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The likely end of DownThemAll

downthemall.net

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Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#31

Post by eiji »

I'm maintaining two Add-Ons with around 20k active users. I agree with his predictions, but I also find it hard to give to much attention to voices like the one expressed here.

It's hard for me to tell how much of this is genuine concern, or just how many donations or how much income he will loose because of this. I never see numbers from these Add-Ons. The one in question here has 1,300,000 daily active users.

Sure, if I make $1500 per month on an Add-On, I would be very upset if things change. Then I'd rather see the XUL/XPCOM stuff around for another 15 years.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#32

Post by [deleted] »

cwyers wrote: post #24
beloch wrote: post #12

From the Firefox announcement: Re: Why they are removing XUL: "XPCOM and XUL are two of the most fundamental technologies to Firefox. The ability to write much of the browser in JavaScript has been a huge advantage for Mozilla. It also makes Firefox far more customizable than other browsers. However, the add-on model that arose naturally from these technologies is extremely permissive. Add-ons have complete access to…

> add-ons that modify our code via regular expressions That's... actually kinda terrifying.

[deleted]

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#33

Post by tn123 »

eiji wrote: post #31

I'm maintaining two Add-Ons with around 20k active users. I agree with his predictions, but I also find it hard to give to much attention to voices like the one expressed here. It's hard for me to tell how much of this is genuine concern, or just how many donations or how much income he will loose because of this. I never see numbers from these Add-Ons. The one in question here has 1,300,000 daily active users. Sure,…

Thanks for implying I'm in it for the money without even knowing me. Nice ad hominem you got there.

Let's just say that the donations do not nearly cover the time I spend developing add-ons, helping other add-on developers out with their questions, volunteering on AMO, writing patches for core Firefox and so on.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#34

Post by jd3 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #5
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.

Ridiculous. I've never heard of power users using Pale moon. it seems like the current `hot fad' in comparison to products like SeaMonkey, which power users have always used since the de-coupling of the Mozilla Suite (netscape suite) in 2005. my personal thoughts on pale moon can be found here[0].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3ay037/pale_moon_t...

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#35

Post by tptacek »

tn123 wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #18

There is no piece of software in the world harder to secure than a browser. There's almost no other piece of software where compromises have higher stakes. Further, the verdict is probably in on whether browsers should use multi-process sandboxes, and how careful they need to be about privilege-escalated Javascript, which is an enormous loophole for runtime security measures like ASLR and DEP. Firefox's multi-process…

>Electrolysis apparently breaks XUL extensions. This is wrong. It absolutely does not break XUL extensions per-se. Add-ons will require some (moderate for most add-ons) changes when accessing out-of-process web content. A lot of add-ons may not even require changes at all, because they either do not access web content directly in the first place, or the Cross-Process-Wrappers and shims mozilla already implemented wil…

I'm prepared to be wrong, as I am not an expert on XUL, Electrolysis, or the Firefox runtime.

I can however interpret what Mozilla says is the reasoning behind breaking XUL extensions, which is:

XUL extensions, among other things, get in the way of getting Electrolysis working.

That's linked from this blog post.

If things have to break in the short term for Mozilla to modernize Firefox's runtime hardening, well, that breakage seems worth it. Just based on the knowledge of what security flaws in Firefox get used for in the real world.

--- (few min later)

As an aside: if this is the definition of "XUL extensions can be made to work with e10s":

The lack of an synchronous API in the chrome side is intentional: because the chrome process runs the Firefox UI, any responsiveness problems affect the whole browser. By making the chrome process block on the content process, CPOWs break this principle and allow an unresponsive content process to make the whole browser unresponsive.

... I can kind of see where they're coming from, even w/o considering security.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#36

Post by steve-howard »

dangoor wrote: post #10

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.

They say they're going to try and cover all the use cases with a new API, but it's clear that that API is in its infancy. Even if it were ready to go today, this would require authors to rewrite their extensions, which will mean that some stable extensions will fall through the cracks.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#37

Post by sp332 »

eiji wrote: post #31

I'm maintaining two Add-Ons with around 20k active users. I agree with his predictions, but I also find it hard to give to much attention to voices like the one expressed here. It's hard for me to tell how much of this is genuine concern, or just how many donations or how much income he will loose because of this. I never see numbers from these Add-Ons. The one in question here has 1,300,000 daily active users. Sure,…

If users like it enough to spend $1,500 a month on it, it should be a priority for Firefox devs.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#38

Post by eiji »

tn123 wrote: post #33
eiji wrote: post #31

I'm maintaining two Add-Ons with around 20k active users. I agree with his predictions, but I also find it hard to give to much attention to voices like the one expressed here. It's hard for me to tell how much of this is genuine concern, or just how many donations or how much income he will loose because of this. I never see numbers from these Add-Ons. The one in question here has 1,300,000 daily active users. Sure,…

Thanks for implying I'm in it for the money without even knowing me. Nice ad hominem you got there. Let's just say that the donations do not nearly cover the time I spend developing add-ons, helping other add-on developers out with their questions, volunteering on AMO, writing patches for core Firefox and so on.

I'm sorry if I offended you. All I'm saying is you could be in a position of conflict of interest. Unfortunately, your user base would never mobilize on your behalf, because they don't understand the technical details behind the comprehensive Firefox extension system that would be deprecated.

That's a problem. The user don't understand what they are about to loose, but the big name developers with millions of users have a vested interest in the status quo. I don't have a solution for that. There are a lot of Add-On developers out there for which this is a business. Firefox extensions can generate an income.

At least you make no secret about it. The euro coins are right next to the article. I mean that in a good way.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#39

Post by eiji »

tn123 wrote: post #33
eiji wrote: post #31

I'm maintaining two Add-Ons with around 20k active users. I agree with his predictions, but I also find it hard to give to much attention to voices like the one expressed here. It's hard for me to tell how much of this is genuine concern, or just how many donations or how much income he will loose because of this. I never see numbers from these Add-Ons. The one in question here has 1,300,000 daily active users. Sure,…

Thanks for implying I'm in it for the money without even knowing me. Nice ad hominem you got there. Let's just say that the donations do not nearly cover the time I spend developing add-ons, helping other add-on developers out with their questions, volunteering on AMO, writing patches for core Firefox and so on.

I'm sorry if I offended you. All I'm saying is you could be in a position of conflict of interest. Unfortunately, your user base would never mobilize on your behalf, because they don't understand the technical details behind the comprehensive Firefox extension system that would be deprecated.

That's a problem. The user don't understand what they are about to loose, but the big name developers with millions of users have a vested interest in the status quo. I don't have a solution for that. There are a lot of Add-On developers out there for which this is a business. Firefox extensions can generate an income.

At least you make no secret about it. The euro coins are right next to the article. I mean that in a good way.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#40

Post by geofft »

AstroJetson wrote: post #17
carlosrg wrote: post #15

I don't know if it's very smart to limit one of the most distinctive features of Firefox, the powerful add-ons available. Erodes the differences between Firefox and other browsers. If Firefox is going to be just another Chrome, people will just use Chrome.

I agree, if they are all going to look alike, work alike and the base is now Chrome, then might as well use Chrome. But frankly if I wanted to use Chrome then I'd be using Chrome now. I've stopped the version madness here, I have some plugins that I love that preclude me from going forward. I'd rather see the team go "Hey we have 2.3 million person years of backlogged bugs, we are going to fix them before we make a f…

> Security is an issue, but with my work machine I'm not hitting sites that would put me at risk.

What add-ons do you use on this extremely restricted set of internal-only websites?

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