{"id":2096,"date":"2012-02-21T15:11:20","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T22:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/?p=2096"},"modified":"2012-04-15T22:13:08","modified_gmt":"2012-04-16T05:13:08","slug":"ask-toolbar-is-changing-the-firefox-add-on-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/2012\/02\/21\/ask-toolbar-is-changing-the-firefox-add-on-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask Toolbar is changing the Firefox add-on process"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Note:<\/strong> This is my personal opinion and is not meant to reflect Mozilla&#8217;s views.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve done a lot of work to help Firefox users have control over their add-ons (for example, <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=596343\">bug 596343<\/a> and follow-ups <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=693743\">693743<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=693698\">693698<\/a>) but some software companies are hard at work circumnavigating these protections. A while ago I filed bug <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=721258\">721258<\/a> concerned about the way the Ask Toolbar changes our 3rd party add-on confirmation screen. Today, in a <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=721258#c15\">follow-up comment<\/a> I posted this screencast which shows an example of it in action:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WWeDmYPmAyU?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>Planet Mozilla viewers \u2013 <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/WWeDmYPmAyU\">you can watch this video on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Some suggested that this isn&#8217;t that bad or that it could be worse. As someone charged with looking out for our users it&#8217;s pretty frustrating to run into that kind of opposition &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/mzl.la\/xCdIya\">just take a look at our support forum<\/a>.  <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ask.com#Ask_Toolbar_browser_add-on_controversy\">Ask is known for this kind of stuff<\/a>. And in fact, <a href=\"http:\/\/asksupport.custhelp.com\/app\/answers\/list\">&#8220;how do I uninstall the Ask toolbar&#8221; is their top support question<\/a>. It looks like we can&#8217;t do anything technical to prevent this at the moment. Maybe by drawing attention to it we can come up with another solution that protects people.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Clarification:<\/strong> At the end of the video, when I&#8217;m trying to fix the location bar search &#8211; the problem is that &#8220;domain guessing&#8221; is happening when it shouldn&#8217;t be (<a href=\"http:\/\/support.mozilla.org\/kb\/Location+bar+search\">documented here<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note: This is my personal opinion and is not meant to reflect Mozilla&#8217;s views. We&#8217;ve done a lot of work to help Firefox users have control over their add-ons (for &hellip; <a class=\"go\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/2012\/02\/21\/ask-toolbar-is-changing-the-firefox-add-on-process\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2096"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/sumo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}