this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024

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Mozilla removes uBlock Origin Lite from Addon store. Developer stops developing Lite for Firefox; "it's worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future." (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago by LWD@lemm.ee to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

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Mozilla recently removed every version of uBlock Origin Lite from their add-on store except for the oldest version.

Mozilla says a manual review flagged these issues:

Consent, specifically Nonexistent: For add-ons that collect or transmit user data, the user must be informed...

Your add-on contains minified, concatenated or otherwise machine-generated code. You need to provide the original sources...

uBlock Origin's developer gorhill refutes this with linked evidence.

Contrary to what these emails suggest, the source code files highlighted in the email:

Have nothing to do with data collection, there is no such thing anywhere in uBOL

There is no minified code in uBOL, and certainly none in the supposed faulty files

Even for people who did not prefer this add-on, the removal could have a chilling effect on uBlock Origin itself.

Incidentally, all the files reported as having issues are exactly the same files being used in uBO for years, and have been used in uBOL as well for over a year with no modification. Given this, it's worrisome what could happen to uBO in the future.

And gorhill notes uBO Lite had a purpose on Firefox, especially on mobile devices:

[T]here were people who preferred the Lite approach of uBOL, which was designed from the ground up to be an efficient suspendable extension, thus a good match for Firefox for Android.

New releases of uBO Lite do not have a Firefox extension; the last version of this coincides with gorhill's message. The Firefox addon page for uBO Lite is also gone.

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[–] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Reviving a long-dead thread for a relevant update, in a top-level post because you deleted all of your replies in the thread where it was relevant.

Mozilla did reply to my email asking for clarification on their Fakespot privacy policy, and whether they collect or sell user data, as we were discussing - though that reply took them four weeks. Their response in full:

""" Hello,

Thank you for contacting Mozilla and for your question. At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws. The only data we share outside of Mozilla are generalized aggregated metrics with service providers who make Faksepot run to help us with logging and debugging issues to provide an uninterrupted experience for our customers, and we do not share this data for monetary gain. We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

We trust this answers your questions and thank you again for reaching out.

Kind regards, Mozilla """

[–] LWD@lemm.ee -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What an email to read. I find it particularly valuable for the things it does not say, but not at all encouraging.

We are in the process of updating our privacy policy for additional clarity on all the points referenced in your email.

They don't say the TOS is incorrect or too broad. And they don't say they will remove their promise to sell private data to advertisers.

At this time, Fakespot does not sell or share any user data pursuant to any applicable privacy laws.

At this time? Pursuant to the law? If Mozilla is abiding by law and nothing more, that explains why they are legally forced to admit they sell private data to advertisers.

And the law is the lowest bar imaginable. Google operates under the law. Is Mozilla not better than them?

... service providers who make Faksepot run...

...and they can't spell their own name right.

[–] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

God, you're exhausting. They don't sell the data. Get over it. The email left no room for ambiguity. You're reaching so far it's embarrassing. Are you really that jaded?

[–] LWD@lemm.ee -1 points 2 days ago

You posted a privately sent email that contradicts a publicly accessible privacy policy. In the four weeks it took them to send that to you, nothing has been changed, same as the prior year. And they couldn't even bother to spell their own product name right.

Do you acknowledge that the privacy policy makes it extremely clear that they do sell private data, as outlined in the table that they made for people who struggle to read and mentally parse full paragraphs of text?

[–] aleats@lemmy.blahaj.zone 268 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Sometimes you really have to stop and ask yourself what the fuck is going on at Mozilla's HQ. It's insane how they manage to shoot themselves in the foot at least once a week.

[–] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 77 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Google's vassal company

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 50 points 1 month ago

Yep. What is the likelihood of coincidence when 1) Google's just released manifest V3 2) is cracking down hard on ad blocking 3) is failing hard at being more than a nuisance to ad block users and 4) Mozilla is attacking its most widely used 3rd party feature; the core feature of Google's scorn.

This is why I don't donate money to Firefox. Mozilla, the for-profit corporation, should not exist. It's a parasitic entity that has no value, need, or right to exist. Users should be able to donate to Firefox and vote on specific features, without Mozilla swinging its dick around and ass blasting us all. If donations were transparent and accountable, I'd donate hundreds of dollars a year, for the rest of my life. Because of Mozillas continuous ratfuckery, they get nothing from me. I wonder how true that is for the majority of its user base.

[–] LemmyBe@lemmy.world 44 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think this is what's happening.

If Google loses appeals, Mozilla (and many other browsers that rely heavily on getting their revenue from Google), will have to find new ways to generate revenue. Unfortunately, they seem to be looking for the easiest way out, and that's selling out their users.

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[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 247 points 1 month ago (18 children)

I'm convinced that 80% of all these threads and the responses within them are astroturfing by Google to cause everyone to despair that Mozilla is no better than Google and that there will never be anything that could be developed to compete with Google if Mozilla went under.

There's just too goddamn many of them and they're all filled with the same negative comments. It's just like the "no way bro, I love paying for YouTube why you gotta have everything for free bro?" bullshit from a few months ago.

[–] abbenm@lemmy.ml 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I've noticed the same thing you have, but I suspect it has a different explanation. I think it's more an echo chamber thing. People have said variations of this for a while now in HN comment threads, on reddit and here. And there's a snowball effect from more people saying it.

But there's been a throughline of bizarrely apathetic and insubstantial low effort comments. That's the one thing that has tied them together, which is why I think they are echo-chambery. Just for one example: one guy just never read a 990 before (a standard nonprofit form), and read Mozilla's and thought it was a conspiracy, and wrote an anti-Mozilla blog post. And then someone linked to that on Lemmy and said it was shady finances. Tons of upvotes.

But I'm convinced that no one reads through these links, including the people posting them. Because it takes two seconds to realize they are nonsense. But it doesn't stop them from getting upvoted.

So my theory is echo chamber.

[–] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 39 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think it's probably a combination of both. There's an astroturfing campaign going on somewhere, just not on Lemmy, which is overall too small and insignificant to target. But astroturfing works - it creates the echo chambers you're talking about, it creates apathy. Most people just read headlines, not even the comments. You read a bad story about Mozilla once a week and you'll start to internalize it - eventually your opinion of Mozilla will drop, justified or not, to the point where you're willing to believe even the more heinous theories about it.

So you end up with a lot of people who've been fed a lot of misleading half-truths and even some outright lies, who are now getting angry enough about the situation they think is going on to start actively posting anti-Mozilla posts and comments on their own.

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[–] KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 month ago

I also noticed the same trend here and elsewhere as well.

[–] Corgana@startrek.website 16 points 1 month ago

Dude SAME. I find it extremely hard to believe that Google would astroturf Lemmy but it really does feel like all of a sudden in the past ~month a bunch of vague or minor complaints being repeated over and over in every thread.

[–] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 11 points 1 month ago

I use to follow a subreddit called /r/degoogle, which was nominally for conversation about how to remove and avoid using google products. ... But I ended up leaving because in pretty much every thread there was a whole lot of posts shitting on any and every suggested alternative, mostly for not being hardcore enough. It was as if the only acceptable approach was to never use any electronic device ever again. Firefox of course was constantly under fire for taking money from Google; which apparently made them worse than Google themselves. ... Anyway, I strongly suspected that people were deliberately trying to destabilize the group so that it couldn't grow or become functional. I had no other explanation for how counter-productive the bulk of the conversations were, and it would certainly be an easy and potentially useful group for pro-google people to target.

I'm less convinced that it is happening here though, but I'm certainly more suspicious of it after that experience with /r/degoogle. I reckon probably why we see a lot of any Mozilla stuff here is just that the audience on Lemmy is very interested in what Mozilla is doing - and negative news always gets more traction than positive news.

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[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 151 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Appears to be a mistake, but needs gorhill to appeal to make the reviewer aware of the mistake and to be able to fix it, which he doesn't feel like doing because he thinks it's unlikely to have been a mistake.

Update: now reversed, but gorhill removed it himself just to not have to deal with the review process and the possibility of human error anymore.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 26 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It's interesting to see gorhill's reaction. I understand that he's fed up with all of this bullshit around both the advertising industry and mozilla's internal happenings, but maybe this was not a logical decision. I hope he is well, or that he gets the help he needs.

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 34 points 1 month ago

The Firefox version of uBO Lite will cease to exist, I am dropping support because of the added burden of dealing with AMO nonsensical and hostile review process. However trivial this may look to an outsider, it's a burden I don't want to take on -- since the burden is on me, I make the decision whether I can take it on or not, it's not something up for discussion.

The last sentence...I feel it in my core.

We, the users, rely on the hearts and skills of volunteers who maintain critical code. His comment received 8 thumbs down.

I completely get his thinking here and anyone who wants to deal with mozilla's fuckery can fork his code and submit it on his behalf.

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[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 54 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Very cool stuff. Between this and fucking Microsuck Recall it looks like I won't be using the Internet at all in the near future....

Very fun.

Fucking Corpo pricks.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 36 points 1 month ago

TBH, we'd probably all do well to use the internet a little less

[–] DarkGamer@fedia.io 46 points 1 month ago (36 children)

So much for capitalizing on Chrome's missteps when it comes to ad blocking I guess

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[–] d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone 40 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Y'all realize a random employee performing the add-on store review process isn't representing Mozilla's or the Firefox teams entire position yeah? This kind of stuff happens all the time with all stores that have review processes.

Firefox Addons store prob needs to improve its process, gorhill is justified in being mad, and I understand if he needs a punching bag between this and google, but, as someone who also develops extensions.... These things happen. It's just a part of building browser extensions.

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[–] AngryishHumanoid@reddthat.com 29 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Mozilla says the addon has problems, the developer says it doesn't. Are there any 3rd parties that can weigh in on this?

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 53 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Mozilla doesn't show their work (the reasoning behind the removal) but gorhill does.

Being on the fence is an interesting position to take, but I would be genuinely shocked if one of the most reputable creators of one of the most reputable extensions of all time is lying to its user base about the locations and contents of the files in the open source extension that can be audited by literally anybody just by browsing to that directory on their computer, because in addition to being open source on GitHub, it's the same source on your PC.

ETA:

Mozilla also accuses uBlock Origin Lite of not having a privacy policy (a detail I removed from my post for brevity's sake) but gorhill provides a screenshot of it. I guess that could have been faked too. Less difficult to fake: the archives of the privacy policy on Mozilla's site, which took me too long to track down

[–] AngryishHumanoid@reddthat.com 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I'm not sure why you think "being on the fence is an interesting position to take", I'm glad there are people out there who have the skills to look at the code and see if it's doing what people claim it is doing or not, I am not one of them. I just want a browser that doesn't treat me like a piggy bank and less ads. I don't know the developers reputation and simply asked for more knowledgeable people to chime in, sorry if that's a problem for you.

[–] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago

For what it's worth, Firefox is absolutely still the browser that doesn't treat you like a piggy bank and has options to eliminate ads.

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[–] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 44 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

My own reading of the situation on the developer's GitHub is unfortunately that the review by Mozilla is indeed completely inaccurate in every way. No way to even read it as a "Each side has their own story" type of thing since they reproduce Mozilla's emails verbatim. They seem just materially incorrect. The source files referenced by the emails are visible on the same GitHub account, along with their complete histories showing no changes at all - the issues referenced don't and never did exist.

The only redeeming thing I can find is that the dev (ambiguously) seems to have never replied to the email from Mozilla about the issues, and so Mozilla was never made aware that there was an issue with the review that needed fixing. They seem to have done this because they perceived the process as hostile and not worth engaging with, which... fair, I guess.

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I understand where the dev is coming from but I think he still should have just replied to Mozilla. This is clearly a mistake on their part. The dev just seems pissed off and decided to not reply out of emotion. His call I guess but I don't agree with that approach.

[–] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

I agree that they should have replied, and that replying probably would have even fixed the mistake, but I also can't find it in me to fault them in this situation. Getting those emails would have been both frustrating and insulting, and one of their messages on the linked GitHub page goes into the various stresses the situation puts them through.

I don't agree that there's enough evidence here to decide Mozilla's actions were hostile/malicious - maybe if they were given a chance to fix things and still didn't, but everyone makes mistakes. Incompetent, sure, malicious, not enough evidence.

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[–] jangdonggun@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This issue has been solved, it's done and it's gone, there's no needs to bring it back, the uBlockLite developer is happier to not have to maintain UBOL for Firefox honestly, it's a waste of time, there's no reaons to use UBOL when UBO exists.

[–] shasta@lemm.ee 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Except, you know, the reasons stated above. He didn't just make a lite version for no reason

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 22 points 1 month ago (4 children)

My guess is that it was flagged by AI

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[–] erenkoylu@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Mozilla has been doing too many shady things recently.

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[–] voracitude@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Edit: bloody hell, I hadn't looked into Brave that deeply yet, fuck Brendan Eich and fuck Peter Thiel.

Jesus. A day without bad news from Mozilla would be nice. I am beginning to feel a distinct need to switch browsers. ~~and Brave is currently looking like the best balance between compatibility and privacy. I've only been resistant to Brave because it's based on Chromium and~~ I want to support non-Chrome browser engines, but the Firefox forks I've tried like Waterfox and Pale Moon just aren't there yet in terms of usability for me (primarily, wide protocol support for web video playback).

Anyone got any better suggestions, by any chance?

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 88 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Brave is currently looking like the best balance between compatibility and privacy.

Brave is the funding vehicle of a far right political activist. Fuck Brendan Eich, fuck Brave.

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 36 points 1 month ago (1 children)

IIRC it's not just Eich but also political agent Peter Thiel, the guy who created a surveillance network so powerful that the NSA relies on him.

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

IIRC it’s not just Eich but also political agent Peter Thiel

Seems you're right: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/new-funds-help-browser-maker-brave-try-ridding-the-web-of-nasty-ads/

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 32 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I had forgotten why I dropped Brave. This was why.

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 33 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Brave is also Chromium-based, so switching to that does nothing to promote a web without a Google engine monopoly. Of the three serious engine developers, Google (Chromium), Apple (WebKit), and Mozilla (Gecko), Mozilla is still the least worst option (and that's saying a lot as this story makes evident once again). FF alternatives like LibreWolf rely in Mozilla Firefox development because they don't do engine development. I hope the Servo revival turns that into a serious contender.

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[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

Let's also not forget their many privacy violations, including secretly whitelisting Facebook trackers that everyone seems to have forgot about.

[–] mnmalst@lemmy.zip 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

https://librewolf.net/

It's very privacy focused but if sites break you can turn of fingerprinting protection and thing like that in the settings with one click.

Great browser

[–] katharta@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 1 month ago (5 children)

LibreWolf still depends on Firefox for continued development. If Mozilla goes under, I don't see it having all that much of a future.

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[–] swag_money@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago (8 children)

when ublock goes, i go :p

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[–] AresUII@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

uBO is still available:

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