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Mozilla is rebranding Firefox. The company is asking for feedback on the new look, which will try to cover the various Firefox offerings. For most people, Firefox refers to a browser, but the company wants the brand to encompass all the various apps and services that the Firefox family of internet products cover, “from easy screenshotting and file sharing to innovative ways to access the internet using voice and virtual reality.” The fox with a flaming tail “doesn’t offer enough design tools to represent this entire product family,” Mozilla believes. Instead of recoloring the logo and dissecting the fox, the company wants to start from scratch. That said, the name “Firefox” is staying, so Mozilla doesn’t have that much wiggle room.
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Mozilla is Rebranding Firefox and Wants Your Opinion
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:36PM (4 children)
I found Mozilla's moves more and more chaotic.
First, they made v. 4.0, in which they re-designed plug-in API enough to break many add-ons, and add-ons are Firefox main power. If I wanted Firefox without add-ons I would go with Chrome. About 50% of add-ons was totally useless in experimental 4.0, so they started to announce heuristic-based API to fix this problem.
I told then, that I'll upgrade my FF when I'll see these heuristics. Now the 3.6 still sit somewhere on my hard drive and I'm writing from PaleMoon :).
But that's not the end. Because slaughtering half of features will make FF instantly loose more than half of users, they decided to use add-on mechanism to do it. They remove a feature giving add-on instead, there are some critic voices but hey, there is an add-on for it. Next, they remove add-on compatibility.
That's how they removed most useful features for netbook (or other mouse-limited) computers such as advanced buttons customization or some protocol clients.
But the real circus started when they gave part of their buildfarm to a small open-source project about RISC operating system and started to do purges in executive chairs, in which political decisions were made more frequently than practical.
Simultaneously FF started to impact the privacy in their announcements more and more. Hey, after you removed half of add-ons users still stick with FF instead of Chrome because privacy, yes?. Well, it's a lie. Contrary to these claims, FF started to phone home getting a text file from some Mozilla's server every start (success.txt, look in your Wireshark capture!), downloading unknown listings from Mozilla's website, or visiting sites from "New tab" window just-like-that. You visited this adult site, closed its tab and then accidentally connected to employer's network - good luck :). And for some unknown reason, every now and then, it just connects to Google's servers just to talk.
It looks like Mozilla is torn by some internal forces which cannot be exactly investigated now, but the openness of their product seems to be the least concern in this process.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @04:11PM (1 child)
>And for some unknown reason, every now and then, it just connects to Google's servers just to talk.
That's the update check for Google's "Safe Browsing" database; it's ostensibly a list of malware-slinging domains that Google maintains in collaboration with the security community. Whenever you visit a domain Firefox/Chrome/whatever checks its local copy (or at least it's supposed to check the local copy instead of sending one request per domain to Google's servers) and the domain is on the list it'll turn on all the idiot lights and won't let you continue unless you click the secret "Yes, I'm really, positively sure I know what I'm doing" button hidden in a disused lavatory bearing a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @05:58PM
Thanks a lot for explanation! At least one part of this is known somewhere.
I usually turn these things off, my security solution is NoScript with a whitelist on a subdomain-level, HTML5 filtered in a similar way and (under Linux) a shell script which kills my browser in specific conditions (which guards against crap-designed websites more than a malware). Simple security, but sufficient in most cases. Before, it was some script control add-on, but it allowed to do too many "geeky things" with JS (specifying rules like all scripts from domains except [x] cannot execute code with eval) and got lost during Australis transition. I would use a per-application virtualization if I had enough cores.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 01 2018, @06:13PM
I liked Firefox, and still use it, but I have to agree Mozilla has lost their way. Asking the community for opinions on their bikeshedding plans, wow, sad. One of the most annoying things they did was:
1. Move features to add-ons.
2. Break add-ons.
One good thing Mozilla did was their project to reduce memory usage. Firefox 4 was a horrible resource pig. When the http://areweslimyet,com [areweslimyet,com] project started, the memory usage declined rapidly, then kept going down more slowly until Firefox 13. Then it began to creep up again. FF 13 could start with a blank page in 96M of RAM. Current versions of FF need about 256M. What the heck happened? I understand that they've had to keep up with standards-- for instance, I very much like having the Opus audio codec that was added in FF 19. But I wonder how much of the bloat is from crap such as the telemetry?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday August 02 2018, @02:38PM
success.txt is captive portal detection. Captive portals work by blocking all HTTPS traffic (usually with a certificate error) and intercepting all cleartext HTTP requests to redirect them to the network's login page. Firefox retrieves success.txt from a known non-HSTS origin to distinguish a known good response from a captive portal's intercepted response. Do you still get success.txt hits if you open about:config and turn off network.captive-portal-service.enabled?