Mozilla Firefox Blocks Add-Ons to Circumvent Russia Censorship
https://theintercept.com/2024/06/12/mozilla-firefox-russia-censorship-blocked/Open linkView original on lemmy.ziphttps://theintercept.com/2024/06/12/mozilla-firefox-russia-censorship-blocked/Open linkView original on lemmy.zip
It's either get the addons removed, or get the whole addon store itself blocked. You can just install the extension from an xpi file.
Mozilla really isn't in a position to fight the Russian government over this and win.
Yes they kind of are. I'm not sure how many Firefox users there are in Russia but some how I think there enough that it would be yet another bad look for the authoritarian government.
I checked, and according to Statcounter it's at 3.3%. So if Mozilla did go hardball, it'd affect an insignificant amount of people.
Realistically though, I don't follow world politics much but I assume that "blocking firefox" probably wouldn't be the worst optics they've had in the past few years.
And they can easily say it’s Mozilla’s fault
If Mozilla gets blocked, people would just install some other browser (probably, something from Russia). I do not see how this helps anyone but the government itself. And departure of hundreds (if not thousands) of western companies did nothing to the Russian government, some problems with a browser with almost non-existent userbase would have the same effect. It should be quite clear by now that such tactic simply does not work.
It sucks, but it's a battle they weren't ever going to win. The dictator gets to have final say in how things go in their country.
Not that this isn't interesting, but how is it linux related?
I mean, FF is the default browser and this also might rub some people the wrong way - having the developer of the only relevant free and open, non-google browser bow to a dictatorship
Firefox is a Linux browser in the since that pretty much all of Linux comes with it of you have a desktop.
LibreWolf <3
Does it have a separate add-on store?
Nope. It just uses regular firefox add ons.
Weird to recommend it here then
Makes me wonder if a 3rd party server for this is ever a thing.
Okay, so they are no longer in the mozilla extension store.....
https://github.com/anticensority/runet-censorship-bypass/wiki
https://github.com/censortracker/censortracker
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ok it's getting properly sus now. Mozilla goes into politics way too much
Read the article. They didn't "get into" anything. They got told to take five add-ons down
or face the wrath of a regime with a close relationship with defenestration, which they did only for Russians.Doesn't matter. Politics is politics and always ends badly.
Hence why they were forced to ultimately remove the requested add-ons. Doesn't make Mozilla somehow bad because they chose not to die on this hill.
Every major company does this, it just doesn't make headlines. Plus I'm sure they know you can still install it outside of the store.
So you're defending major companies? Ok. May as well do what Jia Tan did...
You know as well as I do that Mozilla isn't exactly a small community project. This isn't a surprise to me.
It isn't much of a surprise to me either. I heard of them jumping into politics and misusing donations in the past. But it doesn't mean they're good
It is a hard issue to solve. However, I think Mozilla should ignore Russia.
laughs in Canadian
What is so funny?
It's not the first time. Mozilla was helping to fascism in Russia for years by using Yandex as a default search engine in Russia. Because Yandex was paying them. It's all for money, obviously. And now they don't want to lose the market. But the fans of FF will explain how this is "ethical" and helps to save the web.
It's not ethical.
Chrome, and Google, however, are worse. Firefox derived browsers are the lesser of two evils, at least they prevent Google having a total monopoly.
Chrome is a commercial product and don't pretend to be something more, while Firefox gets free marketing from the whole GNU/Linux community, exploiting people's sense of morals.