>They just pushed an update on android on me that disabled all addons except uBO because they don't support them yet, a few hours ago.
It's worse than you thought. You just got the new Fenix browser they've been working on for some time, it's currently on staged rollout to stable channel. Old stable was Fennec and it's getting killed off. I know this because I've sat in their Matrix dev channel until today. I'm not sure what their priorities are, but it seems to not be focused on user.
While this submission was posted I spent the time filing a report to Mozilla because I brought up 3 specific concerns about this browser and wasn't sure where to file them (Bugzilla, Github issues, or now Jira?). Their Fenix Matrix channel responded by censoring my two messages in full and banning me for 'conspiracy theories'. So much for openness and inclusion. I was gonna save it up for a blog post but screw it, lets do HN, it's in your interest sphere:
First issue: I've been having occasional crashes with Fenix, this was why I was in their channel as I was hoping to get to the bottom of it. I installed it as Firefox Preview and they quietly updated to Nightly. This is sorta expected and fine I guess for beta quality software. The issue is I had all the data reporting stuff turned off. Browser starts crashing, sends a report to Mozilla (shows up briefly in android status bar, disappears). I don't know what it contains and this was highly concerning to me, so I listed this as a first issue as I don't want to be bitten for leaking client data every time the browser crashes. Where, why, and how are these being sent. Was it because I was now on Nightly channel and not Preview? I don't know how else to classify this other than user hostile behavior, in the same range of hostility as installing sponsored experiments without notification.
Second issue: One of the crashes happened while downloading. Every time I reopened the browser it'd re-initiate the download and crash again. Fenix doesn't have a working download manager other than to tell it to initially download. Sucks for you if you need to pause or view what was downloaded, there's no controls implemented. I expressed that this is likely to be a denial-of-service vector as I had to wipe the app's data to even use it again. It's also risky to users on metered service if it's continually pulling data attempting to re-initiate.
Third issue: for between 5 years (for Fenix) and 7 years (for Fennic) users have open bugs requesting pdfjs integration with mobile. Ability to inline pdf's in the browser has been a safari mobile feature since at least iOS 4 and possibly before, to the best of my knowledge it's always been a feature of Chrome. Desktop's pdfjs just got a promotion to first-class citizen last release. Someone wrote an extension to make the mobile browsers use it. Can't do that on Fenix anymore though, not because of a compatibility issue but rather because Mozilla won't allow outside addons anymore in Fenix without their blessing even if it's to use a product they've developed. Only way to override is build the browser yourself. Again, user hostile. If they don't want to add their own product, let us use an extension that adds it for us.
Finally regarding culture: I've been a part of IRC communities for a better part of a quarter century. I've also done HN for a few years now. I've gotten heated a few times in different communities, and been kicked or asked to leave. Forums I've had to remove content that was maybe a bit hotheaded. My interaction with Mozilla was literally the first time I've ever been censored and removed without a single word given in rebuttal. One of the things I love about HN is moderation knows when to step in and mods like Dan treat you like a human when those times occur. I can casually gripe some times about HN's preferences on topics, but the site works overall pretty well. The message I got from Mozilla is 'bot removed'. Here's their guidelines, they don't follow them (but I do, to be transparent I have this issue in their pipeline): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/part...
To contrast, I've had to issue bugs to Chromium for browser issues and got nothing but decent things to say about their dev community there: You go to crbug.com and file an issue. I've had brief convos with some of their devs in Freenode IRC over some of the more buggy roll-outs (Aura was pretty crashy in the early days) and I guess the only thing you could say is they aren't very chatty. I'm concerned of course about Chrome eating the world but that's how it is. At least I understand Google's motivations. I don't understand Mozilla's anymore, they survive on Google money and are facing a continual bleed of users. Stuff like my first issue above is pretty major from user trust/legal liability standpoint and I don't appreciate being labeled a conspiracy theorist and censored for bringing up the behavior.
Issue 1: "Some fields, such as "URL" and "Email Address", are privacy-sensitive and are only visible to users with minidump access."[1] - So yes, you should not send crash reports when you are dealing with sensitive data.
Issue 2: That is unfortunate and should be fixed.
Issue 3: The issue for Fenix is not 5 years old, it is now one year old, see [2].
Regarding your ban:
- "I will not apologize for being spicy about these things"
- "It is a fact that you've made it intentionally difficult to use your own product to replicate functionality present in most browsers"
-> See the Mozilla Participation Guidelines - "Be respectful in all interactions and communications, especially when debating the merits of different options." [3] I guess you could have phrased things differently. I will not judge if this is "enough" to ban you, but I do also not know what you were posting before this specific comment, you mention additional comments.
Thanks for clarification on #1. It confirms what I was most concerned about and that was that my phone was leaking private info to Mozilla. On Linux I don't build the crash reporter, any crashes I used to backtrace and open with my distro first before moving to upstream. On mobile, Fennic had a specific option to turn off crash reporter, Fenix only has the two 'data sharing' sections.
I included the singular prior message posted the day before in my last comment on HN. I removed the part that was baseless in my second response which is what you saw.
@ #1: To be clear, I am not a Mozilla employee. So do not take this as a confirmation, I am just quoting the documentation.
@ "Fenix only has the two 'data sharing' sections." - You can always untick the checkbox in the crash reporter, see [1]: The data choice in the settings was removed in [2] and tickboxes were added at the same time in [3]. Fenix will also remember you crash reporting choice in the following crashes, you can test this yourself using - warning, this will crash your browser - about:crashparent.
Thanks for including your previous message: I think the ban was primarily based on your first message, but that is just my personal opinion. Hopefully you get more details from your report.
I mean, that’s the last text you sent. There was clearly other text you sent that was baseless speculation. There was history there you’ve not shown. Pretending as if this is the only text that mattered is dishonest.
I can see why they “banned” if you can’t even be honest to third parties.
>There was clearly other text you sent that was baseless speculation. There was history there you’ve not shown. Pretending as if this is the only text that mattered is dishonest.
Comments like this only further strengthens my point that rather than discourse this 'community' seeks to erase history and attack my credibility. Since Mozilla also censored it out and here's a screenshot of the original single text sent a day earlier: https://ibb.co/dgXBdJK
I handled all this (including attaching both screenshots) and more in my report to Mozilla. I don't believe it's dishonest to include the specific text that was censored amd banned when requested, especially when that text references the earlier 'baseless speculation' and I did not bring it up again. They asked what I was banned for, it was expressing my frustrations that caused me to send the original message in the first place.
Furthermore, its extremely concerning that the move to Matrix over IRC seems to be so that rather than just remove users they don't like, they can scrub the history of their message content and tag it with labels like 'baseless speculation' and 'conspiracy theories' to further debase the removed user.
I would include the text of the report I sent to Mozilla but it includes some personal information.
It's worse than you thought. You just got the new Fenix browser they've been working on for some time, it's currently on staged rollout to stable channel. Old stable was Fennec and it's getting killed off. I know this because I've sat in their Matrix dev channel until today. I'm not sure what their priorities are, but it seems to not be focused on user.
While this submission was posted I spent the time filing a report to Mozilla because I brought up 3 specific concerns about this browser and wasn't sure where to file them (Bugzilla, Github issues, or now Jira?). Their Fenix Matrix channel responded by censoring my two messages in full and banning me for 'conspiracy theories'. So much for openness and inclusion. I was gonna save it up for a blog post but screw it, lets do HN, it's in your interest sphere:
First issue: I've been having occasional crashes with Fenix, this was why I was in their channel as I was hoping to get to the bottom of it. I installed it as Firefox Preview and they quietly updated to Nightly. This is sorta expected and fine I guess for beta quality software. The issue is I had all the data reporting stuff turned off. Browser starts crashing, sends a report to Mozilla (shows up briefly in android status bar, disappears). I don't know what it contains and this was highly concerning to me, so I listed this as a first issue as I don't want to be bitten for leaking client data every time the browser crashes. Where, why, and how are these being sent. Was it because I was now on Nightly channel and not Preview? I don't know how else to classify this other than user hostile behavior, in the same range of hostility as installing sponsored experiments without notification.
Second issue: One of the crashes happened while downloading. Every time I reopened the browser it'd re-initiate the download and crash again. Fenix doesn't have a working download manager other than to tell it to initially download. Sucks for you if you need to pause or view what was downloaded, there's no controls implemented. I expressed that this is likely to be a denial-of-service vector as I had to wipe the app's data to even use it again. It's also risky to users on metered service if it's continually pulling data attempting to re-initiate.
Third issue: for between 5 years (for Fenix) and 7 years (for Fennic) users have open bugs requesting pdfjs integration with mobile. Ability to inline pdf's in the browser has been a safari mobile feature since at least iOS 4 and possibly before, to the best of my knowledge it's always been a feature of Chrome. Desktop's pdfjs just got a promotion to first-class citizen last release. Someone wrote an extension to make the mobile browsers use it. Can't do that on Fenix anymore though, not because of a compatibility issue but rather because Mozilla won't allow outside addons anymore in Fenix without their blessing even if it's to use a product they've developed. Only way to override is build the browser yourself. Again, user hostile. If they don't want to add their own product, let us use an extension that adds it for us.
Finally regarding culture: I've been a part of IRC communities for a better part of a quarter century. I've also done HN for a few years now. I've gotten heated a few times in different communities, and been kicked or asked to leave. Forums I've had to remove content that was maybe a bit hotheaded. My interaction with Mozilla was literally the first time I've ever been censored and removed without a single word given in rebuttal. One of the things I love about HN is moderation knows when to step in and mods like Dan treat you like a human when those times occur. I can casually gripe some times about HN's preferences on topics, but the site works overall pretty well. The message I got from Mozilla is 'bot removed'. Here's their guidelines, they don't follow them (but I do, to be transparent I have this issue in their pipeline): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/part...
To contrast, I've had to issue bugs to Chromium for browser issues and got nothing but decent things to say about their dev community there: You go to crbug.com and file an issue. I've had brief convos with some of their devs in Freenode IRC over some of the more buggy roll-outs (Aura was pretty crashy in the early days) and I guess the only thing you could say is they aren't very chatty. I'm concerned of course about Chrome eating the world but that's how it is. At least I understand Google's motivations. I don't understand Mozilla's anymore, they survive on Google money and are facing a continual bleed of users. Stuff like my first issue above is pretty major from user trust/legal liability standpoint and I don't appreciate being labeled a conspiracy theorist and censored for bringing up the behavior.