[TAG] The Gentle Art of Firefox Tuning (and Taming)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Peter H??we (PeterHuewe at gmx.de):

> although I do not agree on every single aspect of the article I still think 
> its a great article - so thanks for writing it.

Thank you very much, Peter.  I wrote it primarily because I just hadn't 
seen much coverage of those subjects, and especially about the hazards
of installing code from dubious locations.

[BetterPrivacy:]

> Are you sure about that?

I was sure about the licence.  The source code auditability was just to
the extent of my present knowledge based on what I'd seen.

> however the source IS available (as with all extensions) as they are
> written in plain javascript/xul  - just unzip the .xpi (and sometimes
> the jar within) and tadaa there's your source.
 
Thanks for pointing that out.  I'd been searching for information on how
one gets to the XUL sourcecode of distributed extensions, and whether
it's reduced to bytecode, or what.  Even the Mozilla.org pages on the
extension interface didn't really make that clear -- so I've now learned
something useful.

Of course, this merely means BetterPrivacy _could_ be audited by third
parties.  The proprietary licensing has the incidental effect that few
will ever bother (as one lacks a meaningful right to fork, there's not
going to be a Debian package, etc.).  Anyway, I happen to like the more
modest design of Objectify, for whatever that's worth.