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Mozilla seems to be hell-bent on alienating users, as they did it again:
An update to the Android flavor of Firefox left fuming punters thinking a bad experimental build had been pushed to their smartphones. In fact, this was a deliberate software release.
A Reg reader yesterday alerted us to an August 20 version bump that was causing so many problems, our tipster thought it was a beta that had gone seriously awry. "To sum it up, on 20th of August, Firefox 79 was unexpectedly forced on a large batch of Firefox 68 Android users without any warning, way to opt out or roll back," our reader reported. "A lot got broken in the process: the user interface, tabs, navigation, add-ons."
Meanwhile, the Google Play store page for the completely free and open-source Firefox has a rash of one-star reviews echoing similar complaints: after the upgrade, little seemed to work as expected.
Among the complaints are a missing back button, frequent browser crashes, and extensions not working.
Sounds like a buggy release for sure. But:
Unfortunately for our source, and the other Firefox for Android users, this isn't a mistaken release or a broken beta build: it's the new version of Firefox for Android, and it's set to hit the UK today, August 25, and the US on the 27th.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @06:09PM
The general thrust of Big Tech is to make sure you cannot refuse any update, since they don't want you to be able to actually control (or even own) your computer. Mozilla isn't really powerful enough to be considered Big Tech, but the rest of tech is also following this trend. By default, most companies and organizations assume you want every update they can shove down your throat, usually under the guise of security, as quickly as possible, and usually changing those settings is at a minimum somewhat obscure and usually heavily discouraged. Increasingly these options aren't even available short of tampering with the software.
The logic being, I suppose, that if the crashing applications, back doors, and spyware have a brand name on them, it's OK.