# Mozilla bundles proprietary extension with Firefox



## joepie91 (May 14, 2015)

So... after adding advertising to the start screen, planning to disable installation of extensions from third party sources and deciding to break the open web followed by half-assed excuses that miss the point, here's Mozilla's next step: bundling integration with a proprietary service in Firefox. And it can't easily be disabled either.



I'm really starting to wonder what credibility, if any, Mozilla has left at this point. The points of "openness" and "control over your system" certainly seem to have gotten lost somewhere along the way.


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## joepie91 (May 14, 2015)

And apparently some form of Adobe DRM was bundled on Windows at well. I don't know the specifics of that one, though.


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## Munzy (May 14, 2015)

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/


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## Gang Starr (May 14, 2015)

Changed to Chrome long ago. Mozilla is going into wrong ways... A lot of things are so wrong. This move is totally not understandable .


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## MannDude (May 14, 2015)

Opera is actually pretty nice... Been using it off and on for quite some time now.


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## telephone (May 14, 2015)

MannDude said:


> Opera is actually pretty nice... Been using it off and on for quite some time now.


Make sure to go into "opera://flags" and enable "Tab hibernation". That single feature has been a godsend!


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## joepie91 (May 14, 2015)

telephone said:


> Make sure to go into "opera://flags" and enable "Tab hibernation". That single feature has been a godsend!


Huh. Does that work like The Great Suspender?


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## Aldryic C'boas (May 14, 2015)

I could forgize Mozilla for quite a bit, if they had simply stopped fucking around with Sync.  Being able to sync saved data stored on my own server to my devices was fantastic - now you either let them save your data for you, or you can waste a great deal of time with the "fixed self-hosted" sync that constantly breaks, if you can even get it to work in the first place.

Midori was my go-to choice when travelling light.  Unfortunately, no version of it on Android, and I haven't found any other cross-platform browser that lets you run your own sync server.  So now I'm pretty much just back to Links.


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## telephone (May 15, 2015)

joepie91 said:


> Huh. Does that work like The Great Suspender?



Yep, it's similar except it still shows the tabs content, unlike The Great Suspender which will show a placeholder when suspended.

Here's the spec of "Tab Hibernation":



Opera said:


> *#tab-hibernation* – If a background tab is inactive (does not load anything including XHRs, plays any media, plug-in is not streaming any data, or a script is not changing page’s title/favicon) for 40 seconds its process gets suspended and swapped out (causing process memory usage drops significantly). Swapping out happens instantly on Windows and is driven by OS on mac. If the process is shared between couple of tabs, all of them have to be inactive for this to kick in.


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## stim (May 15, 2015)

I've been using mostly Opera for years, but I am one of those people who has been miffed by it's change in direction. 

It's still a great browser, but I've recently been testing a spin-off from the original Opera developers, call Vivaldi.

https://vivaldi.com/

I've been testing it for over a month and it's very nice, if still in need of refinement.  Worth a look for sure.


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## joepie91 (May 15, 2015)

telephone said:


> Yep, it's similar except it still shows the tabs content, unlike The Great Suspender which will show a placeholder when suspended.
> 
> Here's the spec of "Tab Hibernation":


Well, depends. The Great Suspender has a 'screenshot mode', where it'll show you a static snapshot of the page, until you click it (at which point it restores the page). It's a bit RAM-hungry through, is my understanding, so kind of defeats the point 

Anyhow, interesting to see that as a default part of a browser.


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## bizzard (May 15, 2015)

Switched over to Iceweasel and Icedove today. Using the unstable version packaged by the Debian Mozilla Team. Was using them earlier, when my laptop was running Debian. Now its running linuxmint and it ships Firefox as default browser.

No visible changes after the switch. The Debian free software guidelines are pretty strict. So, they will strip off any stuff that violates the guidelines.


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## Wintereise (May 16, 2015)

Ditched Firefox quite a while back, it just kept getting worse with every version =/


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## telephone (May 22, 2015)

Even more exciting news!!!
 
*Link: Firefox Will Show Ads Based On Your Browsing History*
 
Here's a post from reddit going into a bit more depth:



> Ok, I took a few minutes and reviewed a couple relevant Bugzilla bugs. I'm not a Firefox dev or anything, just someone that needed something to occupy time. From a cursory reading of a couple Bugzilla bugs (which if you follow a the right links from the OP, you will find. I won't link them here because then people will spam them. It took me less than 5 minutes to find them.), I found the following:
> Mozilla is not sending browsing history to the server. What they are doing is getting lists of "Suggested Tiles" along with a list of URLs from the server. If by some algorithm, your history matches that list well enough, they show the tile and notify Mozilla. (I'm not sure about this last part...someone correct me if I'm wrong)
> They prevent Mozilla from passing a list with one item and discovering history by requiring the lists to be long. If I'm reading correctly (I haven't looked at the code), there are a bunch of allowable lists hardcoded into Firefox. The list the server sends with the tiles must be one of those.
> So the only info Mozilla gets is (a) whether your browsing history matches one of the lists of URLs (seemingly hardcoded in Firefox) that shows a tile and (b) whether you clicked on it.
> ...


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## sv01 (May 22, 2015)

Oh no too many compaint connection.


https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/05/13/get-a-firefox-account-and-test-new-features-in-firefox-beta/

Error establishing a database connection


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## telephone (May 22, 2015)

sv01 said:


> Oh no too many compaint connection.
> 
> 
> https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/05/13/get-a-firefox-account-and-test-new-features-in-firefox-beta/
> ...


In case the link goes dead, here's a backup:

Link: https://archive.is/jK1kD


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