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0 pointsbwat498y ago0 comments

It wasn't supposed to be visible on the addons page

0 comments

I don't think that makes it better. Knowing that there's a way to get an addon installed invisibly is going to be more justification for paranoia.

dahart8y ago

There almost certainly is not a way to invisibly install add-ons, unless you are part of Mozilla, and, you know, making Firefox. If paranoia is your thing, it might be worth considering that Mozilla can do anything it wants inside Firefox core, all of it is "invisible" to you.

kuschku8y ago

And this is the point where even the most Mozilla-supporting users move away. For me, this is it, I’m going to Chromium.

Fuck this shit, in the past months we had CliqZ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708, we had Mozilla adding new telemetry, we had Mozilla force-enable toolkit.telemetry.enabled, we had Mozilla say that, if you download Nightly, that is considered opt-in to tracking, we had Mozilla put Google Analytics into the Addons menu (because it’s loaded from addons.mozilla.org: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785 ), and we had Mozilla say that, if we don’t trust Google, we shouldn’t use Firefox.

Fuck this.

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bo10248y ago

Yes and a big part of this entire issue is users deciding whether we can trust Mozilla with that power or not.

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bwat49OP8y ago

You can disable these studies under Options | Privacy and Security

_red8y ago

I hate the fact that Firefox increasingly makes me jump through all sorts of hoops to find all the hidden options to turn off their various spyware attempts. Its the Win10 of browsers...

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falava8y ago

You should opt in, not opt out

arprocter8y ago

Preferences/Options -> Privacy and Security -> Allow Firefox to install and run studies

zzzeek8y ago

that would be worse

Sylos8y ago

How exactly? Whether they push out code to you by just changing the binary or by installing an extension makes no difference. In fact, pushing it out as an extension, means they actually have less control over your browser, because are bound to the restrictions that extensions have.

Every browser vendor has this control over you when you use their browser. Some have even more, because they don't even need to tell you about it when they're closed-source.

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