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It's publically available if you would have taken two seconds to look. Mozilla bought and owns Pocket.

https://assets.mozilla.net/ann...

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bloc...

It's not the first nor the last. You can see the list here for Firefox: https://blocked.cdn.mozilla.ne...

Is it possible for Mozilla to remotely disable the add-ons in Firefox ESR 52 after they have been removed from the add-on website ?

For example, can Mozilla disable them by adding them to a blacklist which causes Firefox to disable them ?

Yes, to some extent, but as far as I know it is only a soft-block and you can always choose to re-enable the addon. This functionality is controlled by the extensions.blocklist configuration entries, including extensions.blocklist.enabled which can be used to disable the feature altogether.

For Firefox 56 at least, you can see the list at https://blocked.cdn.mozilla.net. Not sure about newer versions.

Better user interface? Seriously? How do you even figure out where to click on a window like this one https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net... and what all the buttons do? Oh, and of course there are no tooltips. Those are for suckers.

I agree with you on the tooltips issue - all of the elements just pop up the name of the extension. That could probably use to be fixed.

The interface seems pretty self-explanatory, though: red is blocked, green is allowed. Click on the red to turn it green, and vice versa. Click the universal "power" icon to turn on/off the extension.

Better user interface? Seriously? How do you even figure out where to click on a window like this one https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net... and what all the buttons do? Oh, and of course there are no tooltips. Those are for suckers.

See the May 12, 2015 Mozilla Foundation article, Update on Digital Rights Management and Firefox Quoting: "... the Adobe Content Decryption Module (CDM) to play back DRM-wrapped content ... will be downloaded from Adobe shortly after you upgrade or install Firefox."

Adobe has a long history of being invasive and abusive and releasing buggy software, in my opinion. Basically, installing new versions of Firefox now appears to give Adobe complete control, even though it is "sandboxed". Mozilla Foundation apparently does not disclose if it was paid by Adobe.

A huge problem, apparently, is that technically knowledgeable users will complain intensely. So, Mozilla Launches A New Firefox Version Without DRM Support. (See the U.S. English version 39.0, for example.)

Apparently the idea is that the technically knowledgeable users will get what they want, but most users will be sneakily manipulated, and the technically knowledgeable users will accept that.

See also this May 12, 2015 article: That DRM support in Firefox you never asked for? It's here. Quoting: " The first version of Adobe's CDM for Firefox is only available on Windows Vista and later and then only for 32-bit versions of the browser. Windows XP, OS X, Linux, and 64-bit versions of Firefox are not yet supported, and there's no word yet on when they might be."

Weird.

Cygwin is the worst answer to pretty much any issue on Windows ever. Forcing a POSIX environment onto the Windows environment to do basic tasks is why Linux admins are so shit at administering Windows. Just learn the damn system you're using.

If you need to have a script saved, just use PowerShell:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/38.0.5/win32/en-US/Firefox Setup 38.0.5.exe' -OutFile 'C:\Firefox Setup 38.0.5.exe'

If you really want you can parse the output from http://download.cdn.mozilla.ne..., but that seems like a huge waste of time. Just fetch a reasonably recent version and plan to update twice.

Otherwise, just use ftp.exe.

Firefox can also come without that "shit". From the article:

Mozilla also announced the launch of a separate Firefox download that won’t automatically install Adobe’s technology for playing back DRM-wrapped content in the browser.

As stated in TFA, the Mozilla foundation had to choose whether to support DRM in its own code according to HTML standards, or else accept that most users will resort to awful buggy plugins like Flash or simply switch to Chrome, Safari, or Edge to get the content they want so bad. I, myself, prefer Firefox not become a marginalized has-been project with single-digit adoption.

Choose your poison. There's a silver lining in DRM over browser: it encourages more content over Internet as opposed to cable TV, encouraging more people to dump their overpriced cable subscriptions and have a stake in the net-neutrality war.

Email software should simply drop support for unencrypted SMTP, or report a big warning if the server doesn't support it.

Mozilla Thunderbird already shows a big scary warning when you try to set up an account without encryption.

You have a New Alert.

Is developing in C or asm writing a program?

Is developing in Python writing a program?

Is developing in Java writing a program?

Is developing in Javascript with NodeJS a program?

Is developing in C using NaCL for a web page writing a program?

If I take a program developed in C and port it to Javascript to run in the browser via LLVM/Emscripten does it cease to be a program?

Is this a program?
https://developer.cdn.mozilla.net/media/uploads/demos/a/z/azakai/3baf4ad7e600cbda06ec46efec5ec3b8/bananabread_1373485124_demo_package/index.html

"Web programming" is writing programs on or for the web. "Web design" is something different.

"Web programmers" are people who write software that runs in an amazing cross platform VM: the browser.

I'm one of them.

I know you were just trying to be cute with your comment, but you were legitimately called out on it because it is BS. It's best not to try to defend a bad argument. Just evaluate, learn, adjust your understand and move on.

With the Mozilla marketplace opening soon for desktop web apps and App Tabs visibly separate in Firefox for over a year, it appears you haven't really picked up any info on other browsers yet.

I tried Chromium. There is a problem: I've become addicted to tree-style tabs, courtesy of the Firefox extension.

Chromium/Chrome had this feature natively for a long time, until the developers disabled it in a sneaky-Pete maneuver that pissed off a bunch of people.

The obvious response, to write a Chromium extension for Tree-Style Tabs, is not an option. The Chromium plugin API does not expose the functionality necessary to do so.

Webkit (Chromium/Chrome's layout engine) seems to be a little faster than Gecko (Firefox's equivalent), but I would prefer to use a browser that gives the user (ME!) control over it, even at the cost of some rendering speed.

The time I would gain in rendering efficiency would probably be lost trying to scan this, as opposed to this.

Can anyone running the beta tell me if the "Personas" skins they mainstreamed in 3.6 are broken in 4.0 ? It would be sad to see them go, since I love monochrome themes for myself and colorful ones for the family. The latter allows me to tell from the other side of the room that they're using the correct browser when an issue is "called out" to me. I digress... any brokenness means that they went from 3.6 support to abandonment in a single release, where 3.7 is AKA 4.0. Chrome changes version numbers all the time, and they rarely update their general GUI.

On another topic, summaries sometimes make you "pause" slashdot to seek clarification, though not always not for the articles. I tried to link to personas, but mozilla seems to be slashdotted or something/i>