[Discuss] firefox: hello & pocket

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 06/02/2015 10:39 AM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:
> Does anybody else find it annoying that firefox pushed these two
> services into the browser?  Why bake it in and not make them plugins
> or something?

Because they never purged the Netscape Communicator urges from the late
90's?

I don't get annoyed by stuff like that so much anymore.  There are more
minimalist open-source browsers out there.  This doesn't sound too
different from the Sync stuff they brought into mainline a while back
(put this in your url bar in firefox:
 about:accounts
)

While integration with third-party commercial software is sometimes
sketchy, I think the way Mozilla handles it is pretty great.  Sync has
never gotten in my way beyond the one time they introduced it as a
feature.  Contrast this to the crapware Oracle and Adobe tries to
install on your Windows box every time you download the Java or flash
(which requires explicit action to disable, every time).

Other things that are used by default make me a little more
uncomfortable.  If you have "Block Reported attack sites/Forgeries"
enabled, and they are enabled by default, every url you visit is checked
against a Google service:
https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/developers_guide_v3

But all-in-all, I'm happy that there is an open source browser that
gives most people what they want, is generally safe by default, and has
a minimal number of tweaks for people that really care/understand about
privacy.

Interestingly, there are some SSL bugs that IE and Chrome are /still/
vulnerable to.  Firefox admirably took a stand and turned off the
backward compatibility for the broken SSL implementations, even though
some sites refuse to update their side.

If you want small, there are lots of open-source options.  I just wish I
could do useful things on the web without requiring the cesspool of
security vulnerabilities that is javascript engines...

Matt