Query about parasitic firefox file

[Liam Proven]

>
> I won't use the word sabotage, but for me, firefox took a running swan
> dive into the deep end of the pool at the 51-52 transition and forgot
> how to swim, no longer playing the MSM's news videos with any regularity
> for me.

I don't know what "MSM" is but that sounds like a Flash problem or something.

Around 52 is the time that background tab rendering came in, the
forerunner to Electrolysis, i.e. multiprocess Firefox.

That might have been a factor.

I switched to Waterfox. All my old addons still work, it's quick, and
it's getting security fixes. I hope it survives.

I've explained to Bret how to do it, but he won't listen to me.

I have also explained to Bret that:

* he doesn't have enough disk space
* he'd get more if he merged some of his data partitions
* how to do that
* the vital importance of working from a booted live medium when
working on changing partitions
* that Firefox hasn't been sabotaged, but it has changed
* that he could revert to the ESR version, or switch to Waterfox

In return, he has complained to me and others that:
* websites are broken, without telling us that he has globally
disabled Javascript.
* that his browser is sabotaged
* that his distro is sabotaged
* that evil mysterious factors are conspiring against him to sabotage
his computer

My reluctant conclusion is that Bret is delusional and paranoid, and
he is unwilling or unable to take advice, and he will not supply the
people trying to help him with direct, honest, open answers.

So I have now stopped trying to help him.

Reluctantly and sadly, I suggest that others do the same.

If his paranoid rants continue, I will set a filter to just mark him as read.


> I am trying to be, but I'm not PC enough to ignore whats taken place in
> the firefox releases for Linux of late.

Web browsers are right at the sharp end of Internet security.

Mozilla is the only major full-platform FOSS browser. Chrome is not
FOSS although it's based on FOSS. Others are not full-platform -- e.g.
they don't implement JavaScript, making most of the modern web
unusable.

Mozilla is trying something brave and new:

[1] It's trying to catch up with and outcompete commercially-sponsored
rivals such as Chrome (from Google) and Safari (from Apple)

(E.g. switching to a multi-threaded architecture)

[2] It's trying to do this, in part, by rewriting large chunks of its
browser in the new, type-safe language Rust, instead of the horribly
insecure and error-prone C or the horribly complex and error-prone C++

[3] Due to #2, it is removing large chunks of the browser that it
considers obsolete. E.g. the XUL engine that was used to render the UI
and which was the platform for most add-ons. It's gone and most addons
don't work any more.

All these are laudable ideas.

However, one of the main reasons I used Firefox was its
customisability. Most of that is now gone.

So Mozilla's efforts have driven me away from the browser, sadly.

Currently I'm using a fork. I may switch browsers, e.g. to Opera or Vivaldi.

> firefox I understand has new
> parents,

No, that's Opera.

> and apparently seem to be concentrating on the windows users.

Again, no.

> If they break firefox for OSS, it seems to be a shrug to them. If they
> cared, it would get fixed. The net result is that I now use palemoon as
> my default browser.

Well, I've switched to.

Perhaps in time some of the addons will catch up, and indeed, some of
the websites. It's a big change and it will take time to stabilise.
They're not there yet.


-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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