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Mozilla plans to remove all legacy add-ons from their portal.
Support for Firefox ESR 52 will end on September 5, in two weeks, meaning there won't be any official Firefox version that supports legacy add-ons anymore.
Mozilla said today that following this date, it plans to start the process of disabling legacy add-on versions on its add-ons portal located at addons.mozilla.org (also known as the AMO).
"On September 6, 2018, submissions for new legacy add-on versions will be disabled," said Caitlin Neiman, Add-ons Community Manager at Mozilla.
"All legacy add-on versions will be disabled in early October, 2018. Once this happens, users will no longer be able to find [extensions] on AMO," she added.
Isn't modern FOSS great?/s
I can run old Blender if I need. Or go over all the archived .deb from past Debian releases. But Mozilla seems to be special. Time to call the Archive Team or the Wayback Machine.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:45AM (42 children)
It has been clear to anyone who isn't blind and deaf that Mozilla is in the terminal stages of SJW infestation, that part where it becomes unable to carry out the original purpose of the organization, for several years. If one reverts far enough to eliminate the damage there is still value in the Firefox codebase. It is far past time to fork the damned thing, go through one more rename cycle and get on with it. Version 52 ESR is probably a very reasonable candidate version to use for the baseline code to go in the fork but parts of it should probably be reverted.
Yes it is a daunting task to accomplish without money from political contacts at Yahoo! and Google but if GNOME could be successfully forked without a sugar daddy it is likely Firefox can also be forked. Or perhaps we could all just adopt Palemoon and help the small team currently struggling to maintain that to get the kinks out and get the code up to scratch to the point it could be the default browser in major Linux distributions. What everyone should be able to agree on is the current choice of an increasingly erratic Firefox or the spyware known as Chrome is a terrible position to be in.
I have switched to Brave on destops that are fast enough to run it without chugging, but those resource requirements probably exclude it from being the default for any distribution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:50AM (10 children)
Palemoon is no longer being maintained. https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ [basilisk-browser.org] is the new direction.
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:15AM (4 children)
Considering there was a Palemoon release last week, I wouldn't call it "no longer maintained". Or to use the vernacular on your comment - "citation needed" :P
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 22 2018, @11:59PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:15AM (2 children)
Since I'm still an ESR hold-out and haven't flocked yet, what precisely do you mean by "gone the way of firefox"? Last I saw they were still busy trimming off useless and used-less features and generally making it a better browser?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 24 2018, @11:10AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday August 25 2018, @12:03AM
Interesting. I must admit that one big reason I haven't switched to PM is that I don't trust them to make good decisions on what to cut. The fact that they ripped out the accessibility support raised a big red flag for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:17AM
There was a major release less than a week ago:
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/08/16/pale-moon-28-0-major-update-released/ [ghacks.net]
Why are you lying?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:37AM
lolwut? If you want to point out an alternative to the stage four cancer patient in hospice that is Firefox, that's great. Just don't spread lies and bullshit about other alternatives. It's really not helping.
https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml [palemoon.org]
Looks maintained to me...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by janrinok on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:39AM (1 child)
Wrong, the Pale Moon team is also supporting Basilisk, but from the Basilisk home page:
The final quoted paragraph explains that it is 'beta', and we all know the community's views on 'Beta', don't we? It is currently for development purposes.
Suggesting that people move to it is not a good idea.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:56AM
Fuck beta.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:12PM
This is a common misconception, based on the peculiarities of the Mozilla code, which is not the source code for a single application, but a platform for building various applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.). The Pale Moon developers have forked the Mozilla 52 code, to create the "UXP platform". Two applications built using that platform are Basilisk, which is Firefox 52 with internal changes and little to no external changes other than rebranding, and the recently released Pale Moon 28, which looks just like the previous version, but internally is a completely different beast altogether. The two are distinct applications and none of the two is intended to replace the other. If you are a Pale Moon user, update to Pale Moon 28 and enjoy the latest and greatest; use Basilisk only if you want to help in the development of the UXP platform.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Arik on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:17AM (2 children)
I'm not sure how you determined that but it strikes me as dangerously wrong.
I'd suggest forking from 3.6.28 and then backporting anything of value that's been added since. Should take all of 3, 4 minutes.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Touché) by shortscreen on Wednesday August 22 2018, @08:12AM
Can we do that for the whole www?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:39PM
I'm still running Version 52 ESR, 52.5.0 to be exact, seems to be stumbling along OK. When I check Help|About, it offers to update to 52.9.0, maybe I'll do that before 52 support ends.
A few times over the last years, composing/editing in Gmail has started to act a little erratic, and updating Firefox usually straightens things out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:59AM (7 children)
I agreed with you right up until you suggested PaleMoon.
The PaleMoon team *intentionally removed the Accessibility subsystem* & has no intention of ever putting it back.
I asked them why & was told it made the code cleaner, leaner, & more secure.
I let them know that by doing so they were shooting themselves in the foot.
They. Didn't. Care.
So PaleMoon is a non-starter, non-option, non-functional pile of festering, rancid, Satan's scrotum scrapings.
FF ESR 52 is what I'm using as it's the only version of FF that is compatible with my screen reader.
Any newer version of FF ESR screams about my screen reader being incompatible (& FF ESR 52+ is the *only* program to ever claim that) & thus refuses to run worth a damn.
If I want to use my screen reader (and I can not use a computer without one) then my choices are Internet Explorer 11 or FF ESR 52.
I don't know what Mozilla thinks they're doing, but unless/until they release an ESR that *does* work with a screen reader, I'll be stuck on this old & no longer secure version.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:37AM (1 child)
Did you try Waterfox? (Honest question; I don't have any idea about if it would work.)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:08PM
No, I haven't tried WaterFox yet. I shall go search for it now & give it a try. Thank you for the pointer.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:13AM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:37AM (3 children)
I'd love to join folks on IRC, but there's a problem with that.
My screen reader doesn't play well with anything that updates in real time - every refresh of the screen (every time someone posts a message) causes my 'reader to reread the. entire. screen.
There's never any way to jump to the last post I was in the middle of hearing about when the screen refreshed, I can't just Control+End to the end of the page & cursor up to find that message because there may be HUNDREDS of new messages in the time it takes me to do it, & the only way I have to keep track is to listen to the log files after the fact.
It's like trying to enjoy a tennis game running at 120KHz when your brain is only doing 30FPS.
By the time you've seen something & can react to it, the situation is so old as to make your input irrelevant.
*Comical pout & sigh*
The easiest way is either a forum like this one or via email.
I can actually keep up & my 'reader doesn't go haywire with all the refreshing.
=-J
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @04:17AM (2 children)
Out of curiosity, what screen reader do you use? I know plenty of people that use IRC clients with screen readers. If I remember, I'll ask them what they use for both the reader and IRC client.
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)
Win7Pro64 & Jaws 16 from Freedom Scientific.
Thank you! =-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @03:21AM
Ok, I asked a buddy of mine and he said that there are two main paths people take when on Windows. Now this is coming off my memory from talking to him, so it may not be completely accurate in paraphrase. The first is ChatZilla, an extension for Firefox. It plays nicer with JAWS and most other screen readers than most clients you will use. The problem is that some users are getting nervous because of the EOL of Firefox ESR 52, which not only kills ChatZilla but Quantum doesn't play as nicely with screen readers in some aspects. Another browser based one he did say that qWebIRC (and another one whose name he couldn't remember) can play nicely with JAWS, if the web interface uses that and the IRC admins properly set it up. However, that is not true of every web based one.
Instead, he recommends the second option. He says you should try mIRC and one of the sub-options. First is that mIRC plays pretty nicely with JAWS out of the box. Second and the one he uses because he can see basic shapes, set JAWS to ignore mIRC completely and use its built-in reader, which allows him to still interact with mIRC and have it in the background reading things off while doing other things that don't require the screen reader and voice commands. Third, is to use JAWS as your registered speech component, to better integrate them. Fourth, is that there are plenty of FLOSS mIRC plugins (scripts?, addons? I'm not sure the lexicon) that allow it to play nicer with JAWS.
Another suggestion he made was using IRSSI. Apparently the TUI plays nice with JAWS. The final note he gave was that it has been a few years since he searched and got his setup, so everything I told you could be wrong or out of date. There is probably some accessibility group somewhere with suggestions that he missed.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:51AM
Because deleting deprecated software is totally about social justice. There has never been a software company that did that before. Hitler would never delete deprecated software.
Actually, it has been clear to anyone who isn't blind and deaf that jmorris is in the terminal states of SJW infestation. Symptoms include delirium, paranoia, hallucinations of bugs under the skin and micropenis.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday August 22 2018, @08:17AM
I've been using Palemoon and the win2k/xp build Mypal more and more lately. It's the best alternative that's left.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:09AM (6 children)
That's what Palemoon actually _did_.
If you think a fork would be good, lend some labor or perhaps give some money to Palemoon's open source effort.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday August 22 2018, @11:50AM (5 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @01:37PM (2 children)
[Citation Needed]
As has been pointed out repeatedly above, it has NOT been abandoned. Stop spreading FUD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:19PM (1 child)
The developers had said they were moving to Basilisk, an Australis based fork, for new development. So did the future of palemoon change, or have they just finalized the release of the most recent dev branch?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:12PM
Stop trolling this thread.
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17384 [palemoon.org]
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @01:57PM
What is going on with that "I want attention" font of yours?
Are you like, the red site version of creimer from the green site?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:42AM
That is, the project openly stated that they wanted to develop libraries that other folks could use to create such applications as browsers and mail clients.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 22 2018, @01:18PM (9 children)
I'm guessing this decision has absolutely nothing to do with SJWs, and everything to do with the ongoing efforts of all kinds of organizations to prefer walled gardens over open marketplaces. An alternate explanation that is at least as likely is that there's a large organization with a substantial influence on what Firefox does due to supplying substantial funding that has an incentive to make Firefox suck: That organization is Google, and now that Microsoft's browsers are largely defeated they want Firefox to suck so that more people will switch to Chrome.
The reasons for the walled garden approach seem clear enough to me: In the world of The Cathedral versus The Bazaar, they've figured out that the way to make bank is to replace The Bazaar with the Shopping Mall that you can't escape from, and own the Shopping Mall so that you make rent regardless of which of the competitors the customers buy from.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:59PM (8 children)
SJW infestation has several consequences leading to the death of the organization. First, as SJWs assume all of the important decision making positions they begin diverting resources into pointless SJW bullcrap. But equally important, SJWs aren't generally competent at the goals of the organization, being mostly affirmative action hires from Hell, so they don't even know how to carry out the original goal. Third they drive out the actual talented people, both to make room for their SJW allies and to eliminate the pain that comes from being around talented people and being reminded daily of their own incompetence. Combine all three and look at Moz Corp through that lens and tell me you can't see reality more clearly.
They are doing incompetent buzzword driven crap because they no longer have very many there who realize it is bullcrap and they are terrified to speak up and call out their SJW superiors because they need the job, otherwise they would have left already.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 22 2018, @07:28PM (7 children)
And your evidence supporting any of this is what, exactly?
Because as far as I can tell, what you are trying to imply without explicitly stating (because if you don't flat-out say it, you must not be bigoted) is "Straight white guys are simply the best at programming, anyone else is inferior, and we should abhor any efforts to let anyone else do it. It's just common sense." Which is absolute nonsense: I've worked with women, white people, black people, various varieties of brown people, homosexual people, trans people, old people, and some of the folks in each of those demographic categories were brilliant programmers, and some were idiots, and most were somewhere in between. I also know for a fact that there are people in tech that will reject a brilliant and well-qualified candidate for a programming position because they are black, brown, homosexual, trans, and old, mostly because they told me (a straight fairly-young white guy) sometimes very publicly that's why they weren't hiring certain job applicants, so I am quite certain that the SJWs have a legitimate concern.
And that leaves me with one of two conclusions:
1. You are one of the people who would choose to reject candidates based on being black, brown, homosexual, trans, or old, and are trying to justify that position with bigoted nonsense. Which would be a reason why I'd as a manager never ever consider putting you in any position where you were responsible for hiring or managing other people, since that pretty much guarantees you will overlook the best candidates / employees due to factors that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job (and are in most cases illegal to use in personnel decisions, but that's almost besides the point).
2. Possibly due to the reason above, you haven't gotten far enough in your career to be involved with the hiring side of the interview table and thus not been privy to why certain candidates were chosen or not chosen. Because the kinds of things people have told me during that process aren't limited to a single company, not by any means.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:35PM (6 children)
Here's the only difference:
When a SJW demands "no more white male hiring" then the top 90% of the hiring marketplace is excluded and you get a lot of bad decisions and bad code and that is not survivable.
When a non-SJW does the opposite, then the roughly bottom 10% of the hiring marketplace is excluded, which is quite survivable.
Its pretty much like the recent Hugo awards, where if the first criteria is exclusion of white males, then the product that remains is guaranteed to suck. Whereas in the old days, 1950s american south for example, the folks they excluded couldn't product much worth anything so it was quite survivable.
The fundamental problem with anti-white racism is white folks make the world run, like it or not, so hating them means returning to a pre-modern world in all senses of the phrase which makes it even more ridiculous in the topic of "science fiction". I'm not sure sure if Africa can produce a rotating wheel, much less a warp drive. Likewise if you run a software development business where rule #1 is "hate white men" then you'll be lucky to get hello_world.c to compile.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:53AM (5 children)
So, by my math, that means you believe that about 8% of the world's population (white guys) is the top 90% of the hiring pool, while the remaining 92% of the world's population is the bottom 10% of the hiring pool. That is an absurd claim, because of the simple fact that variation within demographic groups on characteristics not directly related to the demographic categorization is nearly always much much larger than any difference between demographic groups.
I can also supply an obvious counterexample: The best programmer I ever worked with was a Chinese guy, with a PhD and proven and demonstrated expertise in natural language processing. And your policies just ensured that even if you're solving an NLP problem, you're going to pick white guys with less skill in NLP over my Chinese PhD, simply because he isn't white.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:40PM (4 children)
I agree with you in that anecdotes do in fact exist in a large enough pool of humanity.
The point is the relative strategic damage to a company of anti-white-male pro-somalian-woman hiring for a programming position, for example, is simply not survivable in the modern economy. Being either neutral or biased toward the whites is perfectly survivable given large scale racial production.
You can't be seriously claiming that a company that had a 'no white men only asian men' programmer hiring policy could possibly survive in the economy, regardless of the admitted existence of an anecdote? Also regardless how great that one Chinese dude is, Google has approximately 59000 white employees if you believe the google stats, surely you put them on a scale and its not going to balance very well...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:21PM (3 children)
Goalpost move: Your argument specifically stated that banning white men was banning the top 90% of the potential hires, while banning everyone else was banning the bottom 10% of potential hires. Ergo, white men must have (in your mind) been the top 90% of job candidates. I demonstrated that you were in fact banning excellent candidates with your "white dudes only" rule, which was all I needed to do to demonstrate that your argument was wrong.
Misstating my point: I didn't advocate for a "no white men, only Asian men" policy, I advocated for recognizing and addressing your own biases that are leading you to pick inferior candidates for jobs.
However, it's easy to demonstrate that a company made up of Asian men can not only survive but thrive in the marketplace: Mitsubishi, Nikon, Samsung, Nintendo, and lots of other well-known brands were started by Asian men, employed only Asian men in their infancy, and still are dominated by Asian men. I've also encountered successful startup companies that were founded and run by Asian guys. Which again isn't a surprising finding: Asians make up somewhere in the ballpark of 40% of humanity, so odds are that about 40% of the people that have the potential to be good techies are Asians, and all available evidence is that the educational systems of many Asian countries are quite good, so the idea that there are millions of highly trained and capable Asian programmers out there isn't at all far-fetched.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 24 2018, @05:40PM (2 children)
That "you" is rather theoretical in that the only people implementing racist hiring policies are currently devoutly anti-white, and my point is that is not survivable long term in the marketplace, unlike, say, no Somalians which is quite survivable.
Yes Asians are quite smart indeed with impressive IQs on a racial average. They get to enjoy being discriminated against much like white people, with racist phrases like 'non-asian minority'. Asians are quite capable as a race in general of living in civilized communities, which makes them nice enough neighbors and nice enough immigrants. Good people in general.
I think we're mostly argumentatively agreeing with each other with a thin layer of word choice propaganda and some anecdotal stuff on top.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)
No, we're not cordially disagreeing with each other: You believe that race is a useful factor for determining intelligence, I don't.
For instance, you hinted that Somalis were stupid. A simple demonstration that Somalis aren't stupid is that they've figured out how, in a dirt-poor country torn by civil war, to make literally boatloads of money using a couple dozen guys armed with relatively cheap AK-47s and a few small motorboats, out-maneuvering experienced and educated mariners who are backed by the most powerful navies in the world. You can't pull that off if you're stupid.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:52PM
So, it all boils down to I believe in the scientific method and statistics, and you seem to believe in the opposite; perhaps a religious conviction.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 23 2018, @09:17AM
My primary browser is SeaMonkey (Palemoon as a backup), solely because of the interface. I want normal damned menus, not a fucking cellphone interface. When FF switched, I stopped installing it on new builds at all, even as a backup. If Palemoon's traditional interface vanishes -- well, the day comes when I won't install it anymore either.
Much as I loathe Chrome, FF is now a worse experience. In fact with the latest FF, which came along with whatever linux distro I was looking at, I couldn't figure out how to do some fairly basic shit (don't recall what) and promptly fled to the provided Chrome.
BTW, here's a guy who is doing XP and Win2K compatible builds of Palemoon (which dropped XP support as of v26.something) and KMeleon-Gecko:
http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/2018/08/weekly-browser-binaries-20180818.html [blogspot.com]
http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/2018/07/new-build-of-browsers-for-win2000.html [blogspot.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.