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Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

(support.mozilla.org)
757 points shak77 | 4 comments | 15 Dec 17 13:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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blauditore ◴[15 Dec 17 16:23 UTC] No.15932880[source]▶
Many people seem to be shocked because Mozilla installed an add-on automatically. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter since the code is coming from Mozilla - they're building the whole browser, so they could introduce functionality anywhere. If someone distrusts their add-ons, why trust their browser at all?

The main question is what behavior is being introduced. I haven't researched deeply, but apparently the add-on does nothing until the user opts-in on studies.

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vorpalhex ◴[15 Dec 17 16:37 UTC] No.15933001[source]▶
This is being added to the browser, outside the realm of security updates, through what is supposed to be a UX improvement program, for commercial purposes. It's written by a commercial company that produces advertisement content. It's not clear this code is audited.

Sorry, but I'm uninstalling firefox. They have broken the basic trust I have in them as a user to not push arbitrary code to my machine against my interests.

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zie ◴[15 Dec 17 17:20 UTC] No.15933317[source]▶
Have fun in Lynx. that's probably the only browser that wouldn't do something like this.

Well maybe Safari, not because Apple wouldn't, but because they just don't care enough about ad revenue.

Chrome: They leech everything they can get away with, granted it goes only to Google, but you know it's just to feed their never-ending ad-revenue goal.

MS: They bypassed IE only ads, and went on to build ads into the entire OS.

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1. bigbugbag ◴[15 Dec 17 22:56 UTC] No.15935952[source]▶
what about otter ? waterfox ? uzbl ? poseidon ? netsurf ? falkon ? k-meleon ? Iron ? Iridium ? Liri ? Min ?

To cite some of the browsers you overlooked in your snarky comment.

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2. lsh ◴[16 Dec 17 00:02 UTC] No.15936388[source]▶
Vivaldi!

+1 for mentioning Otter though - those guys are doing amazing work

https://vivaldi.com/ https://otter-browser.org/

3. zie ◴[16 Dec 17 03:35 UTC] No.15937334[source]▶
It was definitely snarky, but I did try to qualify the snark to be useful-snark, and not just plain snarky.

As for all these browsers, all of them(unless I'm mistaken) are based off of one of the big 3(Chrome, FF, Safari) so you still have to trust the big 3 to run these, for the most part, as they are all single-developer or maybe a very small team, and would be very hard pressed to catch underhanded attempts from any of the big 3 to embed any nastiness.

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4. anjbe ◴[16 Dec 17 11:14 UTC] No.15938995[source]▶
For the record, of that list NetSurf is an independent browser with its own rendering engine (and is correspondingly less… full‐featured).