Probably due to automatic extension reviews by Mozilla.
Sad that it happened, but at least it doesn’t impact the actual uBlock, only the lite version for which I honestly see no purpose in Firefox anyways.
It was a manual review conducted by an actual person that in the end admitted they were wrong
Are you like, those old multi colour swirly rubber balls we used to get out of 20p machines as kids? Those were ill!
Agreed. Especially considering uBlock origin is pretty much the main reason to use FF at all. They shouldn’t be delegating reviews of it to someone who would fuck up this badly.
Assuming this wasn’t a “test the waters” kind of thing to determine just how much they were reliant on ublock.
I’ve been using the main FF build for a while now but I’m wondering if I should start looking at the various fork options.
I thought that was the shit Chrome was doing to block adblockers and antimalware plugins, if Firefox is doing the same thing what browser do we use now? :-(
I don’t care about all the browser wars stuff, I lost interest when it was Netscape Vs IE, I just want a browser that I can configure fully myself and have it be as safe and secure as one can make it, within reason.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh so ublock origin lite. A manifest V3 compatible adblocker for chromium browsers.
The original ublock origin is unaffected
Firefox will be adopting Manifest V3, but a modded version that enables ad blocking.
The discourse about Mozilla is ridiculous, here and most everywhere. You’ve got people taking every perceived opportunity to attack them for things they do, things they didn’t do, and things it’s imagined they might’ve done. And then another crowd of equally determined people doggedly defending them for every idiotic blunder they make, such as this one.
Meanwhile Mozilla itself has nothing substantial to say. This is not the first time a prominent extension has mysteriously gone missing from amo with Mozilla telling us nothing about its role in the incident. @mozilla@mozilla.social needs to be in the discussion giving us a real explanation of what happened, why they got it wrong, and what they’re doing to improve things.
Correct, this two-sided discourse is due to a massive lack of communication on Mozilla’s part, leaving room for speculation.
The best I can think of is that the explainer language used to justify the extension’s removal was just boilerplate language that got copy+pasted here because someone clicked the wrong button. But even that makes a mockery of the review process.
I think “oops clicked wrong button” would be slightly more defensible, but not by much. If they truly rejected the extension for content in it that it does not have, it’s hard to see how a human could make that mistake even accidentally. But maybe there’s something I’m missing.
True in a way. However, there is a rather large collection of speculation on the Internet that is quite an undertaking to correct. And a large population of people and bots willing to speculate. Also, having once been speculated, each speculation takes on a life of its own. If it gets much more substantial, forget Skynet, we’re busy creating Specunet and its sidekick Confusionet – an insidious duo.
There’s a dozen Firefox extensions that really matter, at any given time. Mozilla has never appeared to give a particular shit about any of them. Paying special attention based on popularity wouldn’t be ideal, but for fuck’s sake, their passive-aggressive treatment keeps burning out the developers who fuel their ecosystem, and it would take vanishingly little effort to shield their keystone plugins.
If their active neglect had ruined both uBlock and DownThemAll - I’m not sure I’d be using Firefox anymore, and I’ve been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Why the fuck would anyone normal even consider it?
DownThemAll is one of those extensions which get installed immediately for me. If I didn’t have DownThemAll and uBlock origin, I’d might as well just use edge smh
And the author spent a year hassling Mozilla about how killing XUL plugins would make his wildly popular plugin nearly impossible. Did they move one iota to help that? Nope. Did they adopt DTA functionality natively, like they’d absorbed Pocket? Did they fuck. Their mantra for two straight decades has been “just rewrite!” and they cannot imagine why they kept hemorrhaging devs and plugins and users once Chrome slimed its way into everyone’s options.
