(no subject)

Well, I had to cut Firefox loose today. They removed the option to allow or deny individual cookies on the fly. It's just gone, both interface and backend. The 'official' explanation, if you care to dig through Mozilla's bugbase, is that such capability is 'not really nice,' which is what parents say to their four-year-olds when they act up. Coders are, in my experience, shamelessly paternalistic, so yes, no surprise whatsoever.

This is just a continuation of what Mozilla has been up to for a while now, becoming more market-conscious and shaping their applications with the 'average user' in mind. Previously they removed the 'Show images' and 'Allow Javascript' checkboxes for this reason. Mozilla has a picture of the average user which is kind of like a lobotomized Neanderthal wearing a diaper, browsing YouTube with one hand and eating Betty Crocker icing from the can with the other, and consequently we are far, far too stupid to know how to use the settings we ourselves select. Projecting forward, the ideal Firefox browser would be a single window with a set of pre-selected content sites and an on-off button. Hey, wait a minute...