The likely end of DownThemAll

#1

Post by deltaprotocol » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:11 PM UTC

The likely end of DownThemAll
downthemall.net

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#2

Post by brillenfux » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:37 PM UTC

At this point, would it make sense to fork Firefox?

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#3

Post by johansch » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

They should spearhead the work on pushing the spec people (and in extension the actual developer teams) at the browser companies to support what is needed to implement DownThemAll in Chrome/Opera/Safari/New Firefox. I have the feeling there isn't that much that is lacking today (sparse file writing support?).

This is clearly a use case that users want.

(DownThemAll is the sole reason I have Firefox installed. Would love to have it work in e.g. Chrome.)

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#4

Post by timdafweak » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:49 PM UTC

Not just DTA, but FireGestures, Easy DragToGo, and all the amazing extensions that made me stick by Firefox even though most of my colleagues left for Chrome. It is a sad day.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#5

Post by vezzy-fnord » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

brillenfux wrote: post #2

At this point, would it make sense to fork Firefox?

There's already GNU IceCat. Pale Moon is quite popular among Windows power users, I've read.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#6

Post by smalley » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:50 PM UTC

brillenfux wrote: post #2

At this point, would it make sense to fork Firefox?

I think that's what the Pale Moon (https://www.palemoon.org/) folks were doing some time ago. I'm pretty sure they support most of the original firefox extensions without the signing etc.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#7

Post by tunap » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

This is what happens when humans achieve success. Rather than maintain the course they are obligated to exploit to the nth in order to squeeze every gram of return from an idea(product) until they can get no more. Then, they will get creative and pull out every hook & crook to squeeze some more. Thanks Mozilla, for everything up until your mass-collection, feature- bloat, entrapment blitz you've set out upon. Perhaps DTA will make their plug-in compatible with PaleMtoon now. Chances are the forks will come out on top & Moz can go f-up Thunderbird & Seamonkey for awhil as their top-heavy pyramid topples.

edit:admittedly a pipe dream, markets ruled by duops and oligops never lose the top players, they just cannibalize each othet and bloat.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#8

Post by s_dev » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

Shame, I used to use it back in college. Like most colleges there was a proxy so torrenting without ssh tunnelling was difficult and I didn't have a server to tunnel in to anyway.

Most people just bought RapidShare (also gone) and downthemall saved mind numbing ctrl+c/v for .rar files along with being able to pause and resume downloads which few others have seemed to grasp as well as they did.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#9

Post by Nadya » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

timdafweak wrote: post #4

Not just DTA, but FireGestures, Easy DragToGo, and all the amazing extensions that made me stick by Firefox even though most of my colleagues left for Chrome. It is a sad day.

It's a sad day for me because I use FireGestures entirely for their wheel gesture "[Popup] List all tabs" that allows me to scroll between my tabs from anywhere on the page. It's a strange feature that I've only been able to find in FireGestures (and wish I could find as a stand-alone extension).

I use DTA! with AntiContainer quite frequently.

Palemoon doesn't (properly) support Tab Groups, so I refuse to use it. The add-on is broken and doesn't restore tabs if the browser crashes.

I feel like my only option is to disable FF updates and hope I never get bit by a security issue. As GNU IceCat doesn't work on my machine. Or learn how to compile from source and maintain my own personal fork...

(And before anyone suggests it, using Aurora/Web Dev version is not an option for me. I've already been there, tried that.)

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#10

Post by dangoor » Fri, Aug 21, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

As people have been saying in the thread that links to the announcement, it is not at all clear that extensions that today can do things in Firefox that are not possible in Chrome will be unable to do those things in the future. The mechanism for things like changing tab management and such would surely change, but that doesn't mean there won't be one.