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posted by martyb on Friday March 20 2020, @08:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the Do-No-Evil-Poof!-Gone. dept.

Moonchild, the lead developer of the Pale Moon browser writes:

"Dear Web Developer(s),

While, as a software developer ourselves, we understand very well that new features are exciting to use and integrate into your work, we ask that you please consider not adopting Google WebComponents in your designs. This is especially important if you are a web developer creating frameworks for websites to use.
With Google WebComponents here we mean the use of CustomElements and Shadow DOM, especially when used in combination, and in dynamically created document structures (e.g. using module loading/unloading and/or slotted elements).

Why is this important?

For several reasons, but primarily because it completely goes against the traditional structure of the web being an open and accessible place that isn't inherently locked down to opaque structures or a single client. WebComponents used "in full" (i.e. dynamically) inherently creates complex web page structures that cannot be saved, archived or even displayed outside of the designated targeted browsers (primarily Google Chrome).
One could even say that this is setting the web up for becoming fully content-controlled."

https://about.google/: "Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

Useful to... whom?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by NickM on Friday March 20 2020, @09:42PM (9 children)

    by NickM (2867) on Friday March 20 2020, @09:42PM (#973641) Journal

    Yyu just have to look at CSS abuse like that art piece https://codepen.io/ivorjetski/pen/xxGYWQG [codepen.io] to see that webcomponent are not required for opaqueness!

    The only reason the pale moon devs are writing this letter is: they do not have the technical manpower to support this nor anything else. I would also avoid a browser that wanted to ship it's own forked system library on a secure platform like OpenBSD.

    The Palemoon motto should've : Palemoon, we are slightly better than old MsEdge !

    --
    I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @09:49PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 20 2020, @09:49PM (#973644)

    Also explains why they (PaleMoon) wanted to disallow NoScript, because the user having control of what Javascript code runs on their machine is bad for, um, for, well, bad for advertisers?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:47PM (#973956)

      There is a fork of uMatrix called eMatrix for Palemoon which give you more control than NoScript ever could. I don't know anything about the NoScript ban you talk about, but I'm sure your interpretation is very wrong.

      https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/privacy-and-security/ [palemoon.org]

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:52AM (6 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Saturday March 21 2020, @04:52AM (#973739) Journal

    Nobody has the technical manpower to continue to chase such a brain-damaged and infinitely expanding "standard"

    Goog is being allowed to redefine what the web and websites are so they become the only browser. This is bad. If you love goog that much that you only want to use goog-web in goog-browser, at least have the decency to give it it's own name and URL format so that I don't have to waste time dealing with a bunch of broken stuff masquerading as websites.

    Palemoon is one of the few current browsers that hasn't had the UI reduced to hipster nonsense which makes it better than any of the MS or goog-based ones already.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by NickM on Saturday March 21 2020, @05:11AM (5 children)

      by NickM (2867) on Saturday March 21 2020, @05:11AM (#973745) Journal
      I used firefox preview for at least 5 years and it is the less brain damaged browser there is. People yelling about the loss of xul should have tried it. It was not the fuck beta situation you make it to be. the loss of xul brought significant speed improvement and the addons I used stayed compatible (styler ,greasemonkey, bypasspaywall, ublock Origin and saml tracer). Please explain, without appel to emotion and politicss, why you feel that the loss of xul was the hipsterisation of Firefox ui.
      --
      I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:37PM (3 children)

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday March 21 2020, @02:37PM (#973832) Journal

        and the addons I used stayed compatible

        Great for you. That may be because you only used add-ons that affect web pages, not add-ons that changed/amended the browser UI (including, but not limited to those that undo earlier unwanted interface changes).

        The vast majority of add-ons I use are the second type, and all of them broke, and where there are replacements at all, they are inferior because the functionality they need is not provided.

        I couldn't care less whether the functionality I want is provided through XUL or any other technology. I do care when the functionality is not provided at all.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:15PM (2 children)

          by shrewdsheep (5215) on Saturday March 21 2020, @03:15PM (#973841)

          Many years back, I felt similarly. I tried to retain my UI as much as I could, be it firefox, KDE or other applications. I spend spent hours to search the internet or dig into configurations myself. That is all gone by now. I feel having matured and being set free. First, I evaluate whether I can still achieve what I need after a UI change. If not, I look for a workaround. If that is not there, I go somewhere else, but I do not complain any more (for many things I have actually gone back to the command line).
          Firefox for me looks pretty much the same, it used to look. There are the annoying tabs int window title but I can ignore that. Otherwise I have vertical tabs and good privacy protection. If vertical tabs were gone, I could live with a menu for the tabs. If that would not be available, I would go somewhere else.

          Nowadays, I perceive bickering about the UI as rather childish. Yes, there are stupid changes, but admit to yourself that you have a strong personal bias against change (we all have, for good reasons). Once you can make that step much of the pain is gone.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:49PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:49PM (#973959)

            Have you attempted to manage your cookies lately?

            • (Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Sunday March 22 2020, @10:23AM

              by shrewdsheep (5215) on Sunday March 22 2020, @10:23AM (#974091)

              Privacy is very important to me, however, again, I have given up on sophistication. Firefox allows to delete cookies and site data when closed which is good enough for me. I do close firefox once a day on average.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @09:55PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @09:55PM (#973940)

        The one add-on I really miss that required XUL is Tree-Style Tab. Well, it still works, but it can't display its own version of the top tab bar anymore. But the performance is so much better and everything else works fine.