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posted by CoolHand on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-is-this-company-named-mozilla dept.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody who's been paying attention the past few years, Mozilla has announced that it will be deprecating all current extensions and have all future extensions be compatible with Chrome and Opera via the new WebExtensions API.

  • We are implementing a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers.
  • A safer, faster, multi-process version of Firefox is coming soon with Electrolysis; we need developers to ensure their Firefox add-ons will be compatible with it.
  • To ensure third-party extensions provide customization without sacrificing security, performance or exposing users to malware, we will require all extensions to be validated and signed by Mozilla starting in Firefox 41, which will be released on September 22nd 2015.
  • We have decided on an approximate timeline for the deprecation of XPCOM- and XUL-based add-ons.

Maybe now we can get a sustainable fork going?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by AndyTheAbsurd on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:29AM

    by AndyTheAbsurd (3958) on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:29AM (#226171) Journal

    Original:

    I'm sorry but I can't give you a full explanation of how the networking back-end works. It's very complex and can't be summarized in a few sentences.

    Translation:

    If you want to know everything about how the networking stuff works, you're going to have to read the code. Trying to explain it to you will result in you having several thousand more questions.

    Original:

    Pale Moon makes connections when navigating: when you actually surf.

    Translation:

    No network activity originates from Pale Moon unless you actually click on something (or a JavaScript call causes something to load).

    Original:

    Not when doing passive page interactions like hovering over a link; that's extremely presumptuous and would cause a lot of unnecessary connections to be made.

    Translation:

    Pale Moon attempts not to waste even a single byte of your available bandwidth; we know that you want to use that for seeding Linux ISO torrents.

    Okay, that last bit about the Linux ISOs probably isn't what MoonChild would have said; but I had to inject some flavor into it.

    --
    Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:12AM (#226190)

    If I click on something, there is nothing "speculative" about it though. It must do something else.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:30AM (#226196)

    So, without inspecting the code, the only way I can make sense of that is if I click a link it "speculatively" connects to everything linked to the destination. That seems possibly even worse. If that's it, why? If not, what is being speculated on?

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:53AM

      by Magic Oddball (3847) on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:53AM (#226218) Journal

      No... When you click on a link, Pale Moon will take you to that page, downloading only the elements for that one specific page so you can see them. That's the traditional behavior, where the browser does what you tell it to and only what you tell it to.

      In contrast, he is saying PM does not do these things that some other browsers do:
      -- download a page/elements because you merely hover over a link.
      -- download a page at the link you clicked to visit, then also download all of the pages/graphics linked to it.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:58PM (#226369)

        From that same thread:

        Pale Moon doesn't connect on hover. It will make speculative TCP connections when actually navigating and that is what the pref applies to.

        My confusion is that if it is as you say, what is at all "speculative" about these TCP connections? If I click a link, there is no speculation going on. The browser should be getting whatever is at that link.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:58AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:58AM (#227389)

          The point is that Pale Moon is not speculative. Other browsers (perhaps unexpectedly) are.

          The point would probably be clearer by naming examples, but I could see why you wouldn't want to call anyone in particular out, as it would just be inviting trouble.

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:27PM

      by Francis (5544) on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:27PM (#226313)

      Or you open a dictionary and look the word speculatively up. It means in a speculative manner or in a predictive fashion. I'm not really sure what's so hard to understand about that. Some browsers will hit up every link of a page in case you choose to click that link. I don't think it's a good practice and probably leaves you open to all sorts of security problems.

      • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:10PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:10PM (#226328)

        Some browsers will hit up every link of a page in case you choose to click that link.

        Yes, and from Moonchild's quote I believe that Pale Moon does this for some reason (I imagine some kind of speed issue). I would like to turn that feature off if so.