Firefox Home for the iPhone is now out, which is cool. However, according to its page on the iTunes Store, it features:
Frequent/Intense Profanity or Crude Humor Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References Frequent/Intense Horror/Fear Themes Frequent/Intense Simulated Gambling Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence
I don’t quite know what our engineers were doing when they coded Firefox Home, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t include any of those things. Although perhaps, for some people realising the number of tabs they have open on their desktop might promote Intense Horror/Fear.
Either someone checked or unchecked the wrong boxes here, or Apple has got thoroughly confused.
And for the person who reviewed it who was asking why they couldn’t have full Firefox – ask Apple, dude. I’m sure we’d love to do it.
Any app that can load webpages is rated 17+….
“I don’t quite know what our engineers were doing when they coded Firefox Home, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t include any of those things.”
Of course – I think it would be technically rather difficult to have a web browser where you had to include all the web content in the code! But they did include the ability to display content from the web, and the web includes all of that stuff.
Except Safari, obviously. That’s totally child-friendly.
Can Firefox Home load webpages? I didn’t know…
As Stuart said, any application which loads arbitrary webpages is rated 17+ because it *can* be used to display frequent/intense bad stuff of all kinds. Safari can as well, of course, but Safari can be disabled onm the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch if a parent is concerned about such things.
But Firefox Home doesn’t actually load web pages! It hands them off to Safari, and if 17+ is blocked Safari isn’t going to load. So what’s the harm from Firefox Home itself? NSFW bookmark titles? I’ll give ’em “Sexual Themes”, “Crude Humor” and the like, but “Simulated Gambling” or “Realistic Violence” in a title?
And, what’s more, the data in the titles is data the user themselves provided by visiting the sites on their desktop. NSFW page titles aren’t going to appear unless the user was visiting NSFW pages. It’s their own data. Surely these restrictions should only apply to data not provided by the user – otherwise Remember the Milk would be restricted because a user might type something crude into it in another client.
> Safari can as well, of course, but Safari can be disabled on the
> iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch if a parent is concerned about such things.
Additionally, Safari (being an Apple product) probably wasn’t looked at by the team that rates third-party applications. So while there’s clearly an inconsistency here, it may not have been deliberate as such.
> Firefox Home doesn’t actually load web pages! It hands them off to Safari
That’s an implementation detail. The people who rate the third-party applications probably aren’t developers, so it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if this kind of nuance went right over their heads. (Would *you* pay somebody application-developer wages to sit around slapping MPAA-esque ratings on existing third-party software? I sure wouldn’t. I’d hire an out-of-work journalism major and pay them a wage they’d be happy to get, which the average application developer wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.)