One of the top crashers on Firefox 115 is Windows malware interfering with Firefox in a particular way.
On TechRights IRC, Roy Schestowitz sums it up.
“Many firefox bug fixes are like that. They release security patches (and new blobs) but they address windows problems.”
I interjected, “Sticking your finger in the holes in the dam.”
Roy continues, “So a gnu/linux user needs to get another 200MB of junk.”
What makes it worse is that Fedora not only has this colossal piece of shit called GNOME Software that demands a restart, of the entire computer, even over a Firefox update, but that they stopped producing Delta RPMs so you have to download the full 200 MB of shit that hasn’t changed, to keep their version number in sync with Windows.
Roy notes that some of these crap patches for Windows bugs (bugs IN WINDOWS) cause Firefox to malfunction on Linux and jam up.
Also notes that Mozilla hires “Mac heads instead of software developers.”.
But it’s so much worse than that. They fired 250 people who were working on Gecko and redirected others to develop adware and spyware and nag screens under a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Supervisor.
One of my top complaints about the gnome-desktop metapackage (Fedora doesn’t have meta-packages as such, thank god) in Debian, was I couldn’t apt remove firefox without it wanting to take out a bunch of other stuff….or install another shitty browser I didn’t want. Chromium.
Stopping to deal with several hundred MB of RPMs and a third of it is Firefox playing bullshit version bump because Windows malware makes it crash, is very very frustrating.
However, in Fedora you _can_ dnf remove firefox. They haven’t managed to bungle this, although I suppose I should not give them ideas.
Most of the time I’m not on the fastest possible VPN server because I usually route my Internet connection through European countries where they treat people fairly well instead of the United States.
They run a lot of ads to try to convince Americans we don’t need VPNs or private browsing modes, and only a crank doesn’t like Windows (which is failing), but we know where this advice comes from.
I love operating systems (like Windows and Mac) that get in my way with “code signing” and then you find out that there’s this Chinese thing that signs whatever using an expired certificate, fakes the signature timestamp, and then runs the code.
Then you look at the Time Stamp Authority using Windows Explorer and the fucker says “Fake Time Stamp”.
It’s barely worth trying to secure your computing practices and then leave a mess like this as your operating system.
“Despite the warning displayed in the digital signature details above, the cracked driver for PrimoCache still functions properly when installed on Windows 10. […]
Microsoft, in response to our notification, has blocked all certificates discussed in this blog post. […]
Microsoft implements and maintains a driver block list within Windows, although it is focused on vulnerable drivers rather than malicious ones. As such, this block list should not be solely relied upon for blocking rootkits or malicious drivers.”
-Talos Intelligence
Since the operating system warns about the tampering and runs it anyway (allowing it to patch the kernel and become a rootkit), the only way to view this is “Microsoft wanted to promote ‘security’ and leave a huge gaping backdoor in for three letter agencies.”
And you notice that nowhere did Microsoft change the policy or actually fix the issue, they only made it so you can’t use the example certificates that Talos Intelligence cited.
Windows is a giant festering mess and since Mozilla kowtows and sucks up to them and spends almost all of their remaining development effort working around its many glaring design flaws, I don’t want this particular Windows chocolate in my Linux peanut butter.
Firefox is pretty garbage anyway as a “cross platform” program that’s mainly focused on Windows.
I strongly prefer to leave GNOME Web in the background while I mainly use SeaMonkey with sanity-preserving add-ons.
At least the people who work on these projects actually use them and mostly focus on Linux.
Lately when I open a Mozilla-ish browser it tends to be LibreWolf, from Flatpak (which has a Delta RPM-like update anyway) and then I grab some videos or something using video download helper and close it again.
A while back, (I read in the release notes) Mac OS broke SeaMonkey due to yet another bug in Apple’s kernel, but the problem was confined to….well….whatever special kind of nutbag uses a Mac and appreciates some of SeaMonkey’s unique functionality.
Using SeaMonkey productively is starting to require a lot of special knowledge.
One of the reasons I still use Fedora is they start out with a ton of patches that are out-of-tree and fix some of the roughness.
Ironically, I have to revert back to using GNOME Web or LibreWolf just to edit my blog since WordPress put some more Googleshit in their editor, which used to work fine with Web standards.
I also recently went back to paper statements with the electric company (no fee for that) and told the lady it was because ComEd switched to Microsoft Azure (corruption, bribery) and now it was putting Google Chrome nonsense and bastard JavaScript in their site that SeaMonkey simply does not understand.
Things are getting worse, not better. But for email, IRC, and most of my browsing it works fine.
The tab management code is largely so old it dates back to Firefox 1.5 and 2, and amusingly it can open and close tabs faster and much more responsively (I have an eleventh generation Core i7) than Firefox!
There should not be jank in a browser on a system as new as mine, and yet there is.
The mentality of Google and Mozilla is to just throw more shit in there and make the pile higher. The more the better.
Then nobody but a “trillion dollar tech company” subsidized by the US spy agencies can build a browser.
I recently reported the security vulnerability I found on Discover Bank’s Web site to Mozilla since it seems to be an issue in Gecko that sloppy Javascript programmers at the bank stumbled into.
I didn’t bother hiding the bug because I believe people should know about these things.
Here’s the bug. Here’s an archived version in case Mozilla tries to hide it later.
While they’re off worried about the millions of Windows malwares crashing their shit, they can’t bother to fix real issues, so we’ll see if this report turns into ANOTHER Bugzilla ghost town or what. ⬆