[ropeladder]

"the whitelist has a purpose" doesn't really capture what's going on, though. It's more like they whitelisted some of the most popular extensions and then just stopped completely with no intention of continuing.

With the much more limited plugin API (and simple html plug-in config pages) of the new browsers you'd think it would be easier to build and vet secure, cross platform add-ons.

[sbernecchia]

yes, you're probably right, they have no intention of continuing. I think mozilla is not really committed to firefox on android. after all they have a minuscule market share on mobile, almost not existent. they probably think that most users will install just an adblocker, so they don't want to "waste" money enabling other extensions. so sad.

[ZeroGravitas]

Somewhere in a parallel universe, Mozilla just let all the plugins claim compatability, and vaguely fascist users who dont like their politics are complaining that the instability of Mozilla on Android is the reason they hate them.

And further along, in a universe where they poured a lot of time energy and money into fixing the whole plugin ecosystem and succeeded, they're complaining about something that didn't get done because of that shift in focus.

The conversation goes something like:

"Why are they spending time and money on fixing mobile addons no one uses? I think this is because their management are too political, not like their old unpolitical leadership. And as I say every time they get mentioned "I hate people who say and do political stuff!!". It makes me so angry. They should only do what I want or I'll force them out of business from pure spite. That'll teach them to be political.

[akira2501]

So, Mozilla makes decisions to win over vaguely fascist users, or at least prevent them from having something negative to say? Or because in other universes there aren't perfect solutions?

Do they have any desire to just.. make a good browser that fulfills peoples needs?

[ZeroGravitas]

The point is, if you don't like an organisation for reason A, you'll easily find reason X, Y and Z why you don't like them.

Ask someone who grew up supporting a certain sports team or religion why they don't like the rival team or religion, and they'll happily give you answers why. They may even believe some of them themselves. Some of them might even be valid criticisms, but they are almost certainly not why someone chose their home team or religion over another.

This never ending drama seems to mostly stem from Mozilla ditching a potential CEO because his religious beliefs meant he felt he had to fund anti-equal marriage organisations. It all seems like echoes of that to me. 8 years of boring whiney echoes.

[teddyh]

Yes. Humans make decisions based on feeling and intuition, and most people then check the decision for any glaring errors by using rules of thumb, and, in rare cases, reasoned logic. But nobody makes decisions based on logic. We all just have opinions, and later, when pressed, find “reasons” to keep them.

See also this discussion about how to choose a phone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656790#21661157

[soundnote]

Let's talk about forging hammers for a moment: I could just be a blacksmith forging nice hammers to put nails into stuff and try to make them high quality - nicely weighted, comfortable handles, durable, repairable etc, make some decisions about quality/price etc.

I could also sing Erika or the Internationale at the top of my lungs or rant about the modern art market at the same time. These aren't very related at all to my actual job of forging hammers. I could also have opinions about something at least somewhat related, like constantly telling people they shouldn't use my hammers to build modern architecture because it's a steaming pile of ugly garbage. Let's say modern buildings use a specific kind of nail. I could make the hammers so they're by default kinda garbage for working with those nails, though adjustable to work with them if the user so wishes.

This evaluation of modern architecture is a valid opinion! But it's still really unsightly to advocate for simple tools to not be used for general purposes, or to try to build features into the hammer to make them a pain to use for making ugly buildings. It's simply not really my job as a hammersmith to do that.

And it's that attitude that we've generally losing as a society - a craftsman's attitude to just do our jobs well and leave the unrelated politics elsewhere. We literally have spice merchants' websites with menus that go "Spices - Gift bags - About Republicans". Your job was to sell me chili and nutmeg so I don't end up in those plain toast meme pictures and not political commentary about how one party is the source of most everything wrong in America.

Think about something like Christian rock. Most of it is pretty dull. Why? It tries to be Christian first, good music second.

I'd like there to be more craftsmanship-type organizations and less political activism with a job on the side.

Sincerely, one of your "vaguely fascist users".

EDIT: Apologies to dang for talking about hammers and pepper sellers.

[robonerd]

> vaguely fascist users

I've seen this one before, a GNOME apologist insinuating that anybody who wants thumbnails in the GTK filepicker is probably a 4chan user. Is this the new trendy way to dismiss criticism of software? Insinuate that anybody making specific concrete complaints about software has invalid political beliefs completely tangential to the feature/bug being criticized? What fun!

[ZeroGravitas]

Or you can just wait two sentences into their comment when they simply can't stop thenselves saying something about progressive politics. Which you really don't need to mention, and common sense suggests you shouldn't, when criticizing a bit of software or a charity foundation on unrelated matters. Unless of course that is the point.

[robonerd]

One person who criticizes Mozilla mentioning politics is not a legitimate excuse for you to paint the entire class of people who complain about Mozilla with that brush. Ironically, doing so is vaguely fascist, in the sense that fascists love to spread the blame for individual crimes across entire classes of people they oppose.

Incidentally, who's comment are you even talking about? I don't see any mention of politics in the comment you responded to.

[soundnote]

It's not one user, but it's also reasonably valid: There are browsermakers who just try to make a good browser and don't talk about politics incessantly, and as far as I can tell somehow their products seem to improve a lot in ways Mozilla's just doesn't.

EDIT: As an example, Firefox is discontinuing search keyword sync via bookmarks. Vivaldi just implemented syncing search engines via their sync service, across both desktop and mobile.