alt Hacker News>The last message from the developer in a now-closed GitHub issue shows an email from Mozilla admitting its fault and apologizing for the mistake. However, Raymond still pulled the extension from the Mozilla Add-ons Store, which means you can no longer find it on addons.mozilla.org.
This seems pretty harsh. Mozilla made a mistake, Mozilla apologized, Mozilla fixed the mistake (maybe even improved their processes), and the author still pulls their choose and criticizes Mozilla. On my opinion either author took this a bit up personally, or cares about improving the review process and wants to make a strong point (with some hurt done for their project visibility).
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The author is a volunteer and the software is a labor of love: of course it's personal. Such projects thrive when the author feels like they are giving a valuable gift to a community which is receiving and appreciating it. Being required to submit your creation through an impersonal "review" process which rejects you in such a way that it's obvious nobody cared enough to even look is not just a buzzkill: it's an insult.
I would walk away, too.
Mozilla sent a template email and you're acting like they did anything beyond that. They didn't even assure the author that their add-on wouldn't be removed without prior two-way communication ever again.
Mozilla has a press page -- they could issue a clear, open press release talking about what went wrong, how they're changing going forward, etc. They could even acknowledge that this extension is awesome and contribute capital to making it available to their users.
But, instead, they did the minimum amount possible to save face after one of their reviewers royally messed up. The things the reviewer cited in the first review are plainly wrong and a junior JS developer could tell you that.
Heck, an AI reviewer would have done better (ChatGPT 4o mini):
"No, this file does not appear to contain minified code. Minified code is typically compressed to remove all unnecessary characters such as whitespace, line breaks, and comments to reduce the file size, making it harder to read.
The code you provided contains readable formatting, including comments, indentation, and well-structured functions, which are not characteristics of minified code."
> author took this a bit up personally
Yea, those pesky unpaid developers, letting their emotions get mixed into their personal projects. Why can't they be cold and unfeeling, like the people who run the firefox "store?"
I can’t fault gorhill for not wanting to play the “give large rich organization infinite second chances” game. Sometimes enough is enough even if you think you’d act differently in his shoes.
> Mozilla apologized
No they didn’t. Now I’m not here to play apology police or anything. But that’s just a perfunctory customer service voice statement which happened to include the word “apologize”. And that’s fine. Nobody expects more. We can acknowledge it for what it is tho.
Judging from his replies, this is not the first time he had problems with the review system
Feels like they were just waiting for a reason to pull out – likely feels its a hassle to upload and have it review and just want everyone to trust them and keep it simple
And I guess some people would claim that since its an open source addon no one can feel entitled to anything else
[flagged]
Remember why uBlock Origin exists in the first place: Raymond Hill was fed up with the chore of all the administrative crap around uBlock¹. They wanted it to be a hobby and it started feeling like a job.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-918...
So it’s predictable they’d get fed up with that Mozilla review process and call it quits too.
¹ Which led them to hand the project to an unscrupulous rando that immediately tried to monetise it, leading Raymond to hate the outcome and having to decry his own previous project and ending up essentially where it all started but with a bunch of extra work in the middle.