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You are here: News > News > Bickering and Internet Drama Ensues Within Firefox
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| » 11 May 2009 |
| Bickering and Internet Drama Ensues Within Firefox |
| The developers of two popular Firefox extensions, who were acting rather immaturely for men their age, got into a passive-aggressive war of words that proved to be a non-event save for several thousand Twitter messages on the topic and a few devout Firefox advocates promising to uninstall one or the other extension in order to feel like they're making a statement on an important issue. There's really no reason for this latest episode of Internet drama (that's comparatively insignificant to the much more popular but just as shallow Livejournal uprising) to become a public affair. Nevertheless, it already has. Sure, the two developers could have avoided airing out their dirty laundry by instead discussing their problems and differences like civilized gentlemen, but this is the Internet. Culpability over your own actions seems to fly right out of the window when surfing the worldwide web. The unconventional and apparently puerile world of open source deems it impossible to even consider avoiding this mess. Getting an over-inflated sense of importance appears to be par for the course in the information superhighway, so there would be no other outcome possible save for a good old fashioned web browser extension developer catfight. Here are the facts of the case. Giorgo Maone, the developer of Firefox's NoScript security extension, makes a living by taking advantage of the popularity of his creation (which has gotten over 50 million downloads) through regular NoScript updates and Google ads on the update page of his website. On the other hand, Wladimir Palant, one of the developers of Adblock Plus, railed against the possible conflict of interest Giorgo Maone has by trying to use his own creation for personal profit. Take note that Adblock Plus is an extension that blacklists all known ad servers and formats in order to provide users ad-free surfing. Seeing that Palant is a developer of a service that keeps other people from profiting over surfers through adware, it's easy to see where he's coming from. Palant passive-aggressively seethed on his blog post for Adblock Plus, "I know that some other extension developers have their extension as a full-time job and that makes them dependent on money sources. Given the market value of their user base, it is hard not to sell out." From there, all hell broke loose, if hell were composed of irate Twitter posts and continuous Internet debates. There's not much to say about the subject beyond that, really. |
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