Am I missing something?

Firefox is Mozilla’s most profitable product. Its millions of users enable Mozilla to make deals for sponsored content (e.g. shortcuts), integrations, and biggest of all: the default search option with Google.

I stand corrected, I see your argument about the comparative difficulty and effect of banning a browser vs an extension. The discoverability of the extension alone is a big point.

Not sure I agree with how you seemingly downplay the damage banning the browser could cause and fail to consider consider other ways people could organize to distribute extensions (even as you mention various ways to get Firefox, I’m a bit confused on this one). Others have already talked about this in the thread, so I won’t repeat it here.

With all that said, it appears we were both fools. Mozilla has returned the extensions already. It was neither about protecting Firefox in Russia, nor a case of “Fuck Mozilla.”

Would you be happier if they ignored the demands and possibly got Firefox banned in Russia? Because if so, it’s not that we disagree over our views of the Russian government. Probably neither do Mozilla.

We have different priorities. I want the average Russian to be easily able to use Firefox, even if it takes more work to load some extensions. From where I’m sitting, you seem to want to cut off your nose to spite your face.

I’m genuinely curious why.

Wrong Conway.

I won’t know if any of the linked resources are any good until I have time to look them over, but if nothing else I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

Re: whitewashing, fair point. I’d already read about the issue, but maybe I still need to rethink how I look at computing history.

If you’re serious, please elaborate on your points. I genuinely don’t understand.

Going by Wikipedia here,

She was a huge part

Please define huge part. She was a “key architect” in the starting years of a project that fell short of its goals.

her entire work has to be viewed through that lens

Why? It was, relatively speaking, an almost small part of her career. She didn’t stay until the end of the project. You even admit that her contributions to the field were many and meaningful.

is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children

This feels like such a huge leap, that I don’t even know where to begin tackling it. Is Tim Berners Lee in every explicit way connected to the modern privacy hellscape that is the modern internet?

Make no mistake, if she really did want to help develop artificial intelligence for the military’s sake, fuck her. I can respect someone’s achievements while also thinking they’re trash as a person.

But I don’t think that’s the case here, and I’m lost as to what point, exactly, you’re trying to make.

Don’t feel too jelly though, the actual profile manager has been in need of some care for a while, now…

…and it’s apparently getting it soon! No way they’ll hide the button after they polish it up, right? Happy times to come for all, I hope :⁠^⁠)

That’s unnecessarily dismissive. Unfortunately, even the best extensions have their downsides. Some used a browser that suited their preferences better instead, which is a shame for both Firefox and the user, in my opinion.

Mozilla recognizes this and is finally taking action to integrate highly requested features into Firefox. Many “who really care” are glad for this, because it is a good thing.

That’s funny, same thing here. I’m very thankful to the stranger on a forum who suggested “blasting the motherboard with a blow-dryer.” Now sometimes I joke that my PC is diesel-powered.

Coincidentally, I was struggling and wishing I could do something similar a few days ago. Didn’t know Windows could do it, that’s awesome. I think, ideally, more software should accept pasting an image in input fields, without even the need to open a file picker. But the file picker handling URLs sounds cool as well.

You’re not the person I replied to, but thanks for sharing :^)

Sorry, meant to reply sooner.

I don’t know what your environment looks like, and I wouldn’t try to fix it anyway—that’s out of scope for a lemmy comment. I do want to mention some info that might be interesting/relevant for people reading this thread:

• The GTK file chooser, if that’s what you’re using, already has better file previews.
• Sadly, programs won’t always use the best method available to do things. While Upscaler gives me nice image previews in the file picker, my installation of Firefox hasn’t even updated it to GTK 4.
• Portals seem to be a good step towards more uniform and predictable user experiences.
  • “[…] any application can use portals to provide uniform access to features independent of desktops and toolkits.”
• Point being, better things exist and are on their way. Adoption is slow, but we’re getting there.
• …And on a semi-related note, if you have previews for certain file types, but not for others, check if you’re missing a package. That took one search and one command to fix something that’d been bothering me for weeks.

Exact issues and how bad they are depend heavily on your setup, such as which desktop environment you use and which software (& versions) you have installed. That seems to be a common description of UX problems in the Linux ecosystem, I wonder why :^)))

But hopefully I managed to spread some positivity(?) about the state of things and where we’re going.

Just curious, what are your issues with the current available options?