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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2020, @11:50PM (1 child)
It's a feature
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:41AM
A great "feature" would be if the Google Play Store allowed installation of the last couple previous versions like F-droid does, which makes most of these risks with updating and testing new versions less of an issue, and for ALL appy app apps, not just luddite Firefox. (This was posted with FF 68 on Android with auto updates disabled.)
(Score: 1, Disagree) by barbara hudson on Tuesday August 25 2020, @11:54PM (5 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:17AM (3 children)
autoupdate
Other things you don't get:
You're welcome.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @01:18AM (2 children)
And if they're too stupid to learn the lesson after getting bit, hey, in their case why should anyone else care? Let them be the guinea pigs for new releases.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:53AM (1 child)
And pray tell us how do you propose we check which version is okay to update and which not? You have two phones or do you skip security issues?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:27PM
For me, usability takes priority over security.
(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.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:09AM (28 children)
Click onwards, comrades.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:19AM
You can't stop progress.
(Score: 3, Funny) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:45AM (26 children)
That's right. *You won't find reverse in a Russian tank*
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @01:22AM (21 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @01:26AM (12 children)
> ...set one track to forward, the other to reverse...
You won't find reverse in a Russian tank!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @01:38AM
And modded Informative!
We have fine scientific minds here, don't we?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:35AM (6 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:58AM (5 children)
Swoosh.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:44AM (4 children)
I, for one, am flummoxed! I don't know how they do it
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:57AM (3 children)
Some people have one track minds others have no track minds...
(Score: 4, Funny) by PiMuNu on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:18AM (2 children)
Some have two track minds that you can lock together with a pin or lever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:31PM (1 child)
Keep moving forwards, no retreat no surrender.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday August 26 2020, @08:10PM
Damn the resonance cannons, full speed ahead!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday August 26 2020, @08:08AM (2 children)
You'll find four reverse gears on an Italian tank!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:10PM
Y'all buy from the ${FAVORITE_COUNTRY_TO_MAKE_FUN_OF}...?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:02PM
and six reverse gears plus hi and low range in a French tank
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:02PM
Maybe you can only put one track into reverse. So its its semi-reverse instead of full-reverse, totally different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @01:42AM (6 children)
So, you're going to expose the engine section behind just to reposition? Great design there.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:39AM (5 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:04AM (4 children)
You wrote that the tracks don't need to go backwards to the GP that said the tanks can't move backwards.
Now that you claim that they can go independently backwards, what do you think happens if both tracks move backwards at the same time?
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:54AM (3 children)
Also, on bulldozers and shovels and air tracks (pneumatic rock drilling machines) there's no actual gear that shifts between reverse and forward. Just valves to reverse the flow of hydraulic fluid or air to the independent drive motors. On a tank you can have gears for different speeds, but the reverse/forwards is still hydraulic, not an actual gear switching.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:15AM (1 child)
Oh wow.
Dude, what if GP meant that there was no way to put either track in reverse?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:31AM
Somples, they would jst reverse one of them. ::ducks::
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:36PM
Hey Barbara - I don't get it. Do you mean there is no reverse? Or there is reverse? It's so hard.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:12AM
*sigh* Why me, lord? [quotes.net]...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:32AM (3 children)
Whereas in Italian tanks all the gears are reverse [thedailymash.co.uk].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:12PM (2 children)
Yeah, that's right, we invade you on our fuckin' backs!
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday August 27 2020, @05:24AM (1 child)
I thought invading the other side's backs was more a Greek thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @09:48AM
That involves horses.
(Score: 5, Funny) by jasassin on Wednesday August 26 2020, @01:35AM
Firefox breaking extensions, and hosing the UI?
Unprecedented!
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @01:44AM (4 children)
I'm not generally one for conspiracy theory, but maybe it's time to look into who benefits from the ultimate failure of Firefox. Spyware makers and advertisers, since a monoculture benefits both. Governments with fewer targets to infiltrate. Anyone else?
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:50AM (3 children)
No conspiracy theory needed. Mozilla is a non-profit, and they're acting about as well managed as is par for the course in the non-profit world.
That they ever got to be worth mention in the first place just says a ton about the other browser that had any popularity whatsoever when it came on the scene (before Chrome existed and when Apple was mostly known as that other computer manufacturer that did something like make Fischer-Price computers...nobody really knows because it was about as popular as desktop Linux at the time).
For what it's worth, when Firefox had its heyday, browsers did a lot less, and they did what they did far better than they do now. Open source projects that try to do too many things are particularly fragile things, as the more complex the tool, the more managerial juggling there is to do, and unlike the for-profit world, there just isn't much managerial expertise in the non-profit sector.
Just be glad systemd and pulseaudio at least have for-profit enterprise maintaining them; the sort of havoc that'd come from them being in the hands of an organization like Mozilla would be enough to have me missing the days when the only thing I had to worry about with my OS was a weekly BSOD...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @08:42AM
That's a load of BS right there. Written most likely by someone that has zero clues about software, never mind FOSS.
Then I shall be very glad that a very "for profit" organization is managing the Linux kernel or GCC.
Now please go back to the rock you crawled out of.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:07AM
> Just be glad systemd and pulseaudio at least have for-profit enterprise maintaining them
We wouldn't have systemd in the first place if it wasn't for a certain enterprise. Should I really be glad?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2020, @03:45AM
The Browser developer is *ACTUALLY A FOR-PROFIT* company. Which is how that whole sleazy Pocket deal got pushed through. The Non-profit Mozilla Foundation has basically nothing to do with the Browser development and any donations made to it are not used for browser development, but for all the libtardy SJW stuff the useless foundation does while the corp does its circle jerk at Google's beck and call.
Mozilla is literally only there for the Dog and Pony effect of keeping Google out of Antitrust scrutiny in the Browser market. Come to think of it, it would be curious to find out where Brave gets its funding from...
(Score: 4, Touché) by Subsentient on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:22AM (8 children)
Gather around Firefox to stay warm this winter. The heat of the massive Mozilla dumpster fire should be enough to keep you alive once you've been evicted because your job went bankrupt.
On the other hand, you'll probably only have your phone with free Denny's wifi, and now the browser you use will probably suck a lot more.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:42AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:42PM
Uh, my mom? Anyone on Windows?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:50AM (5 children)
It still stinks like hell.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 26 2020, @04:05AM (4 children)
You spelled "burning tires" wrong :-) Maybe there's an opportunity tor a browser that doesn't try to support every whacked out W3 "Standard". That refused to run obfuscated JavaScript - or even any JavaScript. That didn't allow sites to override user prefs with stupid "!important" rules (because they're never important enough to override user preferences, you arrogant UX-monkey idiots).
Just show me the data - the way *I* want it.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:19AM
I browse the web on my phone via ssh to my cloud where I run elinks.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 26 2020, @08:42AM
Educated users use !important themselves on their user prefs. That way the user preferences overrule the site CSS even when the site CSS has !important.
No need to fix the specification or have browsers not follow it in this case. If your browser doesn't follow it and gives site !important preference over user !important, it is broken and should be fixed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:13AM (1 child)
!important is NOT about page authors overriding user preferences. It allows CSS writer to sidestep cascading rules whenever it gets painful due to the way weights are calculated. The fact that your browser does not allow you to override calculated value with your own is browser's own problem.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:44PM
It's -1 Redundant to correct Barbara Hudson's posts.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by jimbrooking on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:23AM (10 children)
Chrome for Android.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:51AM
Is there a mod option for "that would be funny if it weren't so sad"?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:53AM (8 children)
Or, we could go with the project from the last person with any sense to have worked managing Mozilla, and install Brave for Android...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:46AM (2 children)
I did.
I really hated having to leave Firefox.
But what can I do?
Companies get big enough to hire the MBA.
And see their followers as useless riffraff.
And become absolutely useless, having value only to investors, who have money to flush down a rathole.
Firefox is not unique. Damn near every organization will do this. Look how many aerospace companies are gone. In my mind, they were, by far, the worst at disintegrating once receiving funding. A flood of MBA would make sure engineering would be kept in the dark, and have their resources rescinded, held hostage for executive ass kisses.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
Over my career I have noticed a big difference between technology "culture" and product/marketing/sales "culture". A big difference. And, as said above, once a company transitions from technology to product/marketing/sales everything changes. The big question is why? My theory is that leaders expect all teams and employees to behave the same general way - and that they should be able to manage those teams in the same way. Put the same input in and the same output comes out. That just doesn't work. How Product/Marketing/Sales teams work is entirely different from how technology teams work, and the process of managing them has to be different as well. Most leaders don't understand this. Honestly, they don't have to - companies bump along and survive in this broken state for years.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by https on Wednesday August 26 2020, @03:06PM
The difference is that MBAs see all problems as people problems - their solutions typically focus on getting someone to change their mind. That's how they get, as you say, people behaving in thw same general way. But it isn't possible to change the mind of a technical problem, namely how can you quickly render HTML/JS and make access to a plethora of websites (including making some sites' rendering "customized") straightforward.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:40AM
I'll give Brave a try, because I hate this new FF version.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:16AM (2 children)
Nice advertisment you got here. Unfortunately, Brave a) is a chrome clone; b) sucks donkey balls; c) replaces ads with its own ads. Fuck this shit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday August 26 2020, @04:17PM
'eh, if they're curated ads with a near 0% chance to include malware, it at least would an improvement for the vast majority of users. As I assume the vast majority of users don't even know something like uBlock Origins even exists.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday August 27 2020, @01:14AM
Yes, I know. I even give you an informative mod for that.
I am trying out "smart cookie", which is a fork of "lightning" browser.
It seems success causes companies to sow the seeds of their own annihilation by providing funds to support lavish lifestyles of the management classes devoted to marginalizing the not so important class of people who design and build the company's product.
While it is nearly unheard of for an engineer to deliberately withold information from a manager, the converse is quite common within companies that have been awarded generous contracts that can support this level of inefficiency.
The company soon soils their reputation by delivering crap to their customer.
Now, it's just a matter of time before the company folds, and new employers get to choose amongst the flotsam of the failed company. Do they want the engineer who was terminated for being ranked as having a "bad attitude" when he balked against someone trying to use leadership skills to force an issue? Do they want to hire the leader who is above the physical laws that engineers confine themselves to?
How important is it the company's products work?
Answering these questions requires executive organizational skill. That's why they are paid so much.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @07:31PM
I am using Opera myself, comes with VPN and Adblocker standard.
I will say the news sites hate it though.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday August 26 2020, @06:34AM (5 children)
My phone hasn't updated Firefox (nor is one currently appearing as an option), so I disabled auto-update for Firefox 68 for now just to be safe...
I installed Firefox Beta (80) out of curiosity last night while checking out some other apps, and it doesn't appear to have all of the same problems that people are saying 79 does. There's a working Back button, Reload is immediately accessible in the menu, there don't appear to be any fancy animations, uBlock Origin is one of the default recommended extensions, and so on.
That said, the UI is so starkly black-and-white and simplified that it looks a bit like a prototype some college students would have come up with, extensions like uBlock Origin are no longer directly available in the hamburger menu, and the Settings dialog/tab barely has any actual settings left in it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:33AM
F Bete. Are you kidding here,
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @11:59AM (2 children)
Mozilla exec: "We are loosing market share to Chrome. How do we gain it back? I know, lets look just like Chrome".
The very idea that most people were choosing Chrome because if its whitewashed UI was a stupid idea on the part of the Mozilla exec's from the beginning. Ninety-five plus percent of the people using Chrome are using it for the same reason so many were using IE back in the Firefox vs. IE days, because it was already installed for them, and they couldn't be bothered to go install something else from somewhere else when they already had IE pre-installed (or today, Chrome pre-installed in every single Android phone).
Trying to beat Chrome by looking just like Chrome is not a way to win market share. Somehow that little bit of wisdom escaped the Mozilla decision makers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @12:47PM
> Mozilla exec: "We are loosing market share to Chrome. How do we gain it back? I know, lets look just like Chrome".
Not just like Chrome, that's not visionary enough for Leadership.
Hide the menus, disallow right click, tabs on the motherfucking top, moar Pocket.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:19PM
I disagree. People are not using Chrome because it's preinstalled (except on Android).
When Chrome came out, it was technically better than Firefox, running tabs in separate processes, allowing a single tab to crash, where Firefox thread model only had the option of crashing the entire browser. But this came at the cost of a browser with very few features.
I wanted to like Chrome, but every time I tried it, I ended up switching back to Firefox, because Chrome lacked a lot of features that I used. But for people who didn't use those features, Chrome was (and still is, if you ignore the tracking) the better choice.
But Mozilla was not happy with the power user niche, they wanted to take Chrome head on. So they started removing all the power user features, to make Firefox competitive, telling people "just write an extension". And people did, because Firefox extensions could do everything where as Chrome extensions were pretty much useless. And then Mozilla got rid of Firefox extensions, implementing support for Chrome extensions instead. And finally they were in the position they wanted - a browser so equal to Chrome, that the only thing left to compete on is advertising budget.
As a result, the people who used to move friends and family from IE to Firefox are now using Brave, Opera or Vivaldi, and their friends and family is using Chrome, because it's the same thing minus the power user features they don't need anyway, Nobody recommends Firefox these days, because the only thing that gives you is disappointment, because no matter how bad Firefox gets, Mozilla keeps finding something to break or remove. Well, nobody except the Mozilla fanboys over at /r/firefox, who still believe that Firefox doesn't track you, even though the list of changes to about:config to turn off tracking is longer for every new version, and keeps changing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @08:44AM
For me uninstalling and using Chrome appears to have fixed stuff.
With the new Firefox my phone got extremely sluggish sometimes (I guess the new Firefox uses a lot more RAM and doesn't free it up).
Before that I was using Firefox Android for years. Now I guess it's more like FireFucked than Firefox.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2020, @10:44AM
This is the same company that awarded Mozilla $500k to just five organizations, one of whom seeks to support "struggles against capitalism and other forms of oppression [archive.org], and spent a great deal of their budget on projects for censorship(calling it tolerance, but only tolerating speech of their persuasion) and the American version of "diversity", not surprised they had to fire lots of their developers and are making one bad decision after another.
All they had to do was make a XUL compatibility layer and ensure that the XUL capabilities still worked for the most part when they had all those engineers and resources, like minimizing to the tray, downloadthemall being able to save wherever you wanted, requestpolicy able to block requests early in the loading, among nearly half of the thousands of other extensions that are now dead.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday August 27 2020, @08:43PM
It renders soylent news better for a start.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday August 29 2020, @07:40PM
I found most of the features I use to be still there, though it took some exploration to find them.
AND it managed to find my old open tabs, even.
What it lacks is, however, essential. I haven't found a 'back' button anywhere.
It's almost OK, but it's actually useless or browsing.
-- hendrik