In addition to Firefox for Windows, I use Firefox for Android and Firefox ESR, and the studies-based temporary hack fix doesn’t even apply to those. So I’m stuck for a while. Like everyone else who’s been complaining, I’m also bothered by how much extra garbage I see on-line yesterday and today. It seems crazy to me that so many people put up with all that junk all the time. The ad networks are probably major drivers of broadband upgrades at this point.
But on the other hand. The mechanism that went haywire was intended to block malicious add-ons. Not too many years ago, many of us would have dismissed that as a paranoid concern, but today, I think most of us are likely to accept that’s a real possibility. The Firefox team was right to include that mechanism and hey, it works! That’s sort of good news! It was a management problem that allowed the cert to expire.
I am certainly inconvenienced but Firefox still works, I can still do whatever (trivial) research and planning I was doing last week.
I pay for Google Music and as part of that deal, YouTube is ad-free for me. I won’t tell you that I’m thrilled by the idea of shelling out small payments to a zillion separate organizations as an alternative to an advertising-dominated culture, but – something like that probably is the most realistic alternative to an advertising-dominated culture. I wish it were practical to spread the few dollars I can afford around more.
