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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: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:36PM (5 children)
Yup. But it wasn't always a problem. I'm old enough to remember when we all eagerly installed every update to a Linux distro because you could see things getting better with each one. Even the exceptions to that rule like the blood splattered users who got cut on Red Hat adopting a few things like glibc a wee bit too early were ok with it since things quickly got better. Red Hat Linux 5.1 was a horror show so bad I spun up a new install CD to integrate all of the errata but 5.2 was golden. Things got better. Then that all changed. Now I tend to only update when I have a lot of spare time and still won't always bother because the bugs fixed are mostly theoretical security patches that a good firewall will keep away and the "new features" are almost uniformly regressions or just weird crap. Or things that work suddenly replaced with new more complex things that don't even claim to work yet and generally never really do. Now we all upgrade when we can't run a supported browser on the current OS and accept that a lot of crap will break because we are addicted to the Internet and it's mad race to keep html5 in a state of constant churn. In other words the OS vendors have weaponized our dependency on browser updates to force all sorts of crap on us and drive hardware sales.
Show of hands everyone, if security errata for remote exploits and current browsers were available could you live a happy and productive existence with Centos 3.x or even Windows XP? Imagine what would happen to the stock of hardware makers if half of computer users were able to happily use hardware from that era with perhaps a memory upgrade and an SSD dropped in.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:35PM
Still have a couple of old ThinkPads (T61 and T42) running Win XP and they are perfectly functional, MS-Office 97 runs pretty darn fast and if there are any bugs in Office I must have learned to work around them. I update MalwareBytes and AVG every now and then, never used the MS anti-virus stuff. Stopped updating Acrobat Reader at v9 and mostly use Sumatra PDF reader instead.
Back in the '80s and '90s, I was buying a new PC every year or two. The gains were easy to see and I was running big math models where performance mattered. For my current use, XP was a nice place to pause and take stock...while my associate does the heavy lifting with the math modeling now.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:47AM (1 child)
I expect you can figure out why.
I even did that for Windows so quite likely I possess a complete set of WinXP updates starting with its final service pack.
I took a stab at doing that for Win8.1 then quickly conceded it was just not possible for just one person to do so.
Were I to continue using windows for anything other than to do a fresh install in a VM EVERY SINGLE TIME I NEED WINDOWS FOLLOWED BY MY DELETION OF THE VM I'd set up a local Windows update server.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by jmorris on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:36AM
You are doing the VM thing wrong. You don't reinstall and patch up Windows from scratch every time!
Install. Update. Take a copy of that image for safe keeping. Now use whatever your virtualization calls it to flip writes into a different file/stream/snapshot that you can discard. Install whatever you want to use, use it, then roll back to the perfect blank install. Rinse, repeat as needed. Never again worry about crap left in the registry when you uninstall, never worry about getting infected, never even worry about downloading a Trojan horse version of something since no matter what it won't live beyond the rollback unless it is so utterly vile that it breaks out of virtualization and attacks the real OS underneath. Avoid the temptation to add a persistent volume because if things CAN live squirreled away on D:, eventually something will. Make an scp client part of the base install and move the couple of files you need to keep out manually before wiping the image back to base.
Once in awhile switch off the rollback, do a fresh round of updates to the base image, take a fresh "just in case" backup of the image file and switch the rollback on again.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:11AM (1 child)
That's why we stuck with slackware (and some of us swtiched to Debian till pottering the scum screwed shit up).
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:05PM
It was because of the cruelty that all the SlackWare Neckbeards showed toward newbies in the Slackware newsgroup.
My experience with Debian was that it was generally hospitable to newbies. Why did I bail on Debian?
Because Debian Is The Self-Righteous Distro.(R)
What did I prefer to Debian?
Ubuntu. Hilarity Ensued.
Now I'm using Linux Mint Cinnamon. One box has 17, the other 17.1. While I know I would do well to dist-upgrade I like 17.1 and 17 so much that I don't really feel the need. I do from time to time "$ apt-get update" then "$ apt-get upgrade", but I'm reluctant to dist-upgrade unless I know there's a real good reason.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]