policy-templates VS Waterfox

There is no such thing as a "known trusted extension" ever since they killed sideloading extensions and forced auto-updates. 10 years ago not force updating extensions was also a thing they moved behind a flag, and then just dropped.

Also - if you want to blacklist certain extensions from certain sites, you abso-freaking-lutely can already... see: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...

you want the `restricted_domains` field.

It gets worse - Mozilla is the fucking worst at checking submitted extensions. They tried to the play into the whole "app store" thing that Google/Apple were doing, but those are justifiable cost centers at those two companies in a way that just doesn't work for a player like Mozilla.

Mozilla's store checks for extensions are fairly pathetic. You can submit a near empty shell with excessive permissions, get approved the first time, then auto-update to a new release (which will deploy to users immediately thanks to auto-updates). That new version has to pass a battery of useless automatic SAST checks, which will happily highlight all sorts of things it doesn't like (it flags words like "hello" because it contains a curse word) but which won't do shit to check if you're hoovering up credentials, browsing data, tracking users, etc.

If you're unlucky, at some point in the next 24 months you'll trigger a real review from Mozilla and get caught.

To be blunt - I have 15 years experience writing extensions. I don't like Google. If you think Mozilla is better you're wrong.

You can do that with policy templates. Use the Discussion tab at the top of the GitHub page if you need help setting them up.

Policy Templates for Firefox

They very well could do this for a a company that requires really strict privacy and security, but unfortunately in its current state Firefox doesn't have nearly the corporate sysadmin-friendly tooling that Chrome and especially Edge do.

When I was tasked with implementing CIS browser hardening policies at a previous job a few years ago, this was just a matter of enabling some Group Policy template settings for Chrome and Edge, but for Firefox this involved distributing a prefs.js file to all the workstations. In any corporate environment it's very likely going to be point and click Windows admins that are implementing browser standards, who tend to be allergic to anything resembling code and are already used to using GPOs for just about everything.

Yes, Firefox does have GPO templates but it's not nearly as rich as Chrome and Edge. Edge has even more GPO templates than does Chrome iirc, Chrome already had a lot to begin with and then Microsoft added even more of their own on top of that.

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/v4.11/READM...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/configure-micro...

That alone already puts Firefox at a huge disadvantage for corporate deployment, the other thing that makes it even less attractive, even to companies where privacy/security is a huge requirement (like my previous job) is that Edge is already bundled with the OS, and is one less thing that needs to be manually patched. In high security corporate environments, just keeping things patched is always a huge task so it's very hard to convince someone that they need to put in more work to keep an extra piece of software patched (which is already very difficult considering how frequently browsers are updated). To make things even worse, just about all vendors will only support Chromium-based browsers for whatever SaaS they sell you, so Firefox is a nonstarter for getting support, even if it will work just fine 99.9% of the time.

For all these reasons, I lost the battle to keep Firefox around, which is a huge shame because of how much I love it and wanted to fight the Chromium monoculture. So I guess for a corporation to support Firefox despite how corporate-friendliness the alternatives are, they'd have to reaaaally want to.

You can see the relevant JSON code in the changelog. As I said, you can post a comment on this page to remind Mike to update the documentation for policy templates.

This GitHub repository has a Discussions tab where you can ask questions about deploying Firefox: Policy Templates for Firefox.

Check out the official documentation here: Policy Templates for Firefox. You can use the Discussions tab if you have any questions.

> [Monday](https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/releases/tag/G5.1.9),

With 4GB of RAM I would recommend that you use the ESR version or some lightweight fork like Waterfox that I've been testing these days. Is really lighter and can use Firefox Sync. But it has his problems. I would prefer to go with ESR and deactivating smooth scrolling if I was you.

> I wish Unity didn't die

Hi from Unity on Ubuntu 23.04.

I am running the Unity flavour:

https://ubuntuunity.org/

It uses the latest Unity 7.7, released earlier this year:

https://gitlab.com/ubuntu-unity/unity-x/unityx

I run it on 3 or 4 machines, one of which has 2 screens and one of which has 3. Works great, scales well, handles modern Ubuntu just fine.

I use it with the Waterfox browser, which integrates natively with the Unity global menu bar, without any addons or config. I am currently on -- (hits alt-H, A) -- version 5.1.9.

https://www.waterfox.net/

Post issues on Gihtub for reporting bugs. https://github.com/WaterfoxCo/Waterfox/issues

I've made sure security updates have now been available ASAP for quite a while now. G5.1.9 released on Monday, for example. This is a day before Mozilla, but mostly because Mozilla spend a day or two doing QA.

I've been a fan of Waterfox for some time now

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1201/extend-panel-men...

Of course, GNOME broke it in a later release. This is why no amount of extensions are an answer: they break. Extensions do not work from one release of GNOME to another, and when they fail, the whole desktop often fails.

> Also, it’s not really Gnome’s fault that linux doesn’t have as great metadata from apps to be able to display the apps’ menubars (unity could do it).

False. Gtk exposes this; Unity didn't have stored metadata on lots of apps, it just displayed the existing controls' contents somewhere else. If you run brand new Gtk apps on Unity today, they get panel menus. This was not some clever hack.

Unity is still around:

https://unityd.org/

The distro is back again:

https://ubuntuunity.org/

Brand new apps, like Waterfox, integrate with it fine although they did not exist when it was written.

https://www.waterfox.net/

> With all due respect, that is bullshit reasoning. Selectively displaying useful things is the whole point of UIs.

I disagree.

1. I want to choose what is shown or not. In order to choose, I have to be able to see it. In other words, it needs to be there at first, and then I can choose whether I want to show it or not.

If I can't see it in the first place, then how am I to know it's there?

It's the users' choice what is shown or not. It is not up to the developer to say "they don't need to see this and I'm going to hide it away."

Any piece of software that does that is user hostile.

> Otherwise why would you roll up your window?

Again: it's my choice. I get to choose. It's my computer. They are my windows. I choose if they are shown or not.

That is the point of free software: Choice.

GNOME says it's free, but it takes choices away from me. I object to that.

> Why do you have menus in the first place that hide their content until clicked?

To save space for my document. You can't show everything all the time: that is why you leave it up to the user to choose what they show and when.

(Incidentally, this is also why in my opinion the Microsoft ribbon based fluent interface fails. It tries to show far too much all at once, and the result is that it wastes a huge amount of screen space, and is actually more difficult to hunt through for what I need when I need it.)

> That is no longer the corner, so it doesn’t benefit from this law at all.

False.

Fitt's law is about target size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for...

It is not about corners. It is about edges too.

By the way I do have a clue about this stuff... for example here is a screenshot of a piece of software which I designed about a dozen years which makes use of Fitt's Law.

https://twitter.com/SimplicityComps/status/54085863397497241...

> The super key is the same as the windows, or the mac command key.

So, yes, but those environments don't suddenly change your entire screen.

> Also often called Meta.

That is a different key. Meta and super are not interchangeable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)

> What’s the problem here exactly? Is alt+f4 written over the screen? Or ctrl+c? Especially that the same behavior is expected from the windows start menu.

The problem here, as I'm attempting to spell out, is that there were existing conventions for this stuff, and GNOME does not respect them.

> It’s a community for its users. You clearly don’t use it nor contribute to it either by work or financially, so it is not really fair to ask someone else to work for you specifically..

No. What I do is, I write about it for a living. I analyse this stuff, I draw comparisons, I point out weaknesses and strengths. That's my job.

In my professional capacity, the GNOME foundation invited me to its GUADEC conference about six or seven years back. I asked a lot of awkward and difficult questions, because that's my job, and I didn't get invited back.

> Literally every OS and distro suck at it.

False. For example, using most other interfaces, such as XFCE, I can treat a multiscreen desktop as one big space. I can have one panel at the far left, and one on the far right, of the entire multi-monitor desktop.

But GNOME doesn't let me do that.

Why not?

> Nonetheless, I feel you are reasoning from a very biased point

Because I disagree with you, you think that I'm biased?

Do you think that everyone who disagrees with you is biased?

Have you considered that perhaps I have opinions, and can draw upon years of knowledge and experience, and make reasoned arguments based on evidence, and that is not the same thing as being biased?

> I don’t think it is as fruitful a discussion.

So because I can counter your arguments with examples and reasoning, you don't think that it's fruitful discussion?

Personally, I think that the arguments where people can defend their points, and produce evidence to back them up, are the most fruitful kind.