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Web Extension equivalents to legacy Firefox add-ons

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Re: Web Extension equivalents to legacy Firefox add-ons

#4

Post by Twirrim »

The main thing I miss is "It's All Text!", which the creator / maintainer indicated was impossible to port away from Legacy, in no small part due to the security aspects of it.

I really, truly, hate inputting anything more than a couple of lines in to websites. Worse when you're fighting WYSIWYG editors, fixed box widths. Even worse than that is when you spend 20 minutes filling in the box, hit submit and find your session timed out.

"It's All Text" allowed me to just click an "edit" button beside the text box, go edit the thing in my favourite text editor, hit save and then go click submit in the browser. If the site screwed up somehow, the text was still open in my text editor.

Re: Web Extension equivalents to legacy Firefox add-ons

#5

Post by throwanem »

Twirrim wrote: post #4

The main thing I miss is "It's All Text!", which the creator / maintainer indicated was impossible to port away from Legacy, in no small part due to the security aspects of it. I really, truly, hate inputting anything more than a couple of lines in to websites. Worse when you're fighting WYSIWYG editors, fixed box widths. Even worse than that is when you spend 20 minutes filling in the box, hit submit and find your s…

It's not precisely impossible to port, but it's a lot more complicated; in practice it requires a separate platform-specific executable, registered with the browser, to marshal between the browser and the editor.

I miss it, too. But not enough to reimplement it, at least not yet.

Re: Web Extension equivalents to legacy Firefox add-ons

#6

Post by adia »

throwanem wrote: post #5
Twirrim wrote: post #4

The main thing I miss is "It's All Text!", which the creator / maintainer indicated was impossible to port away from Legacy, in no small part due to the security aspects of it. I really, truly, hate inputting anything more than a couple of lines in to websites. Worse when you're fighting WYSIWYG editors, fixed box widths. Even worse than that is when you spend 20 minutes filling in the box, hit submit and find your s…

It's not precisely impossible to port, but it's a lot more complicated; in practice it requires a separate platform-specific executable, registered with the browser, to marshal between the browser and the editor. I miss it, too. But not enough to reimplement it, at least not yet.

I was a heavy It's All Text! user, too, and fortunately, an alternative exists, implemented just as you describe. See: https://github.com/jlebon/textern

Re: Web Extension equivalents to legacy Firefox add-ons

#7

Post by norswap »

I was skeptical, but one month in, I have to admit the speed and stability gains are worth the lost addons. Fortunately for me, I only had to give up very small conveniences.

I did lose a few hours over XMarks' inability to sync Firefox search keywords correctly anymore (it's not solved, but you can input the keywords yourself on all your machines and they won't be erased) but that's it.

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