Slashdot Mirror
Students Embarrass eBay With Firefox Add-On
An anonymous reader sends along a posting from the Grooveking blog on a group of Stanford students who got together to help promote Firefox and ended up releasing a long overdue eBay Toolbar for Firefox before Mozilla and eBay could release their jointly developed extension in Europe. Mozilla's COO said the preemptive release of the eBay Toolbar had ruffled some feathers among European eBay execs. "Besides basic search features, it removes external ads on the site and allows users to see thumbnail pictures on ALL search items, even those sellers didn't pay for. An eBay toolbar has been long overdue... eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees. But eBay users get a really good deal."
Suck it, Ebay. Stop trying to hamstring your sellers. Your costs were exponentially lower when you were born, making more money doesn't entitle you to start charging more money for no real reason.
Just installed it and started typing in their personal information, with absolutely no idea what this plugin was doing with it?
Uh huh. Oh, now you're thinking through the security implications.
It's probably not a particularly clever piece of phishing, but the next one might be.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Does it let me "ignore" sellers by name, feedback ratio and feedback quantity so I never see their listings? If it does, I'll download it right now. There are half a dozen or so "power sellers" who flood the search terms I regularly look for with auctions I wouldn't bid on in a million years. And then there are all the 98.2% positive feedback guys who I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole (99% is my normal cutoff) and all the obviously re-registered accounts that are too slick to legitimately have only 8 feedbacks.
I'd very much like an "ignore" option.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Here's the problem. Intelligent people with decent coding knowledge created a free piece of software that sounds pretty good. Ebay appearantly doesn't want them to use it, and started raising a ruckus. But what happens when hundreds of people with programming skills start doing things like this, especially if computer programming becomes part of high school curriculum? ( http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/142 0238 ) One day, the flood will hit, Ebay, Microsoft, Apple, and everything else will collapse, and the Open Source Community will rejoice.
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were capable of staying awake long enough.
Off topic of eBay and the plug-in for Firefox I just installed, I wish to comment on advertisements.
Just as zaphod_es (613312) has stopped watching television, I too had quit and sold my tv in 1997 when I was a teenager because of the lousy sitcoms and excessive number of minutes spent on ads compared to entertainment. People should be able to avoid the ugliness of these ads, if the product was worth a damn, people will get word of it. Everyone knows McDonald's exists, yet they bombard us daily with their latest (and very retarded) slogans and pictures of food that look nothing like the real product (which also lacks good taste).
I have found that Ad-Block Plus and Flash Block add-ins for FireFox makes browsing the web MUCH more enjoyable and pages load faster. If developers did not make software that limits the ads, I would be a very pissed off internet user. I replaced my tv with computer, but have no alternative to replace computer.
I am perfectly happy to have eBay send ad content to my computer. I'm also perfectly happy to have my computer ignore that content. Their markup interpreted by my computer. Showing me adds never made them any money to begin with, so skipping them doesn't hurt anyone.