posted by
CoolHand
on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:47AM
from the who-is-this-company-named-mozilla dept.
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?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Mozilla Thinks You Should Eat Cake
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 75 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:54AM
Firefux can have its fun with Chroom and Oopra while they all slide into irrelevance together. The future is Edgy.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:32AM
Hopefully Microsoft will never port it to OS X. IE for MacOS [way back] was only good for awhile because it rendered the internet 'the microsoft way'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:27AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:05AM
Can anyone explain what this means:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=9168 [palemoon.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:18AM
Exactly what is written.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AndyTheAbsurd on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:29AM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:12AM
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
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
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
From that same thread:
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
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
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
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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:02AM
It meana that a browser like Firefox (and Seamonkey, Palemoon) will look up the address of a linked web page when you hover your mouse over the link. not when you actually click on the link.
Say you were reading an article on the Internet and in the comments there was a link that another poster said supported their statement/position/view.
The link in the test reads something like "www.cnn.com/breakingnews/article/catchytitle".
You, not being an idiot, or having seen goatse at least once, hover your mouse over the link to see what shows up in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window.
When you see that the status bar says the link actually points to "someserver.info/subdirname/kiddieporn" you wisely do not click on the link.
With Firefox, Seamonkey and Palemoon (?) the browser will make a DNS query to get the IP address of the server the link is pointing at when you just hover your mouse pointer over the link. Not when you click on it. This is in case you actually click on the link the browser will be able to get the linked page faster. Yea for efficiency!
Where this could be a problem for some is even if you are just moving your mouse to the other side of the page and your mouse passes over the link, the browser will do the look up. If anyone were to look trawl the traffic logs of your ISP there would be an entry of a DNS lookup requests coming from your home/cellphone/laptop showing that you looked up the address of a server that has kiddieporn on it.
That could get you into some hot water.
Even if you didn't click on the link the record would be there. And as they say "anything you say can and WILL be used against you in a court of law"
If you follow the instructions you can find on the web and change the value on the "about:config" page (sorry I don't have a link to the instructions handy) you can disable the "predictive lookups"
If you don't care you can do nothing, and hope that the old passage "give me six lines written by an honest man, and therin I will find cause to hang them" is false
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 5, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:26AM
Thanks for the explanation, the Firefox (40) setting is called 'network.dns.disablePrefetch'
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Controlling_DNS_prefetching [mozilla.org]
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:51AM
I'm glad it can be disabled, but they've removed the ability to change settings before. Also, nothing should EVER be only accessible through something like about:config. Regular users will never decipher that, or know the option even exists unless told by someone. All browser options should be in the UI with full descriptions so that any human can easily find the preferences/options menu and navigate through all possibilities.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:05AM
Make sure that flipping that actually disables it. Some of those booleans don't actually do anything because the code ignores their value.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:52AM
I'm sorry but you are completely off-base.
DNS Pre-fetching does not happen when you hover over a link, it happens when the page is loaded [blogspot.com] - by default firefox (and palemoon) do DNS prefetching on ALL href anchors in the document.
You've confused speculative connections (see the subject line of this thread) with DNS pre-fetching. Speculative connections are where the browser sets up the TCP connection (but does not do any HTTP protocol transactions) when it thinks you might be about to make a HTTP connection. There was some bad reporting last week that suggested firefox does speculative connections every time you hover over a link. That turned out to be false. [soylentnews.org] It only happens in very narrow circumstances.
(Score: 1) by number11 on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:35PM
Palemoon will not to do that unless you change the default setting in about:config (default setting is network.dns.disablePrefetch = True)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:19AM
Realistically, I think firefox has less and less to offer. Its principal claim to fame sees to be "Its not Chrome".
Is that engine really worth the effort of a fork?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by basstard on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:01AM
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday August 22 2015, @02:20PM
Try uMatrix for Chrome (and I think they actually have a FireFox version as well). Pretty similar, and more usable if I remember RequestPolicy correctly. You can also configure it via text based rules, block malware domains via imported hosts files, and a few other things.
(Score: 2, Informative) by drgibbon on Saturday August 22 2015, @03:28PM
I've found Policeman [mozilla.org] to be an improvement over RequestPolicy, and Self-Destructing Cookies [mozilla.org] is a whitelist cookie policy system. By default cookies are accepted but deleted after you close the tab (with a 10 second delay), but they can also be kept for the entire session (even if the site's tab closes), or set to be kept across sessions as they would normally be. Very handy.
Certified Soylent Fresh!
(Score: 2) by basstard on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:37PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:02PM
your searches? I've heard a lot of on-line masturbatory support for Pale Moon, but right there on their site, maybe the privacy policy or somewhere else, IIRC he states he profits somehow by your use of the browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @07:50AM
What does it do, specifically?
(Score: 5, Informative) by andersjm on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:32AM
It's not google spyware, there's a plethora is extensions, and it's cross-platform.
What other browser would you suggest that offers as much?
(Score: 1, Disagree) by andersjm on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:34AM
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 22 2015, @01:49PM
hehe nice disagree mod
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:46PM
It's not google spyware, there's a plethora is extensions, and it's cross-platform.
Epic Browser
SRWare Iron Browser
Opera
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by andersjm on Sunday August 23 2015, @07:58AM
Thank you for answering my question! Everyone else must have thought it was just rhetorical.
I'm not switching because as far as I'm concerned, Firefox is working just fine. Anything I don't like I can switch off, I really appreciate that they're working to improve security for extensions, and I honestly don't care if the tabs are over or under the toolbars. But it's nice to know there are alternatives.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:57AM
Actually I would argue it doesn't even have the "its not Chrome" as it is ripping off the look of Chrome. A more apropos description would be "a more unsafe Chrome ripoff" as unlike Chrome (and all browsers based on Chromium) Firefox runs in the same permissions as the user instead of using Low Rights Mode which is just fucking DUMB.
But I would say we already have a sustainable fork, its called Pale Moon [palemoon.org]. I give it to my customers as a backup to Comodo Dragon as well as use it myself for those few sites I find that don't play well with Dragon and its...really nice actually, reminds of the old FF before they became an ersatz Chrome. they have already forked away, will NOT support the new UI and even have their own browser string so I'd say all that is left is to spread the word and pick up all those jumping off the USS Moz which appears to be sinking fast.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:06AM
Last I checked, and granted it's been a few months, PaleMoon had one developer. One. That's not cool if you value things like timely responses to critical bugs and knowing your dev team would survive the loss of one member.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:12PM
Then you actually cannot distinguish "lead developer" from "sole developer". Your ability to read and understand written text need alot of improving.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Sunday August 23 2015, @05:54AM
Uhhh...you DO know he is just the head of the project and NOT the only dev on the project...yes? If you go to their forums you'll see they have close to a dozen guys and since they have forked away and are NOT gonna be adding dumb shit like Moz? A dozen devs should be plenty.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 23 2015, @11:12AM
Like I said, it's been a while since I checked.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday August 23 2015, @10:13AM
Having a browser that isn't controlled by Google or Microsoft is valuable.
Firefox obviously is no longer that browser. It has decided to simply chase Google's taillights and that never works. It shows one of two things have happened by Moz.
1. They have a serious case of brain drain. This means they are now too stupid to know this won't end well. RUN AWAY!
2. They have been subverted and are on a course to drive all of their users to Chrome and just go away. RUN AWAY!
Seriously. Who would want a browser that looks to end users like Chrome but only runs a subset of Chrome apps and extensions, spent years attracting extension and app developers and then simply abandoned them with only a few months notice, etc. If you set out to destroy Firefox market and mindshare while ensuring the userbase ends up on Chrome you couldn't have designed a better plan.
Thankfully it is open source. FORK! The code has already been in the care of Netscape, AOL and Moz Corp, why not another?
(Score: 4, Informative) by panachocala on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:28AM
Already lost a few addons due to "enhancements" over the years. Meanwhile the amount of stuff I need to disable or find addons for to remove keeps increasing. Pale Moon just doesn't have enough working addons (yet?).
(Score: 2, Informative) by Groonch on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:55PM
The PaleMoon native extension catalog is pretty sparse, but I find that most Firefox extensions work fine.
(Score: 2) by mth on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:44AM
I understand that migrating extensions to a new API will be a lot of work for extension developers, but in the long run isn't it better to have a standard extension API instead of several browser-specific ones?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:22AM
I understand that migrating extensions to a new API will be a lot of work for extension developers, but in the long run isn't it better to have a standard extension API instead of several browser-specific ones?
It sounds great in theory, until you realise that all it takes to fragment things is someone (Google) going "Nope, fuck you and your 'standards', we decided to do it our own way" and refusing to play ball for a few years. Then you either have to give up what you already had or live with the fragmentation, especially if the uncooperative party gains any sort of market share. Which Google did, by leveraging Android and constant nagging to non-Chrome users in unrelated products like gmail and it search engine.[1]
That's how we end up with things like systemd becoming ubiquitous, and why GNOME essentially creates all the "standards" for desktop environments. If someone else creates something, like improved notifications[2], GNOME refuses to use it, creates its own, and then other environments have to either support both types or give up and remove their own implementation, because GNOME will never use something it didn't create. See also pulseaudio, which was a latecomer but became the de facto standard due to stubbornness and politicking.
Basically, the most stubborn party wins because everyone else eventually gets tired of fighting it, and everyone except the stubborn jackass loses.
In this case, the problem is that it's Mozilla vs. Google. Mozilla was here first, it did these things before Chrome even existed, and if there was anything resembling a standard, Mozilla already had it (like with NPAPI). That doesn't matter, though, because Google doesn't care. They have a "my way or the highway" view of everything, so they reinvent the wheel (see also PPAPI) and then you have to either give up or deal with the fragmentation until you eventually get trampled or left behind. We've seen this play out with Google's stubborn strong-arm tactics regarding NPAPI vs. PPAPI support already, and the result is that on Linux, the most popular plugin (Flash) has PPAPI support but not NPAPI.
---
[1] Similar to how Microsoft gained its market share with IE.
[2] This isn't a fictional example; the notification war thing happened with KDE4 and GNOME a few years ago and ended with KDE giving up and supporting both types due to GNOME suffering from NIH.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marneus68 on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:31AM
Without going into the the full-length explanation that has been brilliantly made earlier, I kinda want to add that I'm not exactly sure that standardization is great when you're aligning yourself with the lowest common denominator. In the case of the Firefox API, we will lose a lot a features in the battle...
That said, Google, (and somehow Gnome, to take the systemd example of earlier) have "won" the right to dictate others what to do because of their position on the market. Mozilla used to be a strong voice, way before Chrome even existed, but they lost that place due to their own inactivity (and desire to invest money into non-viable projects). This whole development is sad but not surprising.
(Score: 2) by BananaPhone on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:12PM
I've read some places that Adblock and NoScript will not work anymore due to missing functionality in the API.
Palemoon or seamonkey might be the only alternatives.
Maybe the TAILS people will pickup the torch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:21PM
I'm waiting for TAILS and the TOR Browser to switch to Pale Moon. Much less of a moving target than Firefox and the others.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:48PM
They already had a standard Firefox extension API. A lot of the reason people used it was because it was better than Chrome's API for actually getting stuff done, I hear.
So obviously they've got to kill it off and roll out a new Chrome-ified version as part of the ongoing march to change Firefox into Chrome in everything but name.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:49AM
The entire point of Firefox is its incredible flexibility due to its addon design. Without that, what reason is there to continue using it? Sure, they've said they'll try to make workarounds for popular extensions, but it's still going to leave a bunch of addons crippled or completely broken, with no guarantees the situation will ever improve, especially with how pissed off some of the addon developers seem to be at this change. Some of them are planning to just quit bothering rather than switch to WebExtensions, because they already spent months following Mozilla's guidelines for making addons Electrolysis-compatible only to have Mozilla go "NOPE! DO IT AGAIN!" with this announcement.
Mozilla's promised that it will probably work to make sure NoScript works, maybe a popular tab addon or two, but that won't be good enough. This is basically snuffing UI enhancements, so maybe they just got pissed that people were rejecting Australis via addons. Regardless, the problem is that everyone's preferred extensions will be different, so a lot of us are going to end up left out in the cold when Mozilla flips the switch on this change, even if they do "help"* a privileged few addon makers.
Mine, for example, are Ubiquity and TreeStyleTab. There are some others I like and use, but those two define my browsing experience. Without them, I have no reason to continue using Firefox any more. When they stop working I'll check if Pale Moon plays nice with them, and if not, I'll probably just give up and use konqueror.
The addon signing is bullshit, too. I was cool with it at first when it said there would be an about:config option to disable it, but then I got to the part where the blog post said it will be removed not long after. I use a couple non-AMO** addons because the AMO versions don't get updated fast enough sometimes and cause breakage when the sites they interact with change. Having to get signed addons means days, maybe weeks with those addons non-functional.
All said, this whole thing is shit. I get that they want to make things safer, and make them work better with multiple processes, but they're throwing out everything that makes Firefox unique in the process.
---
* That, by the way, is bullshit in itself; this is essentially setting up an elite caste of addon devs that get to influence the design while saying "fuck you" to the rest. Which side of the line do you think Adblock Plus, uBlock, and the rest will fall on?
** addons.mozilla.org
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:46AM
Welcome to software that comes out of SF. The culture is very arrogant, and consideration for the community is non-existent. The consideration is moving more and more towards "enterprise", which actually reads as "sellouts". We are in the process of developing the next equivalent of yuppies.
One example is the Drupal 8 vs. Backdrop developements. Backdrop creators want to keep the huge ecosystem of Drupal 7 modules/developers relevant, Drupal 8 wants to cater towards advanced development for Enterprise customers, but the changes to the core system will push out a huge segment of the community. That said, the Drupal 8 switch has good reasons for happening, just as Mozilla also does. I think inter-operability is great, but we must be careful how we get there.
It is a behavioral system rooted in arrogance where a few smart people think they know best and will force it on others. Their reasoning has merit, but they lack the larger picture. When people complain it is definitely a "fuck you" and often comes with "fork it yourself then". Criticism is not allowed.
It is weird to think that a lot of open source projects (the bigger the badder) are in some ways worse for users. At least a corporate entity would be more sensitive to the community because they have a PR department that will force sense into the devs when people get pissed, because for a corp the bottom line is just that, the line that doesn't get crossed (or they lose money hopefully). Basically, developers need to remember that they are building tools for millions upon millions of people, and new/shiny is not always better.
I know for a fact that these concerns have gotten to the board, but we have the age-old pyramid power structure at play. The open source movement was supposed to move away from that, but it still seems to boil down to the age old "tyranny of the few" that we humans are so good at.
Now this is a lot of complaining with no real solution, but it just comes down to the personal ethics/morality/judgment/whatever of the individuals/businesses.
I would MUCH prefer if Mozilla stuck to their old principles, even if they lose a lot of market share. Leave the control with the USER!
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:33PM
Welcome to software that comes out of SF.
San Francisco? SourceForge? Sci Fi?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:58PM
Woops just saw this. San Francisco, I just didn't want to generalize too much further beyond my direct experience. Be excellent to each other, and for coders specifically try to maintain a little humbleness. Sometimes someone who does not have as much experience or knowledge can see something new, and no one should be so arrogant to think their view is 100% the best.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:05AM
Before you give up PLEASE tell the devs at Pale Moon which ones you are having issue with, okay? I've dropped a line there a time or two and those guys actually care about their users (I know, fucking amazing huh?) and were able to help me fix the issue I was having pretty quickly, which considering its just a handful of guys is really quite impressive.
And I hope that everybody here is dropping a line to your favorite add-on to add Pale Moon support, as its pretty damned obvious by now that PM is gonna be the only one left that supports the wide open extension framework, as Moz moves to lock everything down, probably for some other stupid project like FFOS that will go absolutely nowhere...sigh. What a clusterfuck Moz has become.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:28PM
I'll keep that in mind. I don't actually use Firefox directly, preferring to follow Debian's iceweasel builds (Firefox branding removed), which are built on the long-term ESR releases of Firefox, so this isn't an immediate problem for me. I'm going to watch what happens, wait, and decide what action I need to take after the fallout instead of a knee-jerk response of abandoning FF immediately.
Mozilla may adjust its plans based on the backlash, or if not, maybe their actions will push development toward Pale Moon -- assuming it ends up completely diverging to maintain XUL compatibility -- or some other fork. Hopefully by the time I have to deal with it there will be a clear course.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:31PM
Mine, for example, are Ubiquity and TreeStyleTab. (...) When they stop working I'll check if Pale Moon plays nice with them, and if not, I'll probably just give up and use konqueror.
Don't know about Ubiquity, but Tree Style Tab works just fine in Pale Moon. I have 50 or so addons, only one of them didn't work in the newest PM: HTTPS Everywhere... So they forked it. Now it works as Encrypted Web.
You can check incompatibilities and workarounds for some addons on https://addons.palemoon.org/resources/incompatible/ [palemoon.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:37PM
I use TST in PM as well.
All my other core extensions: AdBlock, NoScript, RequestPolicy, GreaseMonkey, and FireGestures are supported :)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:33PM
That's great to know, thanks. TST is probably the most immediate concern for me, since I absolutely hate the horizontal tabs that are default in every browser. Ubiquity is something I use often but can deal with not having short-term if there's a chance of getting support later.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:55AM
Mozilla Thinks You Should Eat Cake
Is this another horrendously strained metaphor?
"Let them eat cake" expresses a contemptuous attitude from those in power (and possibly ignorance) when something is demanded of them. Well, nothing's being demanded of Mozilla. They're taking away the cake and replacing it (for free) with what some people view as an inferior kind of cake.
-------------
In any case, headlines should at least give some sense of what the story is about without reading the summary. This one fails spectacularly, with the added problem that it doesn't make sense after reading the summary.
Also, the cake is a lie.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:20AM
I modded you insightful, because you are completely accurate. However, I wish there was a mod for "pedantic". While the metaphor doesn't track 100%, it fits well enough. The new system is cross compatible (fancy new cake) and the addon community is being forced to eat it. Their contempt is readily given: We have decided on an approximate timeline for the deprecation of XPCOM- and XUL-based add-ons.
It would be easy enough to provide a "click to enable support for older addons" while improving the security to keep addons from getting installed without direct user approval. Perhaps not trivially easy, but supporting the community is supposedly one of Mozilla's big draws...
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:43AM
I thought it was a joke about 'having your cake and eating it too' but you're right that it's a bad headline.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @11:02PM
I actually thought it was a Portal reference.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Refugee from beyond on Saturday August 22 2015, @12:03PM
Cake is just an euphemism for something less pleasant.
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Sunday August 23 2015, @04:18AM
Lest ye forget: The Cake is a Lie.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marneus68 on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:23AM
Well, that's the en of that then. Once this rolls out there will be no reason to use Firefox over Chromium. Australis did bother ma a wee bit, but I got over it since it was only cosmetic changes.
This however will impact the features available to the addons developers. Stuff like Down Them All will disappear as well as any remaining reason to use Firefox anymore.
The reaction of the developer of DownThemAll [downthemall.net] addresses all the issues I have with that decision... and his conclusion is the same I reach. Firefox is dying.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @09:52AM
Fork 'em, baby. Fork 'em hard.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Saturday August 22 2015, @12:06PM
Or help out seamonkey, which will become the only place for old FF extensions, unless they switch too, but then why would they morph into another chrome clone?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marneus68 on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:55AM
https://webextensions.uservoice.com/forums/315663-webextension-api-ideas/suggestions/9437103-drop-webextensions [uservoice.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NoMaster on Saturday August 22 2015, @12:00PM
If Mozilla thinks I can eat cake, I think they can suck my cock.
If they're going to remove the last remaining reasons to use their browser, I'm going to use remove their browser. Why use a shitty Chrome-alike when I could use Chrome (or, more likely since I'm on OS X, Safari)?
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday August 22 2015, @12:04PM
> The Mighty Buzzard
THY GAME IS OVER
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 22 2015, @02:08PM
A lot of people seem pretty upset about this. And, I think you're being at least a little premature in getting upset.
Apparently, you have, right now, a version of FF which you like. Freeze it! Don't update it. Hold what you've got. You'll have months, if not years, before you have to jump one direction or another. Just keep using FF v 25, or 31, or 40. That way, you can wait it out, and see what develops.
I've an idea that Pale Moon will attract a fair number of developers to help it move forward. Look what happened with Gnome and Mate - the Gnome crowd has moved forward, and done their thing, while Mate has followed a different path, and created a fine, stable, usable desktop of their own.
You've got time. Old Firefox isn't going to die an instant death next week, or next month.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by drgibbon on Saturday August 22 2015, @03:36PM
Sure but there's been quite a few security patches coming out lately for FF builds..
Certified Soylent Fresh!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:07PM
The self-destruction of Firefox over the past few years has been amazing to watch. What is going on? Why are they slowly destroying their browser? Why don't they listen to anyone? Someone is on a mission to destroy the one browser that can actually be used to give users some control over the Internet, via extensions, to stop the spying, tracking, scripts, and so on. They made the UI so messed up that no one could use the browser, but extensions let people put it back the way it was, so now they're attacking extensions themselves.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:50PM
They decided that they were done making a browser and needed instead to provide a comprehensive user experience that accorded with a set of philosophic goals grounded in sheer hipsterdom. The new FF experience will strive to anticipate all your decisions, for the set of decisions of which your privilege is still capable without further oppressing yourself and others. Hence no more of the old extensions, no reading list without third party spyware, no more control over your UI, lots of prefetching and predictive behavior. Because you deserve it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:57AM
The same people who made netscape work on FF. Thats why.
Netscape did the same thing.
I agree it is maybe a bit 'premature' to say which way this will go. But given past history it is not looking good.
A standard API is a good idea. But just 'too bad how sad' for all the existing plugins? Really? How to implode your identity in under a year.
Now what is the diff between FF or Chrome? Not much.
I will probably keep on using FF but thats just because the 2 plugins I use will probably be supported. There will be no reason to switch as there will be no difference. What reason do I have to switch or stay... Not much either way. Speed wise Chrome and FF are on par with each other. Memory is slightly better on FF.
There is no reason to switch or stay... You are litterally making me not excited to recommend you. When people ask? I will tell them 'doesnt mater'.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Sunday August 23 2015, @04:50AM
What is going on?
They've been taken over by SJWs. Remember when the CEO was forced out for having wrongthink? Over a few years prior to that I started to notice things going this way. The FF team has been compromised, or have we all forgotten that around the CEO scandal time was when they also tried to integrate non-removable Twitter and Facebook plugins? Giving soulless systems that market in user data a foothold in every install doesn't sound much like the Firefox you first downloaded to "take back the web"? It's been down hill ever since. Now I've implemented my meta language's VM in ASM.js so it's 100% compatible with my stand alone native client that provides the browser features my web deployments use (without needing JS). The stand alone system runs about 1000 times faster than on Firefox or Chrome (even though compilation to ASM.js lets most of my browser code compile to machine code), and this "desktop app" engine is what my web based customers will be using if/when "browsers" are dead. Chrome had a similar way of doing this for its plugins, but who wants the bloated attack surface if you can just include the code you need in a native applicaiton -- "Kitchen Sink Syndrome" killed Java Applets for the same reasons it will kill browsers too.
All the browsers are becoming application platforms. There's even a Firefox OS -- Glad I didn't dev too much for that shite since this change has ramifications for FFOS. All the sites (even this one) are web applications (which the "web" was never designed to accommodate). What the hell is the point of integrating plugin architectures for browsers? I could just install the Internet enabled app to my system directly and cut out the browser middle man. What's the point of LocalStorage and client side IndexDB Objects, etc? It's so your web site can be functional when "offline" -- Gee, just like stand alone applications already are. What are websockets and CORS (Cross Origin Request) for? So that your website can be more like an ordinary desktop application that connects to the web -- except without any of the nifty application firewalls users can deploy on an application by application basis -- nope, better to let the advertisers decide who the site ("web app") connects back to.
Anyone with a bit of snap can see the writing on the wall. The big signal for me was when HTML4.01 took half the age of the Internet to get to HTM5. Over 12 years... At 3 years of 4.01 I was thinking, "Well, the web is over, better hedge my bets for the drawn out struggle." That's when I turned my hobby meta-language compiler into the main development platform, and was able to leverage all of my existing code during the mobile "app" explosion. Nowadays I could give a fuck less about what language or platform is born or dies, all my code will run on it without change (takes about 2-3 weeks to build the VM/Runtime library/platform abstraction layer).
IMO, this is a great move for Firefox. That way, if they croak or go down in a flamewar over Social Justice issues then your new plugins can run painlessly in the app engines made by advertising MegaCorps like the new Microsoft (windows -- as a service!) and Alphabet (formerly Google). [abc.xyz]
TL;DR: What's happening? Unfortunately, everything is going exactly as planned.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DarkMorph on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:27PM
As many others have said, a major reason to use FF is because of some extensions like NoScript...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday August 24 2015, @05:20AM
By extras do you mean stuff like the mail client?
Said mail client is one of the major reasons I use SeaMonkey. I do not wish to use Thunderbird or something else.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Common Joe on Sunday August 23 2015, @04:36AM
May I make a couple of observations?
We're watching four pendulums swing together with different frequencies and some of them are lining up -- enough to create major waves in the computer community, possibly some of them very long lasting. The first is cross platform: it has a lot of advantages but isn't quite the utopia many people thought it would be. (Native app developers knew that, but the web developers are now experiencing this first hand.) The second is thin / thick client. (The web started off as thin client and somehow managed to become much thicker, but definitely not fully thick.) The third is removal of choice from the user. (Very varied programs: Google Maps, Windows 8 start menu, Slashdot) The fourth is removal of choice from the programmer.
This articles falls squarely into the last category but is definitively related to the other pendulums. And there are plenty more pendulums that I don't mention. (Graybeards, ever notice how the complexity of programming languages wax and wane too? Maybe the description of a popping of a bubble is more apt for this phenomenon.)
As a programmer with a figuratively graying beard, I find this fascinating (and at times horrifying) to watch. I don't know what this all means. I just find myself navigating the pendulum maze and trying not to get hit with these swinging monsters.
I think a bunch of web programmers are in the process of getting hit hard. I feel for my brothers and sisters. I once got hit (not even that hard) and never fully recovered.
What worries me most (and horrifies me most) is that the removal of choices by the powers that be. We, as programmers were told to remove choices from the user. It was for their own good. (As a user, it annoyed me. I could change the font in my title bars in Windows 95 but not in Windows 7 / 8.) And now, as programmers and admins, we're getting dosed with this same medicine pretty good too. As employees, we've been getting hosed for a while. This particular pendulum -- the one concerning choice -- is one of the most frightening of all.