uBlock Origin Lite Maker Ends Firefox Store Support, Slams Mozilla For Hostile Reviews (neowin.net) 50
The Firefox extension for the uBlock Origin Lite content blocker is no longer available. According to Neowin, "Raymond Hill, the maker of the extension, pulled support and moved uBlock Origin Lite to self-hosting after multiple encounters with a 'nonsensical and hostile' review process from the store review team." From the report: It all started in early September when Mozilla flagged every version of the uBlock Origin Lite extension as violating its policies. Reviewers then claimed the extension apparently collected user data and contained "minified, concatenated or otherwise machine-generated code." The developer seemingly debunked those allegations, saying that "it takes only a few seconds for anyone who has even basic understanding of JavaScript to see the raised issues make no sense." Raymond Hill decided to drop the extension from the store and move it to a self-hosted version. This means that those who want to continue using uBlock Origin Lite on Firefox should download the latest version from GitHub (it can auto-update itself).
The last message from the developer in a now-closed GitHub issue shows an email from Mozilla admitting its fault and apologizing for the mistake. However, Raymond still pulled the extension from the Mozilla Add-ons Store, which means you can no longer find it on addons.mozilla.org. It is worth noting that the original uBlock Origin for Firefox is still available and supported.
The last message from the developer in a now-closed GitHub issue shows an email from Mozilla admitting its fault and apologizing for the mistake. However, Raymond still pulled the extension from the Mozilla Add-ons Store, which means you can no longer find it on addons.mozilla.org. It is worth noting that the original uBlock Origin for Firefox is still available and supported.
A New Pro-Strat? (Score:2)
The last message from the developer in a now-closed GitHub issue shows an email from Mozilla admitting its fault and apologizing for the mistake. However, Raymond still pulled the extension from the Mozilla Add-ons Store, which means you can no longer find it on addons.mozilla.org.
Eat paste, Evacuate into pants, Extinguish.
He's self-hosting, but far fewer will install or even see this adblocker in the future.
Re:A New Pro-Strat? (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly I don't even understand why it was available, because the only real use case for UBO Lite is on Chromium based browsers, as UBO lite is the nerfed Manifest V3 version. If you're running Firefox, use the original, unnerfed version which IS still available in the store.
Re:A New Pro-Strat? (Score:4, Interesting)
It uses less resources, and might be suitable for potato-level PCs or phones.
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Do extensions, the same extensions, run on Android and Windows versions now? I don't think that was the case last I checked (around 6 years ago).
Re: A New Pro-Strat? (Score:1)
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Normal UBlock Origin is available and works fine on Firefox on Android.
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Yes, for Firefox, and it's the same code (nobody is re-writing the extensions). The catch is that you have access to a limited (but kind of increasing over the years) small subset of the extensions from the store; ublock was there since there were like 5 of them approved, and probably ublock light was there too nowadays as there are many more. Now if you want more extensions you can follow what I called an outrageous process (for some reason the post is moderated Flamebait although I'd say I'm not exaggerat
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That's not the case anymore: open the extensions manager, scroll to the bottom and tap "Find more extensions", then tap "See more trending extensions" and you'll find 1593 extensions as of right now.
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This is PRECISELY what I'm saying, there's a selection that's been somehow increasing over the years but it's still a limited (and not that big) part of the total (there are like, tens of thousands of them in the store)?
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The extensions need to be marked as compatible with Firefox for Android by the author:
"In order to mark your extension as compatible with Firefox Android, add the gecko_android key inside browser_specific_settings (more info) in your manifest.json file"
https://blog.mozilla.org/addon... [mozilla.org]
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uBO on mobile devices kills your battery. In my tests, uBO Lite barely affects battery life on Android, if at all, but the full-fat version causes Firefox to consume power quite rapidly. It's actually noticeably slower too, with scrolling being less smooth as the DOM updates and uBO filters it.
With Lite you get about 80% of the filtering, so I use that and a separate CSS modifying add-on just to fix Slashdot.
Re: A New Pro-Strat? (Score:5, Informative)
His main addon is still there.
The "lite" version was created to work with Chrome, and ported to Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
Ublock Origin (the best adblock) is still right there.
Note that the bogus crap about the Lite version could just as easily apply to the full version, because many of the files that Firefox made false claims about are in both versions.
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Self-hosting he can do what he wants without bending to Mozilla's whim, the email from Mozilla rejecting the addon will become internet lore.
Follow the money (Score:3)
Re:Follow the money (Score:5, Interesting)
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Isn't Google still the biggest funder of Firefox? I heard that was going away, but maybe the threat of them going away is what gives them more leverage now. "Do this and we'll continue providing some funds, even when the courts cancel our search deal."
Re:Follow the money (Score:5, Interesting)
Those "reviewers" are actually a stupid bot. It happened to me too -- my addon was blocked just because of a "trigger word" inside a comment. When I removed the problematic word, it was accepted, without any functional change. (No, it was not a racist slur or anything similar ;-)).
Of course, real malware writers know how to play it and fly under the radar.
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> my addon was blocked just because of a "trigger word" inside a comment. When I removed the problematic word, it was accepted, without any functional change. (No, it was not a racist slur or anything similar ;-)).
What was the word, "master"?
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Seems far more likely that the people getting paid off are people like you and Raymond Hill, who are inexplicably and unnecessarily participating in a coordinated attack against Mozilla over the most unfathomably minor misunderstanding. It was a mistake, it's already been resolved, this amount of hateful propaganda is completely unnecessary. It's like the open-source community just hates when there isn't infighting. There always HAS to be drama, there HAS to be a giant conspiracy, and if there isn't one then you'll gladly make one up. Pathetic.
Mozilla kind of brings it on themselves by being a shit organization. One has to question a company that rakes in $600M a year and at least ostensibly produces an open-source web browser as their main product yet can't even manage to do that correctly.
Also if you read in their bug tracker there are COUNTLESS requests for very small improvements and fixes (like for example storing it's files in the standard XDG prefix directories like basically every other well-behaved program under modern UNIX-alikes) or fi
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They're not a shit organization at all, you've just swallowed loads of Google propaganda + you're addicted to drama and shit-slinging. But I guess I can't expect anything more from someone who resorts to ableist slurs in a conversation about fucking web browsers.
Are you employed by Mozilla? I'd never defend any company that wasn't paying my bills as fiercely as you are in this comment section.
Also: "ableist slur" is hilarious and I will endeavor to provoke more of this response in future.
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No, I'm not, but are you employed by Google? Or married to Raymond Hill? Because I'd never attack Google's only open competitor as fiercely as you are unless they were paying my bills. Nor would I defend a massive crybaby manchild who threw an indefensibly childish fit over absolutely nothing.
I'm not defending Google, Raymond Hill or anyone here. My original statement is that Mozilla is a garbage fire and brings trouble upon themselves, a largely uncontroversial statement if you've used Firefox (and all of the various antecedents going back to the Netscape Navigator days). SeaMonkey was kind of peak Mozilla, but those days are long since gone.
I would personally love a viable alternative to the Chrome-i-zation of the internet which I see as uncontrolled enshittification. Heck my daily driver is a
Uhm... (Score:3, Insightful)
2) All the requirements that he's saying is nonsensical and absurd were put into place after several add-ons were found to use minified/compiled code to do malicious things.
3) The plugin's privacy statement says: "Doesn't embed any analytics or telemetry hooks in its code", but, in that very issue, one of the files is named
4) None of these files are commented or documented.
5) The mozilla add-ons team usually requires explanation for justification not just "where it is".
6) He complains "where is the minification of these codes"? When the statement from mozilla was "Your add-on contains minified, concatenated or otherwise machine-generated code" It's not specifically minification.
Something's not meshing with the author's story. I'm not saying the mozilla team is faultless, they do get stuff wrong sometimes, but all these reasons from Mozilla were justified.
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Here is the apology email [github.com]
Re:Uhm... (Score:5, Informative)
1) I don't see an apology email from Mozilla, as the story claims, in the github issue
you have to click to expand the quote on github but it says that it is from Sept 27th with the meat of it:
After re-reviewing your extension, we have determined that the previous decision was incorrect and based on that determination, we have restored your add-on.
We apologize for the mistake and encourage you to reach out to us in the future whenever you have questions or concerns about a review so that we can correct mistakes and resolve any issues quickly. ...
(see: https://github.com/uBlockOrigi... [github.com] )
Re: Uhm... (Score:3)
1) already debunked
2) He said the review process is nonsensical and hostile. Not that the requirements are nonsensical and absurd.
3) already debunked
4) "None of these files are commented or documented." Well true, and while that could have lead the review to the right conclusion, there is no requirement on commenting or documenting the code, so the point is irrelevant.
5) Well if there is a photo of a beach and they say "this picture contains violence", how do you say where specifically they are wrong if the
Re: Uhm... (Score:1)
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The "reviewers" went straight to banning all but the oldest version of the add-on, which he then pulled to save people from getting an obsolete version. He doesn't get paid enough for that shit.
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"He got the review, and went straight to pulling the extension from AMO without even trying to reach out to the reviewers."
Yes, because this has happened in the past to large, well-known extensions. Notably, the great suspender.
"I do not know if he has an history of issues with the review process, but in the github issue he does not say anything about previous
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There is machine generated code in uBOL.
Manifest V3 prevents extensions from reading in external data, because it's a security issue. They could pull in anything, including executable code that was not subject to review. As such, uBOL has to embed the blocklists in its code, and those lists are machine generated based on statistical analysis of the most effective ones.
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But that's just, like, his opinion. To a flat earther, a globe is hostile. To an anti-vaxxer, vaccine mandates are hostile. To JD Vance, the facts are hostile. 3) already debunked
No, not debunked. It kinda proves my point, in fact. Anyone that's dealt with the AMO team knows that the team goes through thousands of submissions a day. I'm pretty sure the submissions page itself says so as that's w
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3: Those are a dummy replacements for the actual tracker scripts, so that the web page scripts still have the functions to call and don't throw errors, but the dummy functions don't do anything.
7: While seemingly everyone else, including Mozilla, is tracking for the ad industry, we're talking about Raymond Hill, who has been giving the world a usable web experience by disabling tracking and removing ads, fucktons of it, for free, without any tracking or ads of his own. If you look at his work and think, oh
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Yes, Raymond Hill ha
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Did you just call Raymond Hill a manchild? Go troll somewhere else, shill.
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And you can call me a shill when you stop spamming Chrome propaganda. How's that Google boot taste? I assume their checks are pretty hefty?
Re: Uhm... (Score:2)
If your definition of "a couple of days" means "at least 23 days" (the time between the initial emails and delisting, and the apology email, which was probably triggered by him pulling the whole extension or by rob--w pulling some strings), then sure.
Gorhill has every right to be pissed and every right not to take an additional burden for which he isn't paid.
There's no way any extension reviewer doesn't know about ublock, someone fucked up big and it didn't get caught until nearly a month later. I just hope
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From personal experience, the AMO team has about a 1~2 day turn around for responses. Often the very same day. If you're looking at the first then the last response and there's 23 days in between, that should tell you that the author isn't posting the conversation in between.
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Mozilla did buy an ad tech company that was founded by 2 people from Meta a couple of years ago. Then they started pushing that company's tracking systems as default enabled in Firefox.
They didn't quite bury the option to disable it, but they did hide it in the middle of an already very long settings page.
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Yeah, but imagine if you're looking at a pull request and, in the source code, there's a file named "google-analytics.js" and "mozilla-ad.js". What are you going to think? Security analysts often have to go throw hundreds of code each day and are measured/tracked on their speed (I use to work with trend micro and wo
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3) The plugin's privacy statement says: "Doesn't embed any analytics or telemetry hooks in its code", but, in that very issue, one of the files is named ./web_accessible_resources/google-analytics_analytics.js
You're not very familiar with how JS blocking apps work and more specifically how they often need to add exceptions for certain sites that break.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigi... [github.com]
The filter breaking the comments was added to fix the navigation bar not responding to click events.
That has the unintended side effect of breaking the comment section, so I will remove that filter and add
@@||google-analytics.com/analytics.js$script,domain=cyclingnews.com
which will also fix the navigation bar.
I would argue that white listing a site like google-analytics is never OK but the typical idiot web surfer is who they cater to.
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> 3) The plugin's privacy statement says: "Doesn't embed any analytics or telemetry hooks in its code", but, in that very issue, one of the files is named ./web_accessible_resources/google-analytics_analytics.js
Did you try looking into the file?
Link: https://github.com/uBlockOrigi... [github.com]
Even if you cannot read code, it references two issues:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBl... [github.com]
https://github.com/uBlockOrigi... [github.com]
TL;DR: If you block Google Analytics, some pages break. uBlock inserts mock functions emulating Google
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> 3) The plugin's privacy statement says: "Doesn't embed any analytics or telemetry hooks in its code", but, in that very issue, one of the files is named ./web_accessible_resources/google-analytics_analytics.js
Did you try looking into the file?
Link: https://github.com/uBlockOrigi... [github.com]
Even if you cannot read code, it references two issues: https://github.com/gorhill/uBl... [github.com] https://github.com/uBlockOrigi... [github.com]
TL;DR: If you block Google Analytics, some pages break. uBlock inserts mock functions emulating Google Analytics functions but not tracking you, so the pages do not break.
I did. My point is that if a file looks like it's trying to inject ads (just by the file name itself), why wouldn't someone, like a security analyst who goes through hundreds of requests a day and, by policy, can't play favorites, think "Oh shit. This might have been compromised like the great suspender had before."? It's written in the policy(or guidelines, I forget which.) that you should try to make it as easy to read (file name and source code) and make it look as un-suspicious as possible.
Assuming he's correct on everything (Score:2)
So let's assume that every accusation laid at mozilla's feet is accurate.
What it the purpose of porting a crippled extension that is specifically crippled to somehow adapt to changes that prevent the full extension from working correctly on one browser engine... to a completely different engine?
Oh noes ... Mozilla ... (Score:1)
... slapped my tiny weener and said sorry.
for some reason... (Score:2)
For some reason, big open source projects are filled with self-appointed fascists.