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Add-ons in 2017

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71–80 of 121 posts

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#71

Post by tn123 »

Yoric wrote: post #21
hucker wrote: post #10

Extensions is currently the only thing FF is better than the competition at, and they scrap it to copy Chrome APIs... I just can't understand why they would scrap XUL-based extensions before their new APIs reach feature parity. The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

Well, XUL-based extensions are not scraped yet. They will, at some point in 2017, but we're not there yet. The reason to scrape them is simple: the total API surface of XUL-based extensions is pretty much all of the internal APIs of Firefox, which means that any change anywhere in the code of Firefox breaks some extension accidentally. That's a compatibility burden that Mozilla could afford when the only competitor w…

Firefox always broke stuff, since the very beginning. Mayor stuff, sometimes for no good reason, sometimes for very good reasons. Add-on developers learned to deal with it. A lot of add-on developers now have an alternative in WebExtensions, which will ease that pain indeed.

But those developers that cannot or will not use WebExtensions (e.g. I will not/can not port most/any of my add-ons incl. DownThemAll!), but probably would manage breaking changes (I did that for more than a decade now), are left in the cold, rainy dark now.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#72

Post by FatalBaboon »

asddddd wrote: post #64
nv-vn wrote: post #40

And this is how Mozilla goes out. Their last remaining reason for existence is being destroyed. They've already gotten rid of Thunderbird, Tab Groups, full themes, and more, but left us with the things nobody wanted (Pocket, Hello, etc.). They've also slowly let performance go in many places, seemingly. A few years ago, I switched to Firefox for precisely the set of features they've axed. It was also much faster than…

I have to disagree, Firefox is in a much better position than a few years ago. RAM usage is lower, e10s works nicely. Tab Groups was spun out into an addon; a sensible decision for a feature extremely few people used. Test Pilot is a better solution for testing features like this. Very relevant to this thread, addons and plugins are a huge cause of poor performance - I ran into this a while back, where an addon was l…

I find firefox to be faster and less hungry than before as well. And let us not forget about the privacy killer-feature.

Also if you find firefox to be slow, try it with addons disabled (firefox --safe-mode).

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#73

Post by dri_ft »

hucker wrote: post #10

Extensions is currently the only thing FF is better than the competition at, and they scrap it to copy Chrome APIs... I just can't understand why they would scrap XUL-based extensions before their new APIs reach feature parity. The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

Didn't Pentadactyl stop working a while ago? For a while I was trying to keep it working, making the necessary changes on every firefox update, but eventually it got too much for me and I switched over to VimFX. At first I didn't think it would be satisfactory, but it actually is a quite good 80% solution. What seemed to be a weakness - the fact that it doesn't aggressively change how the browser works - now seems like a good design decision, making it considerably more robust than Pentadactyl/Vimperator in the face of the changes Mozilla is making, even at the cost of some of Pentadactyl/Vimperator's more advanced functionality.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#74

Post by tn123 »

detaro wrote: post #70
tn123 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the DownThemAll! developer. First and foremost it's technical limitations, other than that it's also time.

Can/Do you want to comment on Mozilla's efforts to work with extension developers to bring everything needed to WebExtensions? While the promise sounds great, I would expect there are issues that make it not as easy in reality.

They are trying I guess, and may succeed for a bunch of use cases to bring what's required. But certainly not all. Even the add-ons that can be somewhat reasonably be ported will have to deal with limitations, and I think the quality of some of those ported add-ons will take a (major) hit.

To elaborate: If you're doing "web stuff", toolbar buttons, and request stuff (adblocking etc), you'll probably be fine. If you're lucky enough that you only need a few additional new things and your name is e.g. Giorgio of NoScript, you also will be probably fine.

If your add-on does not have a sizable user base, and you do fancy things like modding the browser UI itself, or doing something else not entirely "webby", your outlook is a lot less rosy.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#75

Post by alphapapa »

dmethvin wrote: post #62
hucker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an argument for providing similar/the same APIs as Chrome et al sure, but not for deprecating the old ones.

It's quite a burden to maintain two different sets of APIs.

I'm sorry, but I hear this all the time--it's the primary argument used for deprecating or removing any functionality in any software. And my response is: so what? Maintaining software is a burden, period.

Software exists to be useful. The APIs in question make it useful. The developers have been maintaining it for nearly 20 years. Their employer receives millions of dollars a year to do so.

They don't want to maintain this "burden" anymore because it's not fun to maintain old code. It's not glamorous. No one becomes a rock star by unloading the bus. But if you remove the baggage compartments, the bus ceases to be useful, and the show doesn't go on.

Chromium is such a cooler project. It was started from scratch (except for the WebKit part), and it's made by Google (which at least used to be cool), and it's got all these modern APIs. They're so great that it only took them 7 years to support resumable HTTP requests[1].

Firefox used to be about the users. Now it's about the developers. (This is not to say that individual developers are selfish, but that the organization as a whole is behaving in a way that disregards the needs of users and prioritizes the desires of the developers.)

1: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=7648. Just look at this cleverness: "In the absence of a crypto::SecureHash object, DownloadFile reads the partial file and calculates the partial hash state in a new crypto::SecureHash object. If a prefix hash value is available, then the hash of the partial file is matched against this prefix hash. A mismatch causes a FILE_HASH_MISMATCH error which in turn causes the download to abandon its partial state and restart." Any other software in the world would just restart the download. I mean, they already give it a special ".crdownload" extension, so it's not like any other program is going to mess with it. But no, they can't just resume the download, they have to make 15 hash checks and pass around 7 different objects and find every possible reason to start the download all over again. What could have been a 5-line patch turned into 7 years of waiting, a dozen revisions across 50 files...

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#76

Post by cdmckay »

alphapapa wrote: post #63
Yoric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WebExtensions team has been very proactive, attempting to get in touch with add-on developers across the spectrum. If the add-on developers have responded, there's a 99% chance that new APIs will be available for their add-ons.

And what about extensions that have thousands upon thousands of users, still working fine, but haven't been updated in years because the author ran into real life? Is Mozilla going to dump those users on the street and then say, "Well, your author should have contacted us, we don't have time to implement your API now"?

I don't think that's unreasonable. They can't keep backwards compatibility forever because there might be some unmaintained extensions in the wild.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#77

Post by Kliment »

FatalBaboon wrote: post #72
asddddd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree, Firefox is in a much better position than a few years ago. RAM usage is lower, e10s works nicely. Tab Groups was spun out into an addon; a sensible decision for a feature extremely few people used. Test Pilot is a better solution for testing features like this. Very relevant to this thread, addons and plugins are a huge cause of poor performance - I ran into this a while back, where an addon was l…

I find firefox to be faster and less hungry than before as well. And let us not forget about the privacy killer-feature. Also if you find firefox to be slow, try it with addons disabled (firefox --safe-mode).

Safe mode firefox is dramatically slower for me, because it doesn't block ads.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#78

Post by anotheryou »

akkartik wrote: post #54
anotheryou wrote: post #12

Old or complex add-ons are what keep me with firefox. Will switch to qutebrowser¹ and probably chrome as my backup for what the cutie can't handle. ¹keyboard goodness: https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser

Thanks for that pointer! I've been off Firefox for the past six months since they broke my private feedreader extension[1]. I'd been using Opera but I'm typing this out on qutebrowser. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287049

It's still quite young and you feel it at times, beware :)

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#79

Post by tn123 »

Yoric wrote: post #33
hucker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, will extensions like pentadactyl or Tree Style Tabs be able to exist after "some point in 2017"? Ignoring rewrite time etc., will there be APIs available to do what they do today?

The WebExtensions team has been very proactive, attempting to get in touch with add-on developers across the spectrum. If the add-on developers have responded, there's a 99% chance that new APIs will be available for their add-ons.

Sorry, but that is just wrong, Certain types of APIs are infeasible to provide, because mozilla is too time and resource constrained to invest major resources into spec'ing, implementing and maintaining "niche" APIs.

So far, Firefox did not even manage to reach chrome parity, let alone bug parity.

If you look at the Advisory Group meeting notes (in charge of new APIs AFAIK), there is almost nothing still: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qCIUX0LavYixkzwan8IcSYeu...

Sorry David, but you're kidding yourself here.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#80

Post by akkartik »

anotheryou wrote: post #78
akkartik wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that pointer! I've been off Firefox for the past six months since they broke my private feedreader extension[1]. I'd been using Opera but I'm typing this out on qutebrowser. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287049

It's still quite young and you feel it at times, beware :)

Yes, I'm going in with eyes wide open :)

Some experiences:

a) Copying HN links doesn't work. All you get in the clipboard is "/item".

b) Google Drive is utterly unusable.

c) Facebook is mildly unusable. Rendering gets easily messed up.

d) No password management.

But these are fairly minor, I'm happy to use a secondary browser for them.

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