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0 pointsscrollaway8y ago0 comments

Waterfox is nonsense, no offense to the people behind it. Removing some stuff from Firefox and calling it a day does not make a better Firefox, it just makes for a preconfigured one. You might as well just run Chromium.

The problem is that Mozilla is a good company, that has had a true net positive effect on the world, especially in tech, and continues to do so today with wonderful projects like Rust etc.

If Mozilla were a shitty company, we could all simply dismiss Firefox and get on with our day. But Mozilla is not a shitty company and the fact they keep shooting themselves in the foot like GP said, the fact they are completely out of touch with their userbase, that they cannot see the OBVIOUS problems with this addon even after the Pocket debacle, is ridiculous.

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bkdbkd8y ago

Heaven forbid the decisions about what features an application gives and takes away are decided by lowly users. The free in free software means libre still, right? So if someone forks over 1 change or 10 they are still libre to do it, or is that passe? Its free as in liberty, as in freedom of thought, or is that also passe?

Forking a project, and adding features and removing pulls that you don't want and/or need is kinda the idea behind the whole 'open source' thing.. cause what else would you do with the source code, but compile it.

Speaking of Firefox, a build or two ago, without warning, Firefox deprecated (broke) every add-on. Because [insert-old-architecture-security-justification]. It's not like anybody was doing anything real with a browser anyway.

scrollawayOP8y ago

The new extension system was announced years in advance, including the warning that XUL addons would eventually be deprecated.

This design decision is behind a large part of the performance improvement in 57.

Yes I'm sad, I lost some of my favourite addons as well. But this move was announced well in advance and it had a serious technical reason behind it.

In a difficult situation, Mozilla made a tough decision that is good in the long run and that benefits all its users. Crying "fork!" over it is so blind it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

> So if someone forks over 1 change or 10 they are still libre to do it, or is that passe?

It's nonsense. Doesn't mean they can't do it, doesn't mean it's not nonsense. Furthermore, in some situations, forks can be harmful to the overall health of an already fragile ecosystem. They're not free of externalities.

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