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by kevingadd
4623 days ago
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It's fair to be annoyed by these design changes, but there's nothing you can do. It's already impossible to truly bundle every single dependency into one installer for an application like a web browser. They can and will change on an hourly basis, and having out-of-date (or worse, missing) data for things like blacklists can compromise your security. It's only natural that an application that's designed to communicate live with servers on the internet would, at some point, have to pull more and more of its configuration and application logic from the same internet. The browser's still open source, so if it bugs you, you're free to compile a build yourself and gather all the dependencies manually. The fact is that there are still stand alone installers available for all sorts of configurations, right there on the Mozilla FTP where they've been for something like a decade. If you're a power user and you're saying you can't figure out how to hit an FTP server or type 'firefox standalone installer' into a search engine, I don't know what to tell you. Calling this a dark pattern is absurd. Nobody's being tricked, you're not being conned into opting something other than what you intended. The same Firefox gets installed either way, the install process is just streamlined in ways that increase success rates and simplify it for most users. |
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As to the Firefox installer specifically, now that my brain and memory have had a chance to catch up with the rest of me, I dealt with its "stubification" some time ago. When that first occurred, I was somewhat annoyed. However, I fairly quickly found that full installer downloads were provided under the... "other languages and systems" link/page, or whatever it is specifically labelled.
I did also, over time, observed that the new pattern, including automatic downloads and updates -- or prompts to update -- probably would help significantly in keeping the majority "non-technical" user population up to date, particularly on Windows, that I was using more at that time.
More recently, I've been using Ubuntu primarily, and I've gotten used to the release hitting package management within a couple of hours. I reboot daily, and usually check for and install updates when I do, so Firefox updating has just become part of the daily routine.
I do, nonetheless, think there is something of a "dark pattern" going around, in general, of making erstwhile stand-alone processes more dependent upon network-connected and dependent back-end services.
When I occasionally help family and friends out with a new computer, no longer can I download their ISP-provided security software and get it up and running before plugging into the network. Nope -- that's all network-dependent installs, now. (Used to be, you could sign in to the ISP, generate a license key, and then use that to validate against a stand-alone installation package.)
At least Windows now has a default firewall that actually kind of works, and most people are behind a wi-fi router that has its own firewall. These mitigate the "machine will be probed within minutes if not seconds" scenario that's been described ad nauseum in the last decade plus.
There was also a point in time when moving forward in version could and did sometimes break things. Some of use became sensitized to automated updates and no convenient, or at all officially provided, way to roll back. And some of those update processes could and did get a bit annoying of themselves with their resource use.
Adobe has switched to a online-dependent, "rental"-heavy licensing pattern. To subsequently have X million user accounts compromised. (Thank goodness I purchased my full, stand-alone installation of 5.5 from Amazon.)
Dark patterns...