Comment 457 for bug 269656

@unimatrix9: "Would it have been better for firefox to move anti-phishing non free software to the add-ons that you install on choice?"

The anti-phishing does not involve any restricted software inside Firefox. All of the restricted software is on Google's servers. The software inside Firefox is free.

Firefox consults the service that is described at http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/ (or something similar). The code inside Firefox that does this is free software.

The purists are worried that the software on Google's servers is restricted. The purists feel that because Google hasn't released their _server_ software, this makes Google's service non-free. They feel that Firefox becomes non-free just because it connects to servers that run non-free software.

My opinion is that such a purist view is extreme and impractical. I don't want my free software to be restricted to contacting only servers that run free software. I think this would be a very severe restriction.

I'm delighted that I'm invited and welcome to install huge lots of free-as-in-freedom software on my system, but I don't want to insist that every server that I contact do the same, nor do I feel that Firefox becomes any less free because of restrictions on Google's server software.