[GoLUG] If firefox really cared about security

[Barry Fishman]

On 2025-08-27 23:21:56 -07, Kyle Terrien wrote:
> Remember that extensions running as first class citizens were
> Firefox’s selling point.  The sky was the limit, and extension
> developers added entire new features to Firefox.  That was the one
> thing Chrome couldn’t do and the primary reason users preferred
> Firefox over Chrome.
>
> With regards to so-called “security” being the intention, remember
> Thomas Jefferson:
>
> “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little
> temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
> 	-- Thomas Jefferson
>
> Mozilla is paying for their mistakes dearly.  Firefox usage share is
> below 5%, and once the Google antitrust suit goes through, Mozilla
> will likely loose its funding.  History will remember Mozilla as a
> tragic case of a prodigal son losing everything because of hubris.

A fine example of pipikism.

I like the part basically saying that letting people play most streaming
media (which is unfortunately DRM locked) is part of an assault on
essential liberty.

There are plenty of choices in the browser world thanks to the fact that
Mozilla, Google, and even Apple (webkit) release their core code as open
source.

I am a long time member of the EFF and FSF, and really think DRM and the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was an outrageous perversion of
human rights and the US constitution.  I still can't see why the fact that
Mozilla allows the user the choice of enabling it (or not) in there
browser could be somehow be interpreted as a constraint on their users
freedom.

Your other points also seem to disregard basic reality.  That somehow
the security/usability tradeoffs made by Mozilla were "essential
liberties" vs "temporary safety" rather that what Mozilla considered a
balance of some nice features that still could be re-implemented with
code changes rather than plugins, vs major security vulnerability's.

Personally I had relied heavily on the old plugin system to get Emacs
style key bindings in Firefox.  I used Pale Moon for a while, but mostly
to launch the Conkeror browser.  The security issues eventually got me
back using Firefox, because UBlock Origin was more important to me, and
now I use the Edit with Emacs extension when I have a lot of text to put
in a Web form.  In some sense editing in an Emacs window allows me to
use the full functionality of Emacs at the expense of some unpleasant
setup time.

As with the DMCA, the Copyright lobby is using European courts to get
into international law things that they can't pass in the US congress,
and then push them through via US trade deals.  In this case using
German courts to charge that UBlock origin is an abridgment of their
copyrights in that they modify the content of web pages with their
removal of some of its content (i.e. Ads).

Maybe this might be a better target of your anger (or at Google who have
already restricted some of their blocking features in Chrome) than a
browser that has had trouble staying alive.

--
Barry Fishman