Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

While Firefox is pretty great, be under no illusion that it’s a utopia of openness. It’s plugins are signed and quite tightly controlled. They banned the controversial ‘Dissenter’ plug-in seemingly for political reasons, and recently had the expired certificate ‘oops’ that rendered all plugins unusable for a day or so (without fiddly workarounds)

They too could well bend to corporate pressures to limit ad-blocking, they already have the tech that could be used to block widespread use of ad blockers?



Did they block it, or just ban it from their store? I thought people could still install it themselves.


It's banned from their store, and as of April, at least, it can only be loaded as a temporary add-on and must be manually reactivated each time Firefox is started.


The expired cert weekend gave me the impression that using unsigned plugins, while possible for dev purposes, is quite a pain, and therefore being banned from the ‘store’ would pretty much mean banned from mainstream (non-dev, non-forked) releases of Firefox?

I may be wrong, though?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: