Most large software that hits servers on the network will have this because it's borderline malpractice not to. Not only would it make it difficult or impossible to fix third-party regressions like this, but if your software started causing issues for third parties (like crashing their servers or getting users kicked off the internet or corrupting their data), you'd have no way to mitigate it in a reasonable amount of time.
FWIW I maintained a popular chrome extension (100k weekly users) and I eventually had to add an extensive set of chicken bits pulled from my server multiple times a day. Why? Because chrome updates take over a day to propagate and the extension could regularly break when webdevs made frontend changes to the websites my end users visited. It simply wasn't feasible to ask end users to manually pull a chrome update every time this happened (not to mention that chrome's extension store is designed to make this very hard.) I added an option to disable it but as far as I know none of my users turned that on.
Not exactly the same but most modern hardware has equivalent functionality where they can flip 'chicken bits' in the hw to disable various features in response to regressions - stuff like spectre or meltdown is a good example. Naturally that is instead flipped by OS or firmware updates, but considering those come down across the wire automatically now, it's basically the same idea.
> Not only would it make it difficult or impossible to fix third-party regressions like this, but if your software started causing issues for third parties (like crashing their servers or getting users kicked off the internet or corrupting their data), you'd have no way to mitigate it in a reasonable amount of time.
I completely agree that in the current case resetting it remotely is the easiest solution for both parties. However, it is probably the first time many users learned something like this exists. One would think an open browser promoting user empowerment would have more transparency on this feature and how it can be controlled.
If they want to do that, they'll do it. Governments have forced online service providers to implement back doors before, so Mozilla or Google could similarly be forced to do that.
FWIW I maintained a popular chrome extension (100k weekly users) and I eventually had to add an extensive set of chicken bits pulled from my server multiple times a day. Why? Because chrome updates take over a day to propagate and the extension could regularly break when webdevs made frontend changes to the websites my end users visited. It simply wasn't feasible to ask end users to manually pull a chrome update every time this happened (not to mention that chrome's extension store is designed to make this very hard.) I added an option to disable it but as far as I know none of my users turned that on.
Not exactly the same but most modern hardware has equivalent functionality where they can flip 'chicken bits' in the hw to disable various features in response to regressions - stuff like spectre or meltdown is a good example. Naturally that is instead flipped by OS or firmware updates, but considering those come down across the wire automatically now, it's basically the same idea.