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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2023

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  • Unless they changed it, mobile Firefox is locked to a limited set of extensions unless you:

    1. Use Nightly.
    2. Create a Mozilla account.
    3. Log in to that account on the Add-Ons site and create an add-on collection with all the extensions you want to install.
    4. Set that collection as your source of add-ons in the Firefox settings.

    You’re also unable to use about:config unless you’re using Nightly (or maybe Beta). So Nightly is really the only version worth using since it doesn’t have nearly as many artificial restrictions as the stable version does. This is also true to a lesser extent on desktop where you have to use Nightly to install unsigned extensions.

    You also can’t open any offline HTML files for whatever reason and on devices with very little RAM (like 2GB) Firefox isn’t viable, but Chrome-based browsers work mostly fine. Firefox is still the best mobile browser though, mostly because it supports extensions at all.





  • Dunno. Regardless of the method used by the extension, I think any extension called “Bypass Paywalls” that does what it says on the tin can pretty unambiguously be said to be designed to circumvent “technological protection measures”. In this case, it circumvents the need to login entirely and obviously it circumvents the paywall.

    Though as you said, these guys should probably be sending DMCAs to the Internet Archive if they actually want to stop their paywalls from being bypassed. I know they do honor takedown requests. Maybe archive.today is the problem? Maybe they don’t honor DMCA requests. I very often see them used on Hacker News whenever someone wants share a paywall-free link to an article.


  • You can do that with permissively licensed software too. Except with those, the party distributing their repackaged version doesn’t have to distribute source code alongside it. A lot of companies avoid copyleft software because they don’t want to or cannot deal with stricter licensing terms. If you’re a company creating commercial software which you intend to sell, you don’t want to use any GPL code, because you want to keep your software closed source to avoid exactly what you described from happening.

    This can be exploited by primarily licensing your open source code using strong copyleft (like the AGPLv3) while selling commercial licenses to businesses that don’t want to comply with the AGPL and are willing to pay up. Qt is able to successfully use this even with weaker copyleft (LGPLv3) because it’s used a lot in embedded systems (like smart cars) which cannot comply with the LGPLv3’s anti-tivoization clause.

    This means copyleft licenses can make it easier to profit if you’re the author of the code, but of course third parties can more easily profit from permissive licenses.




  • This entire thing is just idealism vs pragmatism for the trillionth time. The idealists are mad because they think all ads are bad and we shouldn’t try to work with advertisers in any capacity. They do not believe reducing the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach, because that would be an acknowledgement of ads. Common talking points there are about how this is technically working with advertisers and how the internet shouldn’t have ads in the first place.

    The pragmatics also think ads are bad, but believe that an Internet without ads is very unlikely to happen, so they believe attempting to reduce the harmfulness of ads is a valid approach. Common talking points there are about how this isn’t giving advertisers anything they don’t already have and about how this doesn’t matter if you’re using an adblocker.

    Like all other debates of this type, this probably isn’t ever going to be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction and we’ve really just been seeing the same talking points over and over again since the beginning. So I hope y’all have fun duking it out, I don’t think I’m gonna bother looking at these pointless PPA threads anymore.



  • It used to be open source, but large parts of it have been relicensed under their proprietary source-available shared source license. The reason why it isn’t entirely proprietary is that it’s based on Firefox, which is entirely licensed under the MPL. The weak copyleft of the MPL states that all parts lifted from Firefox must remain open source, but the new parts can be proprietary.

    Source-available licenses are a type of proprietary license where the code is made public for people to look at, but you’re not actually allowed to use it. Users can still contribute upstream, so they’re usually parasitic licenses aimed at getting free labour out of the userbase without actually giving back any code to the commons, all while keeping up the illusion of being open source. It sucks.






  • There are significantly fewer Firefox-based browsers than there are Chromium-based ones, unfortunately. Out of the ones we do have:

    Floorp has much like Vivaldi gone the proprietary source-available route, so you couldn’t pay me to use it.

    Pale Moon is easily the most involved of the Firefox forks, being a fork of a much older version of Firefox, but I wouldn’t generally recommend it for security reasons. It does have its uses, though. Waterfox Classic is in a somewhat similar boat. Security-wise Pale Moon is definitely the better of the two because it uses its own fork of Gecko which is maintained about as well as you could reasonably expect given the manpower available to the project. Waterfox Classic meanwhile has kinda just been left to rot since most development is going to regular Waterfox nowadays, so it’s not maintained nearly as well as Pale Moon and it’s just been collecting CVEs. But for those same reasons if all you want is the ability to use legacy XUL extensions, then Waterfox Classic is gonna have better compatibility since it hasn’t been modified nearly as heavily as Pale Moon.

    LibreWolf is probably the most popular Firefox fork nowadays, but it isn’t much more than a Firefox equivalent to Ungoogled Chromium. Waterfox goes a little further, but not by much. Both can be good choices, but personally I haven’t had much reason to switch away from upstream Firefox. LibreWolf is tempting, but I can already disable pretty much all of the Firefox BS from about:config, so I don’t see the point. It’s pretty much just better defaults.