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The likely end of DownThemAll

downthemall.net

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Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#121

Post by brighteyes »

mook wrote: post #120
brighteyes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're suggesting they say "we intend to deprecate this feature", but not give a timeline? It seems much more open and fair to give a timeline. That way it's predictable and lets people plan.

> So you're suggesting they say "we intend to deprecate this feature", but not give a timeline? Yes; but that only works if they don't actually _have_ a timeline. Do the necessary work to let people explore options, then evaluate and give a timeline (in the same order as what it took to get all that implemented). The timeline currently is "you have 12 to 18 months, but can't actually start". That's pretty much a reci…

I guess it's a matter of opinion, but I greatly prefer it they way they did it.

Announcing "this is going away" without a timeline would make me worry "when? now? in a month?" Instead, by saying "12 to 18 months", I know this is a long-term thing and I can plan for it. The timeline is very useful information.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#122

Post by Tomte »

aaron695 wrote: post #49
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…

> If that's the short term cost of getting Firefox to the same level of security that Chrome is at, it seems more than worth it. Without the extensions I perhaps see no point to FF. Is secure and dead worth it? Plus is there evidence of issues around this in the wild? Is it worth the risk of being a possible FF killer?

I've just switched to Edge to really give it a chance, infuriating as it is at times.

Up to a few weeks ago I exclusively used Firefox. Installed plugins? Let me think.

AdBlock Plus, but not really, has been deactivated for months now.

Lazarus. Active, but never used in many months.

Nothing more, I think. And I'm a power user, not some grandmother who uses webmail once a month.

Firefox has lots of reasons to be used, even without plugins.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#123

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

wvenable wrote: post #41
eloisant wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is Firefox already lost most of its market share to Chrome, so "powerful add-on" doesn't seem to be a strong enough selling point to retain users. It is, however, a big liability. In terms of security but also stability and performances. The way extensions work in Firefox is a bit crazy, it's like opening your belly and say "here, change whatever you want". It's the equivalent of a desktop OS where any inst…

> The way extensions work in Firefox is a bit crazy, it's like opening your belly and say "here, change whatever you want". ...and my god it has been awesome. Certainly more awesome than any instability it may cause. > It's the equivalent of a desktop OS where any installed application runs in kernel Most major operating systems give extension capabilities to enhance them in deep ways. My Windows install has ClassicS…

> What you're describing isn't a modern power user OS -- you're describing iOS.

Hardly. Windows, Linux and OS X do not let you monkeypatch the entire system.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#124

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

justin_ wrote: post #79

I'll be pretty upset if the addons that let you modify the Firefox UI via XUL have to go away. Tree-style tabs[1] for example is one of the major extensions keeping me with FF. There's really no alternative for Chrome since they can't completely change the tab UI like Firefox can. Check out the screenshots! [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

As is mentioned on the WebExtensions page, they want to add APIs enabling things like that.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#125

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

tacone wrote: post #29

Don't be so pessimistic. 18 months are a lot of time, Mozilla folks are smart and often listen to their users, there's the browser.html experiment going on, etc. I have a gut feeling that in a way or another, things will roughly be the same for extensions developers.

Also, Mozilla are going to have their developers work with add-on developers to help port them.

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#126

Post by alexolog »

Tobu wrote: post #47
geofft wrote: post #42

From a technical point of view, what is DownThemAll? It seems like it looks at the structure of the current web page, identifies all links, and then downloads them (in some cases using range requests, as with '90s-era download accelerators), with options for pausing and resuming downloads and renaming them in certain ways. What prevents this from being done using a Chrome extension to look at the page structure and r…

Yup, it's basically a spider. The Anticontainer plug-in enhances it to fetch images that are a few steps away from the original page. Looks like it just needs unrestricted XHR, which greasemonkey and every other chrome extension already require. Maybe off-screen rendering, which could look like this: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensi...

> The Anticontainer plug-in enhances it to fetch images that are a few steps away from the original page

You should look at Imagehost Grabber, which is best described as Anticontainer on steroids,

http://imagehost-grabber.eu/index.php

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#127

Post by richardboegli »

cauterized wrote: post #44
smalley wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Too bad there's no Mac version.

Pale Moon for Mac OSX 24.7.1

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=41

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099556

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#128

Post by hussong »

justin_ wrote: post #79

I'll be pretty upset if the addons that let you modify the Firefox UI via XUL have to go away. Tree-style tabs[1] for example is one of the major extensions keeping me with FF. There's really no alternative for Chrome since they can't completely change the tab UI like Firefox can. Check out the screenshots! [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Wouldn't something like Tabs Outliner in Chrome be a suitable replacement?

What would be the UX issues there for people switching over? Docking? Tabs styling?

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#129

Post by hollerith »

pcwalton wrote: post #74
hyperion2010 wrote: post #45

This seems like a classic case if thinking people use your software for the core features you develop. I hate to break it to you but people don't use windows for the control panel. Firefox and other browsers have become development platforms and many of their "users" don't use their platform for its 'control panel,' they use it for some useful tool built on top of it. To use a linux kernel term, this breaks userspace…

> To use a linux kernel term, this breaks userspace (might be a sign that browsers have some serious OS envy). No, the equivalent of breaking userspace would be breaking the Web platform. This is more like breaking the in-kernel API for .ko modules—and the official Linux policy on this is [1]. Firefox has always been much less inclined to break its internal XPCOM APIs than the Linux kernel has been to break its inter…

>No, the equivalent of breaking userspace would be breaking the Web platform.

Suppose someone secretly believes that the true users of my web browser are the owners of the web sites I visit. (Perhaps they own a web site or they make their living working for web-site owners, which makes it natural for them to care about the freedoms and the interests of site owners more than they care about my freedoms and interests.)

That secret belief would tend to make them overestimate the usefulness of the Javascript that the sites I visit cause to execute on my browser and to underestimate the usefulness and importance of any extensions or add-ons I choose to install on my browser.

I think the true situation is that there are two important userspaces -- one in which front-end web-app code runs and another in which extensions and add-ons run. (There is some overlap between these two userspaces.)

Also, one of the arguments being given for the need to restrict what add-ons can do is security even though most exploits of the browser are caused not by the user's installing a bad add-on, but rather by the user's visiting a bad web page. Yet I see no one on this page mentioning the latter kind of exploits (which an add-on can sometimes protect against, for example, by blocking ads).

Re: The likely end of DownThemAll

#130

Post by wvenable »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #123
wvenable wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way extensions work in Firefox is a bit crazy, it's like opening your belly and say "here, change whatever you want". ...and my god it has been awesome. Certainly more awesome than any instability it may cause. > It's the equivalent of a desktop OS where any installed application runs in kernel Most major operating systems give extension capabilities to enhance them in deep ways. My Windows install has ClassicS…

> What you're describing isn't a modern power user OS -- you're describing iOS. Hardly. Windows, Linux and OS X do not let you monkeypatch the entire system.

Actually, they pretty much do. Take for example Dropbox. Windows officially 3rd party applications adding overlays to icons which dropbox uses to provide sync status for items in the dropbox folder. OS X has no such feature or API for icon overlays. Through lots of trial and error, swizzling, mach_inject, and mach_override they managed to provide this feature in OS X as well.
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