Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ObviousScience 3990 days ago
> It's quite similar to other browser integrations.

"Online advertisements with active content aren't shady, almost all networks use them!"

Except for course, what you said it's identical are a notoriously shady group of activities, which has led to much abuse my market leaders at various times (Google, Microsoft), and we see no difference here. For that matter, neither do you.

I get that Firefox benefits from shipping the integration, but you haven't provided any good technical reasons for it not being fundamentally a shift in the way you do business and kind of exploitative.

Holding up a bunch of famous exploitations as "me too!"ing is tonedeafly missing the complaint.
1 comments
azakai 3990 days ago
Maybe I am not following you. Are you saying that browser integrations with google, bing, etc. are all shady?
link
ObviousScience 3990 days ago
Historically, the binary blobs provided as "browser integrations" are both major attack vectors and used by market leaders to exfiltrate inappropriate data under the aegis of "they didn't opt-out of our totally optional service!".

So yes, the market is fundamentally shady for "browser integrations".

link
Manishearth 3990 days ago
There are no binary blobs involved here. The API endpoint is closed source, but the Firefox-side code is not. This is true for Pocket, Hello, and Search.
link
azakai 3990 days ago
Ok, I think I understand your objection now. I can sympathize with your position - browsers would be purer without such integrations. It would be a better world.

I do think, however, that to compete with other browsers, such integration is necessary. If Firefox doesn't integrate with search, users will not find it useful, because they are so used to using google.com and so forth.

So I agree browsers would be better with no such integrations. It's a necessary, sometimes painful compromise.

link
ObviousScience 3990 days ago
> If Firefox doesn't integrate with search, users will not find it useful, because they are so used to using google.com and so forth.

This is a particularly weak case, because what's really needed for this feature at the browser level is an API for search providers, backed by several plugins which take advantage of the feature and offer various providers.

However, that's not what Firefox did here, as far as anyone can tell. Why not? No technical reason has been provided, and the replies have been so completely off topic as to cause a long debate thread over that very reasonable concern.

Firefox tightly coupled a technology to their platform rather than providing a service API and plugins, and we have no understanding of why a group committed to openness would make such a fundamentally close source move.

Historically speaking, the reasons groups do that is malice.

link