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uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

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Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#311
post #94

Keep in mind that it's not within Google's incentives to facilitate ad-blocking and prevention of tracking. After all, that's where the lion's share of their revenue comes from. However, Mozilla is free to actively support such efforts.

I agree. Not just that, I would add that Google's incentive is often to encourage usage of these services despite being a detriment to the user. To this day, Android still does not have Night Mode built in probably because so people would simply use the device more instead of going to sleep.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#312
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what happens when I trigged DevTools while logging key events: document.addEventListener('keydown', ({ keyCode }) => console.log(keyCode)) 91 16 73 You can see each key.

But there's different ways of opening dev tools. You can use the mouse to right click as well. In fact, when using keyboard shortcuts in the better these days, I have a habit of hitting alt+D first to get to the address bar first (Outlook likes to hijack browser shortcuts like Ctrl+n), in which case the website shouldn't know I'm pressing anything at all.

I think OP's point is you can listen for a bunch of signals: If you see the right keydown events, or if you see a contextmenu followed by a rapid change to innerWidth, they probably opened dev tools, and you should delete your evil cookies.

The person who figured this out probably opened them via menu and had dev tools in another window, so the evil folks couldn't detect the resize.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#313
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing as how there is an api in place to have a built in sidebar in firefox, plenty of tab and window API methods available, a way to hide the horizontal tabs at the top of the screen and the developer of treeStyleTabs saying that they will be able to move to webextensions fine... I fail to see how this will be inferior to an XUL extension. Can you elaborate on how the old tree style tabs is different other than usi…

>Unrelated, but the fact that the developer doesn't get the extension AMO approved and uses eval() all over the place should give some pause as well. He does, it is in the official add-on site, but their approval process is slow, and a few times a Firefox update has broken it and I've had to download the update from the dev's site because it takes a long time to update on the official site.

Just because it's on the site doesn't mean that it's approved... it's marked experimental by the developer to not require a full review with the caveat that any experimental extension is inherently more risky than a reviewed one. The developer lists a few reasons why they don't do the full review and one of those is that they use eval() and that the review takes longer than they deem acceptable. I just said it should give a little bit of pause not that you should wholesale reject using their extension. I just looked over his code and it's quite a lot of code for something that should be fairly straightforward.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#314
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing as how there is an api in place to have a built in sidebar in firefox, plenty of tab and window API methods available, a way to hide the horizontal tabs at the top of the screen and the developer of treeStyleTabs saying that they will be able to move to webextensions fine... I fail to see how this will be inferior to an XUL extension. Can you elaborate on how the old tree style tabs is different other than usi…

He uses eval in safe ways, according to the developer. So I think your argument is mout unless you can point the unsafe uses. Now, the real question is: "why isn't Firefox developing a default Tree Style Tab?" I think at this point enough people are using it, and it has proven to be a better way to browse.

He may well be using it "safely" but it still is a string that is being evaluated so it has many inherent drawbacks.

> Now, the real question is: "why isn't Firefox developing a default Tree Style Tab?" > > I think at this point enough people are using it, and it has proven to be a better way to browse.

Not sure there are enough users to justify taking actual mozilla engineers off core problems that are everyone's problems. There is a maintenance burden and associated cost for every feature that mozilla adds to their core product. I think they would rather make the browser extension backend robust enough to allow for those types of extensions without sacrificing stability, performance, and security.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#315
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think this stuff is creepy well...okay? I mean, it's not like every desktop application you've ever used in your life couldn't do the same or more?

The difference is that you run only trusted native applications with the ability to check their source code, while you are visiting untrusted sites which often have obfuscated javascript. I think that it would be a better comparison between a pdf file and the web: pdfs files can't do the same or more.

PDFs can run JavaScript too. Open this PDF in Chrome: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experi...

And I would argue it is harder for the average user to view the JavaScript inside PDFs: on the web just right click and choose Inspect Element right in the browser; for a PDF you'll have to use specialized tools to decode the myriad encoding schemes inside a PDF. The average JavaScript developer doesn't know how to extract JavaScript from a PDF.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using VimFX all along, which is actively maintained and already compatible with multiprocess. It's a web browser, not an actual text editor. 99% of the time, you're just wanting familiar keyboard commands for navigation. It feels like Vimperator does so many impractical things almost tongue-in-cheek, just to show how cool it is that they're theoretically possible.

VimFx is not compatible with multiprocess, it will stop working soon. See https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860 : - You can use the current VimFx for the rest of 2017. - Then, Vimium is your best bet: philc/vimium#2425 - VimFx is free software, so if somebody feels like converting it to a WebExtension they're totally free to do so! (But you're probably going to spend your time more wisely on Vimium.) - I…

Well, "soon" is tomorrow August 11: "PSA: Legacy extensions disabled by default on Nightly": https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-addons/2017-August/00...

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#319

After being a Chrome user for several years, I've switched back to Firefox for the past two years or so and I'm really, really happy with it. Latest version does multi-processing, e10s is finally here (though it might still get disabled by usage of certain add-ons, I remember I had to force it to stay enabled). On performance, in the past it felt sluggish, but now Firefox is fast and for my usage patterns it uses les…

Not many people seem to be aware of this, but Firefox Mobile is just as great! You can run full extensions, just like on desktop.

Oh man plugin support on mobile, this is a game changer for me. If only Firefox supported 2fa with an authenticator app I would have no hesitation using Firefox as my main browser.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#320
I know this is completely off-topic, but that might just be the worst format for support that I've ever seen.

Why bother with topics when you can just mash every single thread of conversation together into a giant wall? And it looks like you can track quotes back to original post, but not the other way round? So good luck following a conversation where time flows backwards I guess...

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