from the write-one-to-submit-a-story-to-SN dept.
Tim Robertson of Omniref has described for us the awful experience of writing an extension for Mozilla Firefox.
As Tim describes it in his article:
Development of the Chrome extension was a pleasant experience — the tools, documentation and release process were all top-notch. But Firefox? Well…I can’t think of a single positive thing to say. From the documentation to the approval process, writing a Firefox extension is one punch in the face after another.
Extensions have long been touted as one of the main benefits of Firefox. So why, over a decade after the release of Firefox 1.0, is writing and publishing a Firefox extension such a horrible experience? Why is there such a discrepancy between the enjoyable experience of creating an extension for Chrome versus the painful one of creating an extension for Firefox? And is it reasonable to believe that the situation with Firefox will ever improve?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:22PM
Google, please go. We're still convinced you're evil.
Of course, this discussion would probably get a lot less bitching and flaming if the part about Chrome saving all the kittens in the kitten orphanage from a fire started by fireFox, and how Chrome found the cure for cancer and AIDS while Firefox is spreading Ebola everywhere.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:44PM
I actually switched back to firefox from chrome because it's now somehow worse in terms of performance, feature creep and bloat than firefox ever was. The extension architecture sucks in its own significant ways too because of google's tendency to think they're gods among men even though they produce some of the worst code and design ever leading to weird hacks needed to build non-trivial extensions. The API also has its own issues since even though they mostly-sort-of fixed the "you can't control requests" issue there are still many more problems with slightly less than high level browser control. One thing it does have going for it however is simple markup, JS and JSON configuration. Like I said in my other posts I'm actually somewhat partial to XUL because of the potential it has that mozilla squandered but even I know chrome does those 3 things (and possibly only those 3 things) better.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Sunday November 16 2014, @11:02PM
That is an extremely bizarre description of Chrome. I've developed extensions for both Firefox and Chrome, and Chrome is much nicer. Okay, the API isn't as powerful, but that's because Google actually gives a shit about security. In Firefox extensions could originally screw with pretty much any part of the browser, which caused many many security problems and compatibility issues. Mozilla slowly removed a few of the worst bits, and a lot of extensions just broke as the browser internals changed. They had to introduce a system where developers get an email notifying them of automated compatibility testing results for every version of Firefox released. Chrome just keeps the API stable and avoids such problems.
XUL is a complete disaster. It's basically the root cause of all Firefox's extension problems, the reason they are so insecure and brittle. If you want stability and security XUL is not the solution.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @11:36PM
Google cares about security only slightly more than they do simplicity, good practice and sound design. That is to say not much at all. One of the bigger instances of them proving this is when they decided they wanted to give sites that use HTTPS rank bonuses just because they use HTTPS. Regardless of how appropriate that usage would be. Which will no doubt lead to lots of insecure servers just asking for compromising via openssl memory read bug of the week because of google's current fleeting hardon for the little green bar. In a similar vein you can thank chrome's decent security model for it lacking features (which was fine, up until they made it a bloated piece of crap rivaling or possibly exceeding firefox) and implementing google's other marketing-friendly hardon of "sandbox". Not the actual implementation mind you, just the word. If it was any good at sandboxing there wouldn't be so many frustrated authors asking how to break out of it. If the security was intentional on their part then communication between background and content scripts wouldn't be so ad-hoc and weird.
Before you say it: No, sendMessage and reliance on global state /or localStorage is not a very good way of doing it, contrary to their documentation trying to act like it is. Let us also not forget the occasional need to use alarms because of one obvious failure or another. And no XUL is not the root of firefox's problems. It's a markup language. If you're going to be like that you might as well blame HTML for chrome's current state. It has a lot of potential as I said before. It allows almost complete runtime customization of the UI whereas with chrome you're lucky if you can remove an option or two from the right click menu not to mention the inherent technical niftiness of being able to do inline XHTML and interact with it as if it were any other part of the DOM. The security and design failures surrounding extensions in general however are the root. They can also be fixed as well as XUL being a bad HTML subset can be. Which is something that Mozilla could be doing right now but oh look at the time! There's another initiative we need to start and there is drawings of foxes to retweet!
Feel free to blame XBL for everything though. I'd probably agree with whatever security and design criticism you've got with regards to it.
Also check out the latest firefox's New Tab page if you don't mind the UI. It's one of those things I get a guilty pleasure out of looking at. I don't know why but seeing the XHTML there being used just like intended is pleasing to me. It's also one of those things that speaks for XUL's potential if Mozilla would just stop being stupid. I have a userchrome.css and userchrome.js that I used to pretty much make the new tab page my own little thing without having to completely gut it or reimplement everything like the new tab page replacements for Chrome must do.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Monday November 17 2014, @10:43AM
Google cares about security only slightly more than they do simplicity, good practice and sound design. That is to say not much at all.
Do you know anything about the architecture of Chrome at all? It's built from the ground up to be secure. In fact it was the first major browser to be built that way, with sandboxing as a core part of the design. Other browsers adopted much of what Chrome does later, if they could.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday November 17 2014, @05:40PM
No, since I can't look at it. I do however know plenty about chromium which I'd hope you'd have inferred from the grandparent post. I also am somewhat familiar with the code and it is what you'd expect from google. Which to put it quite simply is not anything near what their marketing-style bullshit puts it out to be. It's better than gecko by far in terms of cleanliness and good practice but this hardly sets a good bar. And let me let you in on a secret. Multiple isolated processes with strong IPC (Which is chrome's real security and stability advantage, not their failure of a sandboxing implementation) is not something they pioneered and is not something other browsers are doing because they do. They probably already wanted to. They're doing it because chrome showed it was feasible with the specs of today's machines.
and yes it may have been the first "major" browser if you are to define major by a multinational company doing it but it was not the first by far either. People were doing this shit with w3m in emacs without even knowing it for years and that's only the most strained example I could think of.
I'm not trying to lessen the importance of chrome or give google a hard time. Chrome, just like google fiber, was needed to boot the ass of companies. Like Mozilla (clearly though they didn't get booted hard enough). But can we please recognize it for what it is and stop acting like google is an engineering powerhouse. They're not. By any means. I've lost all respect for them because of a few codebases I've inspected. Least of which being youtube's horrific intentionally obfuscated markup, Go and really anything that they've released written in python. They're lucky if they can even keep to their stupid internal conventions of things like 2 space tabs and not break python entirely by using tab characters and other obvious syntax fails.
As an aside, Firefox currently pulls in chromium's IPC implementation for the plugin container. I guess I can understand wanting to reuse that. Like I said it is one of the parts of it google did good on. I'm assuming that the plugin container is the start of an IPC model similar to chrome's. There is worse code to reuse that's for sure.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:36PM
If the sandboxing is so good, why is it that every time I use Chrome I end up with the browser crashing a few times a day from misbehaved tabs? Never had that happen on Firefox -- Firefox *will* slow down, sometimes quite severely. But it doesn't crash.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:33PM
1) Are you seriously saying it's a massive security flaw that a program I installed can access data I gave it? Browser extensions aren't websites, and they don't need the same security considerations as websites. Browser extensions are software explicitly installed by the user. Why would you install an extension that you don't trust? It SHOULD be allowed to modify the browser. It SHOULD be allowed to take data from one page and put it in another. It SHOULD be allowed to access my hard drive and network. If they want to go above and beyond what is necessary and implement something like Android's permission model (or better yet, Cyanogenmod's Privacy Guard) that's fine, but it's not strictly necessary. It is part of the browser and should have all the permissions of the browser.
2) Yeah, Chrome's security model is *fantastic*. That's why simply loading a website will often cause the entire browser to crash, right? And I'm not talking about sketchy Russian mafia websites; I've had that happen with the New York Times. More than once. Or Slashdot. Or countless others...
Having said that...I've written one browser extension in my life, just a couple months ago. Originally I wanted to write it for Firefox, because that's what I use most of the time. After trying to find documentation on how to actually do that...I ended up writing it for Chrome and deciding the Firefox version would come later. It never did. Chrome certainly makes it a pain in the ass too, but Firefox is far worse.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday November 16 2014, @10:35PM
The stark and ragged flaws in Mozilla development are still clearly better than serving Google's twisted, Trojan-horse browser. The proof is in the sheer number and variety of FireFox extensions - and the completeness of their realization.
Enabling extensibility that minimizes Google's commercial value and interest is always going to inhibit them from making Chrome a platform of first choice.
In short? Mozilla may be rough - but it is still OUR rough, until the time we let it be squandered or parceled to outside interest as was the Debian project.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Sunday November 16 2014, @11:08PM
The reason there are so many Firefox extensions is because the extension API lets you hack around with almost any part of the browser. That is a security and compatibility nightmare. Extensions can introduce all sorts of flaws and new attack surfaces, and can interact with each other in unpredictable ways. With hindsight any sane person would design things the way Google has, with a carefully consider and stable API that puts security and sandboxing of extensions first. It might not be as powerful but at least it isn't letting extensions, and by extension any exploit that targets them run arbitrary code in the browser.
Mozilla's development process is clearly driven by bullshit merchants (UX experts) and commercial considerations (advertising). They are no better than Google, don't kid yourself. Hay, at least Google didn't put adverts on the new tab page yet.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:45PM
Browser extensions are, as the name implies, extensions of the browser. They should have just as much access as the browser itself. If you don't trust it, don't install it. Installing random sketchy extensions off the web is no different than installing random sketchy executables from your spam folder.
It's not a security flaw that software I installed has access to data I gave it. Chrome requires a more secure model because Chrome was basically designed to be an operating system. I'd hope Firefox OS has a better security model too. But a browser alone doesn't *really* need it. Might be nice to have, but it really does more harm than good if the user can't override it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @02:41AM
So if in the future there are as many extensions for chrome as for firefox, that will "prove" you wrong. Right? Your claim seems very dubious.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:30PM
They would rather waste money and be attention whores. It's really quite that simple. This is also the main answer to any question that takes the form of "Why has mozilla not addressed obvious issue with firefox X yet?". Just take a look at the submissions about firefox as of late. A "developer edition" that any competent developer already does with standard firefox, a worthless privacy initiative that is going to steal potential donation money that could go to Tor itself, then there are things like Persona which pretty much died out without further comment. The well known designer circle jerking with the new UI design is another thing. Do I need to even mention Firefox OS?
Basically, mozilla knows of the issues with extensions. They know XUL is a pain in the ass. They know the SDK is a pain in the ass. They know firefox has severe design and performance issues. They just don't care. They would rather spend the resources doing such worthy things as designing ad pages [mozilla.org] and being more transparent attention whores [twitter.com] than people making "thumbs up if you agree" posts on youtube.
Funny thing is that I actually like the creativity and potential for UI customization that XUL allows (check out how it does the tree in the DOM inspector, really cool) so I'm one of the people most forgiving towards mozilla right now. Yet they spit in our faces repeatedly.
Also check out that twitter feed in general. Keep in mind that most projects with a dedicated feed use it strictly for keeping people up to date on the project itself or commit logging. Mozilla uses it for advertising and crap like someone making paper mache foxes. This is what mozilla spends their time doing instead of using the significant sums of money Google gives them and money of members/donators to work on Firefox's core. The most promising project in that regard is Servo, which right now is being treated as little more than a side project and Rust toy.
Will they improve? Yeah, sure. Just boot the idiot CEO and other officers, boot the incompetent designers and give the guys willing to tolerate Gecko's code a raise. (Seriously, I'm pretty sure I got my first gray hairs trying to patch it)
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:36PM
Oh and forgive the double post but Mozilla are so fiscally and ethically irresponsible I couldn't remember the plethora of stuff they're wasting money - I mean investing - on. One of the bigger pieces of shit they've spent time gold plating recently next to the developer edition is this... Weird thing that I'm still not entirely sure what it's about or what it is trying to accomplish.
http://mozvr.com/ [mozvr.com]
and no. It's not a hoax. I wish it was.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:44PM
...so you see a Mozilla research team trying to find a new way to use a virtual reality headset... you know, doing some actual research with some fantastic geek cred... and you can't figure it out so it's a piece of shit? Excuse me while I completely disregard everything you just said. It took me a grand total of 2 seconds to work out what it was, which included waiting for the page to load. x
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:58PM
I know what it is but what I don't know is its purpose. There are better qualified places doing this stuff right now without trying to shoehorn a "web" slant on it. Like Google or Oculus/Facebook. Not exactly the posterchild company for this I know but if I'm going to be neutral to one I have to be neutral to all and that includes recognizing their projects. It's a gold plated piece of shit because it will amount to nothing while pretending that it is and being a resource leech the whole time. Which pretty much summarizes all their recent endeavors. I'd rather donate to facebook to research how to overlay Mark's favorite restaurants on Google Glass than pay Mozilla to posture. At least then it'd amount to something.
Also, right now would be a good time to mention Mozilla's manifesto [mozilla.org]. Last I checked those trendy Cards(TM) did not include "Be the best Facebook and Google-like me-too company we can be on donated money" or something else along those lines.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Sunday November 16 2014, @09:13PM
If and when VR takes on in gaming, desktop and the web will be opened up to VR too. Mozilla is just trying to see how they can be part of that, and they have every right if you ask me. And sure enough, Google will be ahead of them in no time but they have huge resources, while Mozilla mostly has volunteers.
There seem to be a lot of projects and fragmentation under the Mozilla umbrella, and you might think that effort might be better spent on fixing bugs. But diversity is also good, right? For the same reason we (well, I, at least) don't want scientists to only concentrate on curing cancer, fixing poverty, pollotion, etc. before exploring space.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @09:22PM
That's fair. But as you said yourself they have limited resources. They should be focusing on doing a few things and doing them well. That's exactly why I'm so frustrated with them as of late. They also have no business diversifying if their core projects aren't doing well. If they were doing great and giving firefox core the attention it deserves I'd say go for it. Why not. But as it is they're spreading themselves thin and ignoring firefox almost entirely except for aforementioned impotent PR moves like developer edition. I'm fine with chemists working on how to create environmentally friendly bombs (and yes this is a thing apparently) because they generally do a pretty good job at researching drugs and things of that nature and generally stick to their principles as scientists. If mozilla had any kind of similar work ethic firefox would be awesome, I'd be proven wrong and probably shut up and go crawl into a corner.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday November 17 2014, @01:44AM
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday November 17 2014, @07:42AM
Meh, to be honest I don't blame you. Take a quick look at xulrunner and gecko proper's code. They need refactoring to put it lightly. Mozilla kind of brought it on themselves though. Even though we've only recently assigned an agreed upon name to it technical debt is something well understood in projects and they could have avoided its current state.
At one point I was willing to cut them some slack because (for example) it's a bit of a technical challenge to properly do threading when there are two different but attached markup trees (i.e. the XUL tree/DOM and the web page DOM embedded inside of it) that need to be rendered asynchronously. But that excuse sailed ship a long time ago and now they're just wasting resources while that debt continues piling up and can be avoided.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 16 2014, @09:34PM
If and when VR takes on in gaming, desktop and the web will be opened up to VR too
I've been promised that for decades. I don't think it'll ever deploy, same as "gorilla arm" problems with finger/tactile interfaces, just too many problems with human biology and modern culture.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday November 17 2014, @01:38AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @01:27PM
One word: porn.
It will happen, trust me.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday November 17 2014, @01:48PM
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday November 17 2014, @06:53PM
"I know what it is but what I don't know is its purpose."
That's why pure research needs to be done. I'd rather the Mozilla foundation did this research and open sourced it properly for anyone to work on / contribute to / fork / do whatever with over some commercial entity not releasing the source code and abandoning it incomplete some time in the future. Oddly enough, this seems to be what's happening with Google Glass at the moment if I'm reading the situation right...
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday November 17 2014, @08:24PM
Honestly, between Mozilla being impotent and resource wasting some more or Google just bootstrapping something and then abandoning it to spur further development I don't know who I would prefer. Like I said in another post here though if Mozilla was actually giving its core project(s) the attention they deserve then I'd be all for some experimental stuff on the side. Problem is, they're quite literally ignoring firefox core and proceeding to do useless stuff like mozvr.com which I guarantee nothing tangible will come out of. I know the inherent problems with Oculus being effectively Facebook (let's not kid ourselves, they're going to assimilate them. You can see the lie as plain as you could Mark when he sweats up a storm) but even then you're more likely to get good code and documentation out of them than Mozilla and Google. The latter not because they're incapable of doing the job, but because I'm quite familiar with their secrecy-for-secrecy-sake bullshit. They hide completely mundane things behind implicit and explicit NDAs. So it's unlikely you'll get much unless you beat it out of them or the hardware becomes obsolete or they abandon the project.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @10:02PM
The problem isn't that research is being done. The problem is that it's the Mozilla crew doing it. Just look at their track record so far with "innovation". It has been abysmal! They consistently manage to overlook, or totally ignore, stuff that would be useful. Instead, they focus on stuff that's totally unwanted, like Persona, or totally shit, like Firefox OS or Australis.
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Sunday November 16 2014, @07:56PM
Your rant would be more effective if you came across as a reasonable fellow, and less like a raver
subicular junctures
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:46PM
It's not my problem if you want to look at how I deliver a point rather than the point itself. When I do long posts about a technical subject I need to draft it as quickly as possible because I will forget otherwise. I understand that it could flow better but frankly the only people I've ever seen critique my method of delivery are the people who don't wish to partake in the discussion. So why bother posting at all? I also realize that I'm less than formal in how I address parties like Mozilla but the fact is that they deserve no better right now. I deal with political correctness enough in business communication. I shouldn't have to do the same in a community of people more than capable of groking the subject matter.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:56PM
> It's not my problem if you want to look at how I deliver a point rather than the point itself.
Unless your intent in writing is the equivalent of public masturbation - an act of pure narcissism - then it is your problem. Your failure to express your point in a convincing manner means not only do you fail to sway your audience, you encourage them to support what you oppose.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @09:04PM
Well considering that any kind of community discussion is masturbation of the mind or ego stroking at some level. I really can't deny that is part of it if I'm going to be completely honest and realistic right? Otherwise though no I'm not trying to sway anyone. I just like encouraging discussion beyond shallow politics. I don't shill anything so what would be the point of trying to write something in a purely argumentative fashion? Besides, as far as this goes I don't think anyone is really denying that mozilla is deteriorating. Except maybe mozilla themselves. The only question is to what extent.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @10:57PM
> Well considering that any kind of community discussion is masturbation of the mind or ego stroking at some level.
False dichotomy. Just because a recipe calls for salt doesn't make an entire cupful of salt mandatory.
> Otherwise though no I'm not trying to sway anyone. I just like encouraging discussion
Lol, that's some pretty strong self-delusion.
> I don't think anyone is really denying that mozilla is deteriorating
Ah the old, "my opinions are self-evident facts" self-delusion.
(Score: 1) by dlb on Sunday November 16 2014, @10:37PM
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:04PM
Yeah but Mozilla developers could definitely get with the times. The modern way to develop a firefox extension (at least on linux) should be to create an .ini file that's read by a systemd service which in turn spits out your completed, kdbus aware browser extension on demand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @10:00PM
Why is the parent modded Offtopic? It's totally on-topic. It's talking about how Mozilla could go from being so far behind to being on the cutting edge of extension systems, for crying out loud. Look, systemd is the future. Firefox needs to look to the future at all times. So it's obvious that Firefox and systemd need to come together as one.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday November 16 2014, @08:52PM
I don't know nuttin' about Firefox extension development, but I think the pattern I'm seeing is "Get rejected for silly reasons" means technology will die. Amazon's criticism in the press is their app store doesn't have enough apps, and one reason is getting an app into their store is frustrating. With my app, they did flag some issues that were legit, but also nit-picked my app to death. One obvious page in my app had a refresh link if nothing was available, and my app kept getting rejected because the reviewer could not figure out that if you refreshed and nothing was available, you'd get the same page until something became available - I had to put a special message into the Kindle version to explain it. The Barnes and Noble Nook basically died with their curated app store. I had an app that triggered a platform bug in their Android fork, and it was rejected every. single. time. I. submitted. it. and I had to open a tech support issue and then they'd approve it. The Nook was dying until they added Google Play apps, and is still dying. And this is just stuff I know about.
Bottom line? Rejection should not be your default policy if you want anyone to care about your technology. Any group that has what I call an "auto-rejection policy" (that is, they look for reasons to reject your app) is not going to get developers interested in their technology. If you don't want to be treated as damage and routed around, make it easier for people to support your platform. Otherwise it will die.
Apple is the exception to the rule. Any Apple developer seems to expect "thank you, I'll have another" from them.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @09:12PM
I haven't really had rejection issues with firefox either but that's mostly because I don't really push them to the store when I do write one. They're usually itch-scratchers that I couldn't do with a userscript alone. I think that what you said regarding Apple is a little indicative of company arrogance though. Mozilla has definitely been showing that they think they're something they aren't, Barnes and Noble for some reason think that despite being a book company of all things. People tolerate Apple because they consider it a price of doing business. A lot of people have iphones, businesses want their crap on those iphones. There is enough exposure potential that the developer will clench their teeth and keep trying. Companies like Mozilla and B&N however don't by any means have the same level of phones/tablets in hands so if they get bitchy then people will just give up and move on.
I feel that this is some kind of failed attempt at quality control. But as you said these reviewers are oftentimes not literate and take bugs in the system or expected behavior from your program as the program being buggy. Just ends up being yet another circlejerk since said reviewers can be pretty easily be worked around by trendy UI designs and this weeks idea of "user friendly" as Apple's store proves.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @09:57PM
Anything that's "curated" is absolute crap. Curated news is crap. Curated app stores are crap. Filtering like that guarantees that only total crap gets through, and anything interesting and truly useful gets rejected.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @09:23PM
In the age where a wiki is considered documentation the only well documented things are ran by companies, not foundations.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday November 16 2014, @09:27PM
I wrote an extension for GIMP and the GNU XMPP client whose name escapes me once. Wrote some scheme. Got annoyed when I realized the XMPP client's architecture was limited to glorified formatting strings.
Still got to write some lisp though.
Was pretty good.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @02:46AM
Wiki is just a media format, like "pamphlet" or "book" or "manual."
Funny, a lot of the stuff companies do is totally undocumented and opaque, and most of the good technical information I find is written by people employed by foundations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 16 2014, @10:34PM
I used to write extensions and themes for Maxthon, (an IE shell) it was a piece of cake, easy, well documented. But then gave up on Windows and switched to Linux, a hackers dream of an operating system. Some companies just want to make it hard to work on, to keep their crappy code a secret.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday November 16 2014, @11:24PM
Firefox extensions may be painful to write, but they can be much more powerful than Chrome extensions. Likewise, while Chrome extensions may be nice to write, they are very limited in what they can do. Can't have the best of both worlds, it seems.
(Example: Chrome extensions cannot touch the UI, they work on a per-page basis, and are hard-blocklisted on certain pages. This makes any UI changing or global plugins impossible. So for example Pentadactyl is impossible on Chrome (and half-assed imitations such as Vimium do not count).)
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Marneus68 on Monday November 17 2014, @03:23PM
That's due to the inherent differences between userscripts, extensions and plugins, and that's probably why I will never use Chrome.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday November 17 2014, @03:45PM
Chrome extensions cannot touch the UI
Yeah, god forbid I could change their horrid UI to something more conventional.
(happy Pale Moon user here)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by zafiro17 on Monday November 17 2014, @09:16AM
This browser user is at a point of near-depression thanks to the current situation, but as a (until recently) Opera user with no preference for either Firefox or Chrome, here's some feedback that seems subjective to me.
1. Chrome: fast, runs well, seems to be very stable. But it's run by Google and I really dislike all the ties back to the mother ship. Increasingly I avoid it. That said, there are a lot of sites on the WWW that require a modern browser with all the latest javascript magic under the hood, and Chrome seems to be that browser: I have yet to find a site that doesn't work in Chrome whereas other browsers all seem to have a deadspot or two.
2. Firefox: not a developer so I don't have an opinion on most of this stuff. I thought the guy wrote a good article until he got to the "reject your extension for silly reasons" excuse, which basically blew away his credibility and made the rest of the post sound like a whiny bitch. Sorry, if you want to lob criticism, you've got to keep it professional. As a user though, the fact that I still have to figure out the difference between an "Add On," an "Extension" and a "Plug In" is pathetic - what is the freaking difference and why can't you combine this? And secondly, how come browsing the themes/extensions/whatever is an exercise in rejection. I'm running x.y.z and this theme is only useful up to x.y.y, so no good. This theme isn't available on non-Mac platforms, that extension is no longer good with your latest updated edition, which you had to update because x.y.y was vulnerable to some awful exploit. That's a really poor user experience.
3. Opera: the above are why I use Opera! Not. Actually, I loved Opera from 2001-2014 but gave it up this year because they no longer make a broswer for power users; they make a something-weird around Chrome's blink engine. I miss keyboard short cuts, User CSS mode, the integrated mail, news, and chat stuff, and a browser that had a version for Linux the same day it had one for Mac and Windows. Not sure what they're doing these days, but as far as I can tell, they've come unglued and are now producing nothing much that interests me. Heard of a browser project out there hoping to recreate the Opera poweruser experience and I'm hoping they do it, because I'll be their biggest fan.
Meanwhile, I use Firefox for the "It's All Text" extension (which I love!) and generally avoid Chrome unless another site chokes on it. On the wife's Mac I use a mix of Safari and Firefox. Nothing is as good as it was in 2007 when Opera was kicking butt (not including pathetic market share), Chrome wasn't quite so untrustworthy-feeling, and I didn't have to touch Firefox or deal with their crappy upgrade/extension experience.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1) by Jesus_666 on Monday November 17 2014, @11:08AM
As a user though, the fact that I still have to figure out the difference between an "Add On," an "Extension" and a "Plug In" is pathetic - what is the freaking difference and why can't you combine this?
It's probably because they want to distinguish between extensions (browser-internal things under the control of the browser) from plugins (external libraries that can do whatever the hell they want as long as NPAPI allows it). Because they need some place to manage all of that at once they use the term "add-on" as a superset of all things you can put into your browser to make it behave differently.
I think that it's a good idea to distinguish between make-the-browser-different-thingies that use the appropriate browser-internal mechanisms to effect new behavior from those that run third-party binary code in the browser process. Heck, just look at the Flash plugin and the trouble that causes – and Adobe's not even trying to be malicous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @05:10PM
Oh dude i was about to flame you to death until that "Not!" :-P
Opera blink is nothing more than a chrome clone (and a pretty bad one). I finally gave up on presto and switched to Firefox last month and never looked back, there are extensions for every Opera presto functionality and even some more, plus full linux support and frequent updates. So fuck opera and what they have become and how they treated their most devoted users. If you make the mistake and ask or rant about some core functionality that is missing even 1 year after the change, in their forums, the usual 2-3 "regulars" will pop up to say how awesome the new blink engine is and how the "vocal minority" should just shut the fuck up and swallow the changes or take the high road. Well, guess what, the minority is taking the "high road" showing them the middle finger, good luck with that 2,something% you arrogant pricks
(Score: 1) by jbruchon on Monday November 17 2014, @12:51PM
Aren't we at the point now where a new flagship open-source browser needs to be built? Every browser that's out there seems to suffer from the same problems and they all have some sort of absurdly complex set of build requirements. I have yet to see a non-text-only browser that I can ./configure; make; make install. I also have yet to see a modern browser that runs well on low-end hardware or consistently with less than 512MB of RAM on any hardware. One of the most annoying things about having a Raspberry Pi model B is that the only functional browser is Midori and even Midori is slow as dirt and crashes fairly often due to a lack of RAM, even after stealing most of it from the GPU. Most of the "light" browsers are based on WebKit and WebKit is not "light" by any current definition, unless "light" can now require RAM measures in GB. The ones that are not based on WebKit are either annoying to build and half-functional or (mostly) text-only. If you don't have HTML5 and JavaScript support these days, more and more sites are simply inaccessible, so I don't know if there is much hope for low-end/low-power machines at all. Hell, I've managed to use Firefox 33 on a Pentium III-M I have lying around, and while it works, it's really freaking slow; compared to the P3, the RasPi and most of the Android phones I've owned are pocket watches.
I suppose I've made my point. End rant.
I'm just here to listen to the latest song about butts.
(Score: 1) by rytier on Monday November 17 2014, @08:18PM
Search for browser called Links. While it started as text-only, it also has graphics mode.
It's a bit aged though, don't expect any html5 fancy.