A big thing for me is that Tampermonkey is not open source.
And yes, Firefox on Android has an allowlist of "known working good" extensions, the reason given being that Firefox for Android doesn't implement everything the Desktop version implements and IIUC, want to a avoid users blaming the browser when something breaks because of it.
It really is bizzare, old Firefox used to support all addons, then they shipped a new version and only allowed like 10 addons, and to this day they don't allow any more. It's already been years.
I know my addon works fine on mobile, but they provide no means of specifying that*. I tried to email them for it to become "recommended" but never heard back.
The fact that they allow tampermonkey which allows any kind of script just adds insult to the injury.
* when uploading a new version, it does ask to specify which Firefox desktop/android versions are supported, but this existed before the new Firefox and doesn't do anything.
Mozilla has been going down a bizarre path for a while. If only Brendan Eich could have stayed at Mozilla instead of getting excommunicated, then we'd have the best of Brave and Firefox.
(What _really_ showed me Mozilla is going crazy is when they fired sunfishcode (IIRC) and the Servo team! Both were essential to their success. It makes little sense.)
I agree, Mozilla has been on a very weird path since then.
Not sure Eich would have made a positive difference though. Brave's main claim to fame is that they took Chromium and added an ad blocker. At the same time, they dabble(d?) in injecting ads and crypto, to just name the shady things I know about.
I suppose there just isn't much money in building a non-compromising browser, and Mozilla is struggling with this pretty publicly.
Well the whole point was that there wasn't supposed to be any money in building it. That's why Mozilla is a nonprofit (in theory at least). Originally the idea was that enough companies and individuals would donate to support its development as a common interest, because obviously people want a good private browser, right? Now the status quo has shifted to a big corporation making money off of peoples' browsing habits via closed-source components, and then paying the nonprofit to have a consistently worse browser to prevent a full monopoly.
Much in this world would be better if we donated to what ought be a public service. If browser vendors didn't have to chase profits, perhaps they wouldn't be so user-hostile, and the same principle applies to most software I'd say.
That we don't have a world where this is possible is in my opinion both a cultural and political failure. What if every person on HN gave 1% of their income to various open source projects they use? What if we made this a cultural norm, and you'd be shamed if you didn't?
That's my opinion. We need more of a culture of giving back. I dislike proprietary software, but I have no problem paying for software.
For example: there are several apps on F-Droid that give you full functionality (even if there is a paywall for those features on the Play Store version), and all they do is say "hey, this took my time to develop, and I'd appreciate if you could throw some bucks my way." I enjoy contributing more than what they'd charge with a paywall in those cases.
It's possible to make money as an independent browser if you put the user first and deal them in on >= what you make from the gross. That's what Brave does, and we're building out search ads now to do the same. These revshare and payment rails use crypto, no "dabbling".
> If only Brendan Eich could have stayed at Mozilla instead of getting excommunicated
Mozilla actually encouraged him to stay by giving him the role of CEO. He decided to step out.
> First, though, there's a matter that we should all be clear about: Brendan Eich was not fired. After his appointment, there was backlash from the Mozilla Community. He came under pressure to resign and he did. The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation; they did not "remove him because of his views." If that alone was the issue, they simply wouldn't have given him the job in the first place
I guess we could point out that the Mozilla Board should have seen this coming and not encouraged him to be the CEO, but they could also have been criticized for this.
> then we'd have the best of Brave and Firefox
I don't think so. Mozilla is tied to its agreement with Google and I believe they are limited in what they can do privacy wise. Unfortunately.
The Brave browser is mostly a fancy Chromium and you can achieve similar results by taking an ungoogled chromium and adding uBlock Origin to it. But you are better off installing uBlock Origin on Firefox [1]
>Mozilla actually encouraged him to stay by giving him the role of CEO. He decided to step out.
Sure, but for those that don't know the story, Brendan was being portrayed as being evil incarnate because of the donations (which were a perfectly legal thing to do, btw). Brendan's resignation was his way of saying "f*ck this crap, I have better stuff to do", and he showed.
>they simply wouldn't have given him the job in the first place.
LOL, are you aware that Brendan co-founded Mozilla? HE was the one that gave them THEIR jobs.
Yeah, no. Being co-founder is not everything. He was CTO back then. He pretty much didn't give them their jobs, alone anyway. And of course, to go from CTO to CEO, the board gave him the job. I don't know how that can be wrong.
And in any case it does not give him any specific kind of immunity against criticism.
Note that I didn't write this sentence, I'm quoting the linked article.
> which were a perfectly legal thing to do, btw
Of course. But legal ≠ good. Not speaking about Brendan because my opinion on this is irrelevant, but I'm sure you can find something legal that you don't like. For Brendan homosexual wedding is one example of something legal that's bad, if his opinion on this matter hasn't changed.
> Brendan was being portrayed as being evil incarnate because of the donations (which were a perfectly legal thing to do, btw).
Im not sure why you posted this as it has never been suggested that his donation was illegal.
The campaign against his appointment as CTO was on the basis that his financial support for proposition 8 showed him to be hostile to the protection of civil rights for some members of society, including Mozilla personnel, and that this was incompatible with his leadership role.
But organizations should be, at least I'm on that camp.
Edit: Well actually, I can think of some orgs. that should be polarized by nature, like those meant to promote change. But a foundation that "works to ensure the internet remains a public resource that is open and accessible to us all" should be quite neutral on all others topics beyond that.
I think I understand this opinion, but I'm not sure this is actually possible. I don't think political neutrality really exists. The closest thing that exists is status quo and mainstream / widespread opinions / beliefs.
On any subject that's not the main mission of the org, people will have any sort of opinions, on one side or another. Sometimes biased towards one of the sides depending on the mission or the actual people it attracts.
(sometimes on the main mission too actually, but in this case the org is in trouble / needs to adapt the mission - it can be an existential crisis)
And if for some idea, the mainstream / status quo outside the org is biased toward one side, this bias might also affect the org because the org lives in this world.
Let's take an (imperfect?) example: about veganism/vegetarianism/non-vegetarianism, what is the neutral stance? If the org needs to organize a dinner, some side will need to be taken. Allowing everything to accommodate the preferences of every person is not neutral. That's the status quo however, usually. You can only have "presence of animal-based food" or "absence of animal-based food". Nothing in between. You need to pick a side, take a non neutral-decision.
In the case of Brendan being rejected, people were going to be pissed either way. If he stayed, it would have pissed people who thought Brendan was not desirable as a CEO of an organization like Mozilla which is supposed to be inclusive because of his anti same-sex wedding actions. Because he left, it pissed people who thought his personal opinions should not matter. And both sides have a point, which is the hardest part.
> By allowing choice you are taking a neutral path.
By deciding to serve meat to people who want it, you already decided that the necessary meat production is okay enough that your org will endorse it, which is not consensual. Many vegetarian people stopped eating meat not for their own comfort and pleasure, but because they actually think meat is not okay (for environmental reasons, for the animal suffering, or whatever). Usually they won't complain because they don't want to be seen as jerks and to force their views onto people, and because serving meat is very normal, but that's still not neutral. Maybe in 10 or 20 years not serving meat will be seen as an obvious environmental measure to apply and will become the status quo, and serving meat the weird thing to do, but that won't be neutral neither.
By the way, if my preference is zucchini, will you make sure I can have it? Why not, and why the special treatment for the meat, of all food a human can eat, then? That's not neutral.
I'm sure this example won't convince everyone though and that's why I called it imperfect, so let me find something else.
As a bus company in Alabama in the 1950s, what was the neutral thing to do? Letting people sit in their bus anywhere no matter their skin color, or to force "colored" passengers to sit at the back?
In South America in the 1800s, was it neutral to let people have slaves? That was probably considered normal / acceptable. Neutral? I guess not for the slaves.
Today at a bar, do you serve your drink with a straw by default? If you do, in the eyes of some people, you are producing waste for no good reason. If you don't, for others, you might be breaking their expectation to have a straw and that's unacceptable for them, and it is your duty to serve them well, just letting them pick one on their own is not enough.
Today, when speaking about someone and you don't know the gender of the concerned person, do you refer to this person using "they"? Is it neutral, or is it pushing fancy new pronouns that break English and don't sound natural? Is "neutral he" neutral then? Is "he or she" good enough when there are non-binary people out there? By the way, do you acknowledge that some people are non-binary? If so, aren't you too much into this LGBT stuff? If you don't, aren't you too close-minded?
You are creating a new company. Full remote? Okay, now, you are pissing off people who feel better in a office. Everybody at the office, then? No, that can't be neutral in 2023. Hybrid then? Ok, but now you are forcing people into some uncomfortable mix where remote workers are missing out on the office talks and office workers need to bother with setting up video calls with remote workers all the time, and to put up with video calls from the colleagues next to them all day. Here I don't see which would be the neutral choice, I think there isn't actually.
There might be consensual topics, but you have to pick sides for most decisions, even if the side you take is the status quo.
Well said, but one of your examples is not quite like the others:
> Is [singular they] neutral, or is it pushing fancy new pronouns that break English and don't sound natural?
Singular “they” is actually the traditional English approach. "Neutral he" is a neo-Latinate prescriptivism: it was relatively obscure until Victorian-era schooling¹ drummed these Rules of English Grammar into everybody's heads.² Even people who swear by singular “they” being ungrammatical usually use it idiomatically, because it's so baked in to the language: it wasn't proscribed for long enough to actually fall out of use.
Neopronouns are a better example: for some people, the class of English pronouns is closed, but for other people it's not. (Or, you could just set the clock back a couple hundred years, and use "neutral he" as your example.)
¹: Contemporaneous with the romantic movement, which gave us the Cult of the Bard. A man who, like his contemporaries, used singular 'they' in his writing.
²: See also: “to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before” (Douglas Adams). Totally kosher in the 14th century, but the same kinds of people who gave us “scissors” (an atrocious spelling, rivalling "cysowres" in its arbitrarity! What was wrong with "sisours"?) decided that splitting infinitives was ungrammatical. This has a much longer history of rejection (comparable with the duration of the transatlantic slave trade, encompassing the transition betwixt Englis and EMnE, and long enough for the construction to actually disappear outside poetry), so it would probably work as an example, too.
> > Is [singular they] neutral, or is it pushing fancy new pronouns that break English and don't sound natural?
> Singular “they” is actually the traditional English approach.
It's traditional for those of unknown gender. I believe (we could always ask) that the statement you're replying to implies "Is [singular they] for those of known gender neutral, or is it pushing fancy new pronouns that break English and don't sound natural?" because that's the new use.
I actually somehow knew that singular they is not exactly new, but not to this level of details.
But that only makes the argument more interesting: something that was normal was lost, and is now somehow coming back in some form… with push backs like "it breaks the English grammar" , where English actually already worked like this before (for the exact same use or not). Push backs I saw here on HN, or on RMS's website [1]. Regardless the new use, the grammar construct was actually there all along.
I love both your and the parent answers by the way, thanks!
They used to refer to someone (as a singular pronoun) whose gender is unknown has been valid English for hundreds of years.
He to refer to someone whose gender is unknown is, as the link you provided points out, a more recent addition to English grammar and could be starting to fall away again.
They to refer to someone whose gender is known can be and is used occasionally but can sound strange at times too, he or she would and should usually be preferred.
To only use they to refer to someone whose gender is known is novel, forced, and contradicts the previous rule so it does break grammar (as the other link from Stallman shows).
• The third-person plural 'they' is uncontroversial.
• The third-person singular 'they' for an unknown (but not general) individual, while valid English in nearly all dialects, went through a period of being proscribed for no apparent reason.¹
• The third-person singular 'they' for a specific individual, of unknown gender, was proscribed and uncommon. Evidence of its historical use is a lot rarer than the unknown-individual usage.
• For a known individual of known binary gender, you normally use the pronoun corresponding to their gender. (As you observed, neutral 'they' is becoming popular as an alternative.)
• For a known individual of known non-binary gender, it gets trickier. It's hard to separate language from culture, and English culture has more-or-less² only had two genders throughout the EMod–Modern English period: denoted by 'he' and 'she', respectively.³ To describe a non-binary individual who's sufficiently far from either of those categories is impossible, unless you fall back on the closest available construction: once 'it', currently 'they'.
To use 'they' to refer to somebody whose gender is known is a relatively recent construction – but English has been steadily losing its gender for the past few centuries. A few decades ago, to people in rural areas of England, a hedge was 'she', not 'it'. Now, we have sewists, and a woman's hair can be 'blond'. It breaks grammar no more than any other option would – and certainly less than the loss of 'thou' did:
> Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number to a single person, you to one, instead of thou, contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, thou to one, and you to more than one, which had always been used by God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking you to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out of and required to cease from.
Plenty of languages have a gender-neutral form of address: one that can be used for anyone. It serves a purpose, it fits a pattern, people are using it, and it doesn't even require extra logic in my natural language parser: I see no reason to call this sense ungrammatical, especially not when the others are accepted.
---
¹: For a specific instance of the general person, 'one' and 'you' are used, with 'one' currently out of fashion: I personally prescribe 'one', but often find myself using 'you' anyway.
²: Upper-class English culture, anyway. Great Britain's got a dozen ethnic groups on it, more ways of speaking than you can shake a stick at, can't even make up its mind what a 'country' is, and don't get me started on the trade/invade/cold-war dynamic with what seems like the entirety of Western Europe. And then you've got religion on top of that: are we with the Pope? Are we against the Pope? Do we even care? Which prayer books are we using? Are we running out into the woods when the moon is full and yelling 'Diana' into the night? Is the priesthood male, or some 'third sex' – and if so, what (if anything) does that have to do with 'eunuchs'? And then there's historiography on top of that, because culture is affected by people's beliefs about what is and isn't traditional… No, it's much easier to stick with what the wealthy and powerful's letters and diaries and books say, than to try to work that whole mess out with basically no sources available.
³: This isn't strictly true: I've seen writing that used þorn ſimultaneously with 'it' for Hermaphroditus. Currently, 'it' seems to be exclusively for objects, dehumanising when used for people… except infants, where it's an acceptable gender-neutral personal, for some reason.
1. The changes you've outlined are all simplifications except the ones for non-binary, which as the Stallman essay linked above outlines, is a mess. Simultaneously more confusing, less accurate, less precise, sounds more clumsy, and takes more effort. Not a winning strategy (though calling people bigots got quite far for a while).
2. We know what a country is, we've created several.
3. We're not with the Pope and haven't been for nigh on 500 years now and won't be back.
4. Non-binary is a luxury belief[1]. It came directly out of universities and has been supported via people of a similar background in media and education sectors, so if we're wondering how the wealthy and powerful want us to speak, we need look no further than this. As the link states:
> Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.
5. There are no true human hermaphrodites as even those born with something akin to the other sex's genitalia have only been able to produce from one type, usually female. As with singular they, it is a misnomer and the medical profession prefers more accurate designation of disorder of sex development. Calling them it would seem dehumanising.
> Plenty of languages have a gender-neutral form of address: one that can be used for anyone. It serves a purpose, it fits a pattern, people are using it, and it doesn't even require extra logic in my natural language parser: I see no reason to call this sense ungrammatical, especially not when the others are accepted.
Putting the verb at the end of the sentence is grammatical in Japanese, that is not a reason for why it should be grammatical in English, any more than giving my television a female gender would be (French), or using capitals for every noun (German). I'm all for helpful innovations but as stated in point 1, this ain't that, or should that be they ain't they.
> the ones for non-binary, which as the Stallman essay linked above outlines, is a mess.
Exactly the same criticism applies to singular you, down the the example sentences. I would take Richard Stallman's criticism more seriously if he was a thou proponent. (Use whatever words you like for the generic person / unknown gender cases, but don't start othering people by using non-standard pronouns exclusively for them.)
It's a basic fact of life in many pre- / non-British Empire cultures – and even in modern-day cultures formerly of the Empire. If you mean the modern, 'western' ideas of non-binary gender, that's derived from the experiences of transgender people, and existed for decades before the academics picked up on it.
Virtue-signalling existing about something doesn't mean the thing is made up (see: carbon credits, corporate inclusivity). Your linked essay somewhat misses the point: belief in virtue-signalling is also a status symbol, as is name-dropping social psychology and evolutionary psychology in an argument, and I could easily rebut that essay in exactly the same way it rebuts the 'defund the police' movement (except, that wouldn't be intellectually honest: for all its central thesis is flawed, and its examples are misrepresented, it does describe a real phenomenon).
> that is not a reason for why it should be grammatical in English
If I may be pedantic for a moment: it's the same grammatical construction as things that are grammatical, so it is grammatical. That's not up for debate! Even "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is, per Noam Chomsky, a grammatically-correct sentence. What's in question is whether it's acceptable, to which I say the notion of acceptability is not how language works, and especially not how English works. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription for further discussion.
You can fight the good fight to bring back thou, no one is stopping you (ha), other than perhaps the good sense to realise no one wants it and, more importantly, appeals to hypocrisy or inconsistency are basic logical fallacies.
> > Non-binary is a luxury belief.
> It's a basic fact of life in many pre- / non-British Empire cultures – and even in modern-day cultures formerly of the Empire.
But not part of a Britain that has a literate population that's been through basic science at school, which still appears not to have been enough for teenagers, and curiously, university educated journalists and educators. What could tie those groups together?
Regardless, what's happening elsewhere in other languages is for the speakers of those places and languages to deal with.
> If you mean the modern, 'western' ideas of non-binary gender
Yes, I do. I don't live in 1550 nor in pre-modern Britain, hence, those time periods have no relevance to this discussion other than "things change".
> If I may be pedantic for a moment: it's the same grammatical construction as things that are grammatical, so it is grammatical. That's not up for debate!
You're arguing on the side of an innovation, of course it breaks grammar rules (and who claimed that Chomsky's sentence was not grammatical? Again irrelevant). The only thing worth writing in that whole text was “What's in question is whether it's acceptable”, and it isn't. Wouldn't it have been better to focus on that instead of chatting nonsense about borders that only Scots with a chip on their shoulders care about?
No, because it would expose the paucity of any good reason to accept this innovation. The idea that those who are against this are being prescriptive is funny, I'm not demanding that anyone use an innovation in language to refer to anyone else upon threat of punishment if they don't comply. Now that's not how English nor English culture should work.
> They ain't them. ;-)
Glad you're paying attention but I meant what I wrote, the joke doesn't work if I make it more grammatical ;-)
This is so far off-topic we might end up in our own debatable lands…
> People still didn't like it. His right to have these views, their right too.
Yes, the question here is who mixed their personal right to their views with their professional responsibilities. If Eich didn't, then it seems clear that everyone at Mozilla who objected to his appointment did. That wasn't the conversation that took place though.
The "professional responsibilities" in this case was being a good steward for Mozilla's products and the vision of products that preserved digital rights for its users. Not clear what this had to do with civil rights like gay marriage.
> The "professional responsibilities" in this case was being a good steward for Mozilla's products and the vision of products that preserved digital rights for its users. Not clear what this had to do with civil rights like gay marriage.
That's not all a CTO does. They also have "people" responsibilities.
As the then CTO, one of Eich's professional responsibilities was to lead the tech teams and individuals at Mozilla. The belief, among a significant proportion of Mozilla's employees, that he could not be trusted to put aside his opinions on civil rights when managing people, was what led to the opposition to his appointment.
> The belief, among a significant proportion of Mozilla's employees, that he could not be trusted to put aside his opinions on civil rights when managing people
A belief he couldn't be trusted based on what evidence, aside from them not liking his views on gay marriage?
That doesn't make any sense., and there was something else going on. Eich's position was exactly the same as the platform that Obama when he initially ran for president. Somehow that supposedly makes Eich unfit to run a company, but it is fine for Obama to be President.
Obama and Eich are both people, but the president of the USA and the CTO of Mozilla are completely different roles. It "doesn't make any sense" because the comparison is invalid.
And outside too. I read that OKCupid invited Firefox users to switch browsers, and CREDO mobile gathered 50K signatures for a petition. So nothing specific to Mozilla in the end.
> No wonder he left.
He indeed wrote on his blog "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader" and he was probably right about this.
This was all discussed at the time: the campaign against his appointment was far from just being "inside Mozilla". And "what they perceived as their rights" are now actual civil and legal rights because US society decided that was the right thing to do.
That's a good point— gay rights are pretty precariously situated and it seems a bit premature to celebrate their status as set in stone at this point.
But Democrats who run in elections and appoint judges seem to generally like being able to point to the courts as a risk, and show little interest in legally bolstering civil rights when they have the power to, so it'll probably stay as it is... until it doesn't, just like with Roe and Casey.
I don't think anyone questioned the legality, but you seem to be conflating that with morality. evil (to use your term) is a moral judgement, not a legal one.
What he did wasn't immoral. Whether you agree with that or not that's a different topic, and if you disagree with that let me remind you that people have different points of view and that shouldn't be an issue.
Since morality is subjective in the end, the only discussion worth having is whether or not what he did was legal, which it was.
... to you. Like you say in this very comment, morality / ethics is personal / specific to each person.
If you did something legal I despise (I might even think what you did was moral, but still strongly disagree), I understand that you did something legal but still might reject the idea to have you near me or representing something I like and might employ legal means to try to get rid of you, too. By protesting for instance. I have the right to do so as long as I respect the law.
The fact that what he did is legal is settled but he still decided to step out, as a consequence of people protesting against him being the CEO because of his past actions. Since legality is settled and everyone agrees about this, it's not a discussion worth having, actually. Only the rest remains. This is absolutely non-legal concerns that people don't agree on.
Law does not settle everything. Legality is not sufficient for something to be moral. It might not even be necessary.
Now, the rest has also been discussed at length, so it's not clear it's worth keeping discussing this neither.
> morality / ethics is personal / specific to each person
It's not. Almost all of humanity, every culture now or historical, has agreed on many of these things. Others have very wide support, including universal human rights (which include your rights). You can find many arguments supporting these things, throughout human history. Societies and much of the world agree on them (including universal human rights). Research shows evolutionary advantages and connections to these things, and that animals share them with us.
Ethics and morality are not some arbitrary things we each make up.
> What he did wasn't immoral ... Since morality is subjective
I agree that morality is subjective -- what he did was immoral to some and moral to others. Similarly there are people who considered it immoral when CEOs were publicly voicing support for pro-choice policies.
For a leader it probably hinges on the perspectives of the people they lead. You won't have a healthy organization if a significantly large number of people believe you are behaving immorally, especially at a nonprofit paying below-market rates.
> What he did wasn't immoral. Whether you agree with that or not that's a different topic, and if you disagree with that let me remind you that people have different points of view and that shouldn't be an issue.
> Since morality is subjective in the end, the only discussion worth having is whether or not what he did was legal, which it was.
That's a philosophical point, a student's thought experiment taking the (positivist?) requirement for objectivity to a logical extreme - and it's a very incomplete experiment that takes only the first step.
Reality doesn't work that way: Most information and decisions in life are subjective and we have many tools for doing it that way. Subjectivity doesn't make something arbitrary or meaningless or infinitely relative. Almost everything important is subjective, including morality.
> I don't think so. Mozilla is tied to its agreement with Google and I believe they are limited in what they can do privacy wise. Unfortunately.
> The Brave browser is mostly a fancy Chromium and you can achieve similar results by taking an ungoogled chromium and adding uBlock Origin to it. But you are better off installing uBlock Origin on Firefox [1]
And LibreWolf is pretty much Firefox with uBlock origin. But Brave is popular and Vivaldi is popular (among some). A successful mega project is supposed to have (gently) knockoffs.
For a while Ghostery was owned by an ad company, and for a while Ghostery would add ads to browsers (IIRC). The first is no longer the case, not sure about the second.
As soon as it got bought up by an ad company it just felt like a poisoned well so I stopped using it / recommending it to friends. Their reputation suffered so I stopped paying attention to see if they got any better.
Unfortunately, everything at Firefox has become political in nature and it's been downhill ever since.
With an already low (and diminishing) market share, it's just a matter of time before Google cuts their search engine deal with them, then poof they're gone!
I suspect this won't happen. They cut deals with even smaller browsers. Its about proportional revenue though, so dropping market share may net Mozilla less on the next contract negotiation.
I also don't think its in Google's best interest to let Mozilla fall out, if anything, it gives them some lever against anti trust.
> It really is bizzare, old Firefox used to support all addons
It never did though? In my recollection the old version had an Android-only extensions API, and only a few extensions ever supported it. At least now, in theory, any extension can run on Android, which is great.
Compared to desktop certainly, but in absolute numbers it still weren't actually that few, and certainly much more than the mere 22 (!) add-ons (as of today) that can currently be installed.
> At least now, in theory, any extension can run on Android, which is great.
What good is that theory if in practice I actually can't make use of it?
Besides, the transition to webextensions happened with Firefox 57, and support for webextensions was added to the old Fennec-based Android Firefox, too. True, not the full API available on Desktop was ported, but that's no different from the situation today, and yet at that time there were no artificial restrictions on what add-ons were able to be installed on Android.
And even with the webextension API, to some extent extensions still need to be specifically designed to properly work on Android, too (especially if they need to display any sort of UI)…
Asking people to run nightly (essentially modern alpha/aurora) or beta is asking people to use an insecure browser with bugs.
Firefox not allowing people to control their own browser and install add-ons, enable features, etc without their permission was the end of Firefox for me (back in version 37). This move to trade freedom for "security" for the technologically ignorant ended up providing neither. Especially considering the security theater that is the automated signing portal. The only benefit to all this is the ability to revoke after the damage is done widescale enough to be known.
There are the un-branded builds of Firefox that are not buggy and do not restrict your software freedoms for no purpose. Unfortunately Mozilla has disabled auto-updates in the unbranded builds so you have to manually install the a new full browser for every little update. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
As far as I know you can install any addons you want, you just have to create your own collection. Those default addons you see are only Mozillas standard collection.
Even do I would like there were more addons to choose from as default I can understand Mozillas choice here. And that is that most addons are not design for android and they would not work or give a very bad UX. So for many non tech savvy standard users, that just would be frustrated and blame Firefox, this decision can make sense to select god and popular addons they know works well.
But it would be great if more addons could be added ofcourse, and that Mozilla could have some design guidelines for new addons that they should work for both desktop and mobile (where it make sense). And mark in the addon store which addons that are design for both. Or maybe have a simple setting in Firefox for android that is for advanced users, there they could add any addon, but first they have to check a box that they understand that the addon may not work correctly on a smartphone.
>As far as I know you can install any addons you want, you just have to create your own collection.
I'm also very interested in bypassing the mobile limitation. Does creating a custom collection require an account? Ive never seen the option and have tried everything to back to 2019-2020 Firefox plugin capabilities.
Update: For anyone in the same position, I just saw this solution in another comment. Its unfortunate that such basic functionality requires a whole user account.
>For reference, to work around mozilla's artificial restrictions, you have to use nightly. Once you activate the debug menu (about firefox > tap logo 5 times) there's the option to set a "custom add-on collection". You can make a custom collection on addons.mozilla.org using a firefox account. The two fields are the last two parts of the URL on your custom collection.
I had to stop using Firefox mobile due to this (and removal of about:config). I switched to Kiwi browser and I have been using Violentmonkey for several years. It doesn't work perfectly but it has been good enough for me.
And also also, why they block the ability to run devtools directly on mobile. It's an incredibly sad state of affairs that I have to use a chromium fork to do something that was pioneered on Firefox. Why do Mozilla keep shooting themselves in the foot like this?
And why is mouse/keyboard and stylus support so bad on mobile? Most of the normal browsing hotkeys don't work, even though people can use that setup a good bit with tablets and foldables.
Check for the appropriate modifiers on your key event + R, and call components.useCases.sessionUseCases.reloadUrl().
Why is it so bad ? Because noone uses a keyboard on mobile. Because if they had spent time implementing any other features that are used by 0.0001% of users, you'd have been complaining that Mozilla is wasting their money on not making a better browser.
Web developers are, indeed a tiny fraction of the overall userbase for web browsers. Why browser makers might want to cater to their needs anyway is left as an exercise for the reader.
Why browser makers might not want to cater to web developers wanting to use a keyboard on a platform that is used at 99.9% through touch controls, platform on which we both know they neither develop on (when is the last time you made a website on your tablet?) or even test on, is indeed left as an exercise for the reader.
Testing websites on actual mobile devices is generally advisable. Testing them in a niche browser, perhaps not so much, but more people will if that browser makes it easy.
Doesn't seem very high up their list of priorities, seeing as how their desktop extensions - including the "Recommended" ones - are allowed to break all the rules.
A surprising amount of them comes with unlisted and uncontrollable connections to snooping services like Google Analytics or Sentry, I've seen unexpected redirects / tab hijacks - mostly to advertise the developer's new other extension, even fetching and executing external scripts and other resources from various CDNs is not uncommon... essentially everything their extension policies disallow.
All these violations are hardcoded into the extensions' source and rather easily scanned for automatically mind you, it almost takes more effort to not notice them.
I've stopped reporting the ones I encountered, they were never taken down, never lost their recommended badge, and all the violations remained in every next version that I checked.
To get the source as its distributed to the browser you click "See all versions" in the "More information" panel on the left hand side of the extension page, then right click the "Add to Firefox" button and save to disk (don't left click the button if you're using FF or the extension will auto-install!), and then just unpack the XPI archive.
Don't forget to send in those abuse reports, maybe that'll finally get Mozilla to look at them.
That's what Apple would do, and in a lesser measure, Google.
Walled gardens have value for the user, Apple made tons of money and happy customers doing this.
But Mozilla is neither Apple nor Google, and Firefox is supposed to be an alternative to Chrome, in fact that's what annoys me the most with Firefox since last years: they copy Chrome for many things, but they don't have the means of Google, so it almost guarantees their position as a second choice. They did great things with Quantum, but they also lost most of their identity.
It is great that they support some extensions on their mobile version (uBlock Origin alone makes it worth it), but the wall garden approach is, I think, too much like what they are competing against. They could give the user an option.
Yeah if FF just becomes Chrome I might as well switch to the original.
I think Mozilla just has to bite the bullet and accept that they'll never be a mainstream browser (the majority of internet users don't even use ad blockers). The public is staying with Google and Apple.
Going down the path to eventually having no users is an interesting way to accomplish that.
But really, no, they don't. Put up enough disclaimers (this is the secret to compromising with security teams on usability) and let me do what I want at my own risk.
If I protect you by taking away your house keys so you can't have them stolen and abused, does that make me a good person? Is it a good reason to begin with?
Ah, I was hoping there was some amazing little known fork with lots of promise. My wildly optimistic hope is that servo takes flight now it appears it isn't just a research project. I'd love to help, but I know nothing about web or UI stuff, all my code is cli or embedded rust/cuda.
I know for sure I could enforce the use of my desktop addons by installing them manually. They were missing dialogs boxen and touch problems, but for the most part they worked and I was OK with the problems.
Of course we can't have nice things and not even bad things. Personal freedom is overrated after all. At some point Mozilla invested time and money to take my freedom.
This reminds me of the time of XPI and XUL, when I used to hack my own Addons together. Then they enforced addon-signing. Until this point you could disable it and switch to "developer mode".
I hate Mozilla and guess they hate me.
> A big thing for me is that Tampermonkey is not open source.
How does that even work? I assumed that Firefox extensions were implemented in frontend web technologies (JavaScript, CSS, etc.)? Do they use WebAssembly or something, or is it just obfuscated to the point that trying to read it isn't worthwhile?
> You are strictly prohibited from, and agree that you will not, adapt, edit, change, modify, transform, publish, republish, distribute, or redistribute Tampermonkey or any elements, portions, or parts thereof, including without limitation, to any elements, portions, or parts of Tampermonkey software (in any form or media) without the Company’s prior written consent. [...]
If you own the rights to software, you previously releasing something under the GPL does not mean you have to make derived versions of the thing you released under the GPL available under the GPL too. If you take someone else's code under the terms of the GPL you have to do that, but that does not seem to have happened here.
It only assumes that there were no copyrightable contributions that weren't replaced as before the license change. Not all code changes meet the criteria for copyright.
Website's source code is not open source, even though you can inspect it.
If you have a public repository with your code on GitHub, everyone can see the code. But they do not have the right to use the same code in a commercial manner, without you specifying a license for your code, that says they can.
It's worth pointing out that this isn't truly "getting past it". It's still locked to Mozilla's add-on store (preventing you from testing or manually loading extension bundles) and all you're really doing is switching the collection that Fenix loads the extensions from to one you control instead.
One of the bigger reasons to use Fennec instead (the old Firefox Android browser, still maintained as a community fork) for me has been the fact that you can also load in the XPI files yourself, which is needed for a few FOSS extensions that aren't submitted to the Firefox Add-On Store due to one reason or another.
Hmm I use F-droid Fennec daily, and it has the same whitelist of available extensions as regular Firefox. I don't see how to add your own, unless you go through the hoops of enabling debug mode (described elsewhere in another comment)
It was basically a complete rewrite. Mozilla moved from a bundled browser + UI to a GeckoView component with a browser UI on top.
I'm not sure anyone else actually uses GeckoView. I only know about it because their argument for disabling about:config is that users could mess up the bindings between GeckoView and the browser, forcing you to clear the browser's data to get it working again if you mess up the internals.
The old browser definitely could've used some refactoring but after the rewrite almost every feature that made Firefox interesting disappeared. They also changed how user-installed certificate authorities are handled (if you, as a user install your own CA, you need to tap the Firefox logo in the settings seven times to open up special secret settings and enable loading the CA in there).
Firefox currently has two things going for it: their tracking prevention being built in, and a few useful addons. If you don't use those or don't care too much about them, you should switch to Chromium (I recommend Bromite as an alternative, which has ad blocking built in and even rudimentary user script support without addons) because Firefox is a lot slower in comparison.
Completely new codebase yeah. The old codebase is known as Fennec and is directly based on Gecko (the browser engine that powers desktop Firefox). All the same advantages. The UI wasn't excellent, but it did the job perfectly well.
The new codebase is known as Fenix and is instead based on GeckoView which isn't an actual browser but rather an library version of Gecko that is intended to replace Androids own System WebView (it was first used in Firefox Focus which was this tiny trackerblocking microbrowser that they offered).
The difference sounds tiny but it feels just... way clunkier to use and there's a bunch of features missing since a WebView browser isn't made with those in mind the same way a regular browser is.
There's just... loads of features missing or not available and the team working on Fenix is blatantly either mismanaged or underfunded. It's so feature-poor that you still can't actually set your homepage to a URL[0] among many other bugs and missing features. It appears to have gotten so bad that they moved the entire issue tracker over to Bugzilla and moved the repo to a new GitHub repo to hide just how feature poor this browser is.
Firefox Fenix is terrible, has been terrible for the past 2 years and I don't understand why they're still developing it instead of shoring up Fennec properly.
> but rather an library version of Gecko that is intended to replace Androids own System WebView
Not literally, though. Yes, the idea of packaging up the rendering engine inside of an Android library with a proper Java API was likely modelled on the implementation of the system web view, but I don't think that offering a literal drop-in replacement was ever the goal. Literally replacing the system web view is impossible anyway unless you're building a custom version of Android, and even just offering an API-compatible replacement (which would mean probably having to emulate quite a bit of Chromium/Blink-specific behaviour with Gecko) seems of dubious value [1] compared to the additional effort required for building such a thing.
> there's a bunch of features missing since a WebView browser isn't made with those in mind the same way a regular browser is.
I think that's not so much the Webview-inspired technical design, but simply the fact that Firefox on Android always seemed chronically under-staffed. Even with the old Fennec codebase there were some comparatively and surprisingly major bugs and missing features (didn't remember your scroll position if the memory pressure evicted either background tabs or the whole Firefox process, under memory pressure session history would stop recording entirely for tabs that had been unloaded once [2], you couldn't re-order tabs in the tab list, and quite a few more) that remained open for sometimes years and were in quite a few cases only fixed because of outside contributions.
So then they went and did the Thing You Should Never Do [3], i.e. throw away the existing codebase, which of course meant that all and every little feature and UI nicety that finally got added throughout the years (and sometimes only because of outside contributions) got thrown out, too, and had to be re-implemented from scratch. And what with the Android browser still not being all that generously staffed and having to re-write the whole browser from scratch, it means that any progress beyond the MVP state will necessarily be slow and very intermittent.
> Firefox Fenix is terrible, has been terrible for the past 2 years and I don't understand why they're still developing it instead of shoring up Fennec properly.
The problem was that due to being chronically under-staffed (and also because of Fennec's design with a native Java Android UI [4] meant that you got at least the UI responsiveness benefits of multi-process even without actual Gecko-side multi-process capability), they never got around to doing the whole work of making Gecko on Android multi-process ready and only finally did it as part of the GeckoView/Fenix total rewrite. Given the time that has passed since development on Fennec stopped (and as far as Gecko was concerned, it stopped even earlier because they eventually shunted off Fennec to the ESR branch, which coincidentally meant putting a relatively fixed termination date on Fennec, regardless of how good or bad Fenix would be coming along one year hence +/- a few weeks [5]).
Much as I'm unhappy about Fenix and nostalgic for Fennec myself – if you somehow were able to drum up sufficient manpower for making a real dent in the bug backlog, I suppose that at this point it'd be more efficient finally re-implementing all those missing features back into the Fenix codebase, rather than attempting to get the old Fennec codebase working with a current Gecko build again.
[1] Shipping a custom browser engine (i.e. Gecko) along with your app immediately bumps your APK size by dozens of MB, so unless your app is actually a browser itself, you probably need to have a really special use case and be quite desperate to start considering that option instead of using the system web view which comes at no size penalty.
[2] Either the Firefox developers themselves didn't actually use their browser that intensively, or maybe they all had phones with much beefier specs and therefore never experienced the behaviour on a memory-constrained device. That particular bug got introduced in Firefox 16, got its first bug report for Firefox 24 and amassed seven duplicates before it was finally fixed in Firefox 46, but even that only because I got so fed up with it that I finally investigated and then fixed the issue myself.
Personally I'm not complaining that much about that turn of events, because it got me starting to contributing to Firefox for a while which was nice as a hobby, plus I got an invitation to the San Francisco all-hands out of it, which was nice, too (both meeting the Mozilla developers, as well as the trip itself), but for the management of the whole Firefox on Android project itself it doesn't speak quite that well…
[4] The very first Firefox on Android actually did use a HTML/XUL-based interface just like Desktop Firefox does, but they found that on a phone the performance of that approach was terrible enough that they decided to rewrite the UI as a native Android app (codename "Native Fennec"), which then became Firefox on Android until version 68 and the replacement by the Fenix codebase.
[5] I suppose in a real pinch they could have extended the life of the 68.x ESR branch a bit more, but only if Fenix would have been in a really catastrophic shape at that point.
> It appears to have gotten so bad that they moved the entire issue tracker over to Bugzilla and moved the repo to a new GitHub repo to hide just how feature poor this browser is.
The move to Github with Fenix probably happened because all the cool kids are hanging out on Github these days and they were hoping to gain some additional outside contributors that way. On the other hand, while Github's UI is in some ways possibly a bit slicker and more polished than Bugzilla's, Github's issue tracking is still lacking some notable features that are present in Bugzilla, like proper dependencies between individual bugs. Plus development of Gecko and GeckoView still happens in Bugzilla, so while using Github for Fenix might make things easier for outside contributors, it also introduces some additional friction for Mozilla's own developers.
As for the repo move – from what I remember around the time that the whole GeckoView thing started, they (or at least certain product managers) were dreaming of being able to develop figuratively (or maybe even literally) dozens of little special-purpose browsers along the lines of Focus. Like one special privacy browser (i.e. Focus), one special browser for watching videos, one for… I can't remember actually, but maybe for online shopping, one for doing "research" or something like that, and so on, and so on, and so on.
That's why the old Firefox actually got split up not just two-way, but actually three ways: GeckoView (Gecko packaged up with a proper Android API instead of the sprawling ad-hoc API in browser.js), Android Components (common UI components for web browsers as another separate library) and then the actual browser itself (because like I said the original idea was to have dozens of separate little browser apps, so they wanted to have as much re-usable code as possible – not just the browser engine itself, but also any other components that would be part of the native Android app – things like the URL bar, tab management, downloads, menus, sync, etc. etc.).
It's an admirable goal, but it also introduces quite a bit of additional friction – instead of building the browser in one go, you now need to build three separate projects. I suppose for pure Android developers it's nice not having to directly deal with Gecko [1], but if you're doing things that straddle those component boundaries, it's rather annoying. You have three separate repositories that you need to keep in sync, you need to wrangle three separate builds, when landing new cross-component features you need to land them across those separate repositories in the right order and with the right timing, Gecko development is still tracked on Bugzilla while the two Android repositories used to use Github… [2] And what with the additional split of even the Android app into Android Components and the actual app, even pure Android developers who didn't work on Gecko/GeckoView couldn't entirely escape this additional friction.
And of course (YAGNI was true this time), Mozilla never really got further than building the two browsers that are existing even now (Focus, which still seems to be hanging on, as well as the main Firefox itself [3]), so I guess that ultimately they themselves decided that having two separate repositories (or three, if you're counting Focus, too) wasn't actually worth the hassle, so they decided to merge them back together again in order to make the developer experience more seamless.
[1] Though Firefox has been able to build in "artefact mode" for quite a while now (definitively pre-dating the Fenix rewrite), where it'll simply download a Gecko build from Mozilla so you don't have to compile the C++/Rust code yourself if you don't have any intentions on making any changes in that area. So from an Android developer point of view there's not much of a difference between building the old Firefox for Android with an artefact build, or building the new Firefox with a ready-made GeckoView package, though I suppose the new systems allows you to skip some "Mozillaisms" that are still required for building the full Firefox repository even in artefact mode, plus of course you no longer have to download the whole large mozilla-central repository.
[2] Apart from the general annoyance of feeling that Spolsky was definitively right and throwing out the whole old codebase was a mistake, this was another reason why I stopped contributing to the frontend bits of Firefox on Android – I used to contribute both frontend and backend bits, and in conjunction with the general annoyance about the direction being taken, suddenly having to deal with three separate repositories didn't feel like fun any more.
[3] Okay, so there was Firefox Rocket, too [4], which was supposed to be some sort of lite browser for developing countries, but with the release of the full new Firefox it was discontinued again. (And shipping it with Gecko(View) instead of using the system web view would have definitively taken it out of the "lite" category, too.)
[4] And the "Reference Browser" I guess, but that was only ever intended as a demo project for Android Components and possibly to also aid in debugging without having to spin up a full Firefox for Android build, or before the new Fenix-Firefox was even in a really useable state.
I've landed on using the F-droid build instead of Nightly. That also allows custom extension collections, and I believe Mozilla's attitude was that they get more telemetry for Nightly as they consider that an opt-in somehow (or at least they did for the desktop app).
IIRC, the developer initially resisted shifting to WebExtensions and then eventually (my assumption) half-heartedly did convert his extension to it, but in the meantime TamperMonkey developer got to it much sooner and worked hard for making it work equally well in both Chrome and Firefox. It is still not as feature rich as TamperMonkey and not even actively maintained anymore I think.
I just checked the addon in its settings. Yes, it has telemetry. No, it isn't enabled by default. Its opt-in. That's how I want such a feature implemented (e.g. Homebrew doesn't, it uses opt-out).
What exactly is better in ViolentMonkey? Just want to know because I keep working with userscripts and after GreaseMonkey's collapse TamperMonkey has been my default userscript manager.
In term of usability: its JS injector mechanism is much faster than TM last time I checked. Not that it's a big deal for normal users, but I have a few huge global scripts that I can see very visible impact.
And it's more "cleaner" as that you can clearly see each scripts you loaded in devtool and debug them, but and I think TM is catching up in this regard.
Outside that, VM is totally open source, development seems to be much quicker (with the drawback of slightly less stability, I'd admit), devs are more responsive.
I'll pinch in with Tampermonkey's upsides compared to Violentmonkey.
Tampermonkey supports @connect [1] which lets you take an action whenever a script connects to a domain that isn't listed in its meta fields. Tampermonkey also warns you whenever a script modifies its @include/@match/@connect fiels with an update.
Yes, I was waiting for someone to write about it, but no one else did. I can see such a vast API that TamperMonkey offers in comparison to the competition. I don't have an immediate use of that extended API, but can definitely see using them in future.
ViolentMonkey at least seemed to be the only one that worked in my Firefox with NoScript enabled on a site. And since I was occasionally writing script snippets to fix stupid uses of JS to unhide images/html, that was nice.
My browsing's habit is the same as yours, just a bit different is I use noscript-mode and write my own scripts to fix the sites using ublock alone (so I won't need 2 extensions for it).
It was a bit (nice) surprised for me to see many sites is really usable in noscript-mode.
Heh. On a few (not all) my firefox profiles I actually use umatrix+noscript. :)
This one I'm typing on right now actually.
The reason is I like the simple toggle approach of noscript, but I like umatrix's granularity. So I set umatrix to block virtually all 3rd party things, but give it a full whitelist on the things noscript handles well (media/script/xhr/other). Then I whitelist selectively in noscript and expand slightly in umatrix if necessary (say, for temporarily whitelisting google's captcha images).
TamperMonkey has a terrible embedded editor. It assumes 4 spaces formatting and some other shit that I don't like, but can't change. I'm also lazy to switch to something else. I just wish they would fix the editor.
Oh the days when user scripts were simply files on your hard disk and could simply be directly edited (and e.g. also globally searched) by the text editor of your choice…
What? I've been using it for years and that's not true, there's several settings to customise formatting. Have you tried selecting "Advanced" for Config Settings, maybe that's why you can't see those settings.
Only a small subset of extensions are allowed on mobile. If you use the nightly version of the Firefox app there's an elaborate process you can go thru to allow access to all extensions.
I agree with most of your comment, but just a quick note that whether or not a service provides a privacy policy doesn't mean they necessarily do anything to protect users' privacy. (Mostly in the sense that if they did have one, that fact wouldn't mean much on its own.)
The same repeated with Tampermonkey. It now has telemetry built into it, at one time w/ no privacy policy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6hs59w/tampermonke...
The good one now is Violentmonkey. Has been for some time.
Does Mozilla have an allowlist for these? If so I don't like it.