On 12/18/2017 07:29 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
Sure. A new release coming out affords many people in the pipeline many chances to notice changes in it. The packager has the opportunity to notice significant changes while updating the package. Users of updates-testing have the opportunity to notice any significant changes before the update goes out to the broader user base. And users, unless they have manually set up some sort of non-notifying automated update script, either make a conscious choice to install the update or are at least notified that it has taken place, both of which provide them with the opportunity to examine changes and decide if they wish to accept them. Silently deploying an addon to existing installations of Firefox bypasses absolutely all of the above.
On the other hand, when it comes to privacy settings, if Firefox developers make changes to the settings themselves (not their defaults, but how they are encoded in profiles), they usually do not make an attempt to inform the user or preserve the intent as closely as possible. Two examples come to my mind:
When the “Ask me every time” cookie setting was abolished, it was silently changed to “Keep [them] until they expire”, so people were now tracked without their consent, until they realized what had happened.
When the New tab page was redesigned, major redesigns discard previous settings to offer a blank page and not to capture thumbnails.
In either case, I wasn't aware of proper communication. With the complexity of the code base and the widespread use of extensions, there is little anything any downstream can do. (This is also the reason why I'm wary of privacy-enhanced downstreams because they surely can remove only the obvious stuff.)
Thanks, Florian _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
