Kris_88 wrote: ↑2023-12-17, 18:41
Extensions are certainly good...
However, there are situations where adding a preference costs only a couple of lines of code in the browser, but several kilobytes in the form of an extension. It's not effective. I don't want to clutter my profile and a browser with extensions. I think extensions make sense when you need to add new functionality that is completely missing in the browser. And what costs a couple of lines of code needs to be built in.
But this is just an opinion, and I do not insist. I'm just saying...
I do get where you're coming from with this, as I don't install many extensions myself and prefer to keep the browser as stock as possible. The whole "your browser, your way" thing is mostly in reference to the fact that you can modify the browser with extensions. However, there is a trade-off to that. The very fact that the browser is so extensible can mean that the developers are less interested in putting work into the UI, and more likely to tell you that you need to find or write an extension that does what you need.
I think the natural price of having such a customizable browser, is that it does create a climate where users are expected to install extensions to modify behavior rather than getting something polished that "just works" out of the box with plenty of configuration options, It's that old open source spirit, the one that expects that if you want freedom, you have to work for it and put in the research and tweaking... like back when I used Linux in the early 2000s and had to compile my own kernel to get my system working how I wanted.
I think our philosophy is a bit like that... we won't give you the most polished experience out of the box (although I personally think our OOBE is much better than the Firefox we forked from), but we are offering you the opportunity to build the experience you want by searching through extensions others have made, and possibly even learning to make or modify extensions yourself where possible to get what you want. "Your browser, your way" doesn't mean "Your wish is our command, "or "The customer is always right," but rather it means, "You have the opportunity to extend and modify the browser yourself, and if you put in the work hunting down extensions or writing your own, you can get what you want." What I think really angered people here about Mozilla enough to start the project, isn't that they didn't give us exactly what we wanted, but rather that they took a lot of the extensibility away, and instead made everyone more dependent on what they provide out of the box, which pleases most people but doesn't work for everyone.
While we won't take away your freedom to extend the browser in any way you see fit, we also won't accept an obligation to implement user requests. This isn't a positive freedom where we guarantee you rights that we will go out of our way to uphold, it's old-school negative freedom where you are left to fend for yourself and figure things out without interference. You have to put in a bit of work to have it YOUR way, but the freedom to have it your way is in fact there, should you choose to put in some effort and take advantage of that. This community wasn't really built for "normal" users... the greater your ability to understand and write code, the more freedom you get. The less you understand your computer, the more you rely on the defaults... and thus are probably better served with Chrome or Firefox, because they are already taking care of those users and their needs for the most part.
back2themoon wrote: ↑2023-12-17, 19:07
That sounds unfair. Surely you can't call PM a program where "
nothing can be configured"? Just to save "several kilobytes of extension clutter" and for not adding a somewhat esoteric option?
I agree that it sounds unfair. Honestly I'm wondering if I've blown this whole argument out of proportion... it hardly matters what we do at this point anyway, since the extension already does most of the damage I was afraid the pref would do anyway. Probably nothing would be hurt by giving Kris what he wants that wasn't already hurt by uBO implementing this. A lot of our users have it installed anyway. I guess I just don't want this to become a precedent, and feel like some of the reasoning is a bit unfair, more than I care about the actual feature one way or another at this point. We started off talking about CSP, and ended up talking what the ideal of user freedom means and whether we're living up to it.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind
Re: CSP used for spying on blocked domains(?)
