best days. It is a fun job in many ways but it’s by its nature extremely frustrating at times. For professionals, the inherent frustrations are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, the rest of the iceberg being induced frustrations due to work environment causes of various nature, and a lot of devs who also develop stuff in their own free time do it to regain a sense of purpose and control.
If these kinda hiccups keep happening even outside the day job of a developer, it is absolutely understandable that the reaction is simply to cut the bullshit rather than grabbing yet another shovel to shovel away the shit you’ve been covered with this time.
Ultimately, the cost benefit analysis for keeping uBOL hosted on mozilla’s platform became skewed on the cost side and the additional expense is not one that gorhill can or wants to afford.
So, yeah, it’s not a hissy fit.
I don’t think throwing a fit and it being a hissy fit are the same thing.
Lite is barely relevant for Firefox anyway. Gorhill (along with host list maintainers) is one of the saints of modern day open source; if he felt overwhelmed by Mozilla’s actions, and chose to just take Lite down from the extension store, he has every right to. No one should shit on someone who has given so much to the community.
Mozilla can’t be trusted to host the addon, so the author is taking on the responsibility of hosting it himself. How is that his fault and not Mozilla’s?
Whether Mozilla acted out of malice or incompetence is irrelevant. The report was false and the findings were incorrect, they have to be held responsible either way.
I’d much rather have them be overzealous and mistakenly block an addon for a few hours, than have them be too lax and approve addons actually stealing data.
Mozilla did apologize, said they were wrong and said they’d correct the issue. The author refused and decided not to put it back to AMO. At that points its on the author that it’s not AMO.
As the article says, only when it blew up. But you’re right, the author doesn’t look good either.
More honestly, I enjoy a good conspiracy theory with my coffee.
As the article says, only when it blew up.
The article also seems to say that he didn’t bother to disprove the mistaken findings and so Mozilla might’ve not even heard anything back until it blew up. The whole thing seems to have happened pretty quickly.
I think they had reasons to act how they acted. They’re probably on a lot of pressure because the whole tech world is fighting ad blocking now.
There’s always some reason. I’m just worried that something happens with uBO and same happens there
then someone with much more talent can step up, rename the plugin, and carry on.
The challenge is choosing the next maintainer user handle.
https://github.com/msftcangoblowm/sphinx-external-toc-strict
It’s probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they “accidentally” remove an ad blocker.
I mean I’m of two minds here. One, there’s an epidemic of intellectually lazy, kneejerk Mozilla hate and it’s time to turn the tide on that.
But on the other hand, even as a Mozilla fanboy I can see how this is a really bad look, and really indefensible. I think it’s more of a huge error of judgment, and if there are other huge errors, I can begin to see a problem, but I think they have too much of a positive track record in their history to just go reaching for the tinfoil hats so quickly.
