Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Extensions in Firefox 59

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 243 posts

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#71

Post by classichasclass »

kodablah wrote: post #63
npongratz wrote: post #3

I find this pretty exciting for (hopefully; someday) wider adoption of alternative protocols: Starting with Firefox 59, several protocols that support decentralized architectures are available for use by extensions. The white-listed protocols are: + Dat Project (dat://) + IPFS (dweb:// ipfs:// ipns://) + Secure Scuttlebutt (ssb://)

Why does it require a whitelist? If I make my own, do I have to contact Mozilla or is the user prompted when first access is attempted?

The protocol handler support is restricted to a whitelist to prevent an addon from taking over, say, "http://" (or other protocols which could be used to insinuate unsafe content).

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#72

Post by btschaegg »

hartator wrote: post #39
nathcd wrote: post #33

I have a tangential question for anyone who might know more about tab stuff than me. Awhile ago, I looked into making Firefox not do any tab management. Basically, always have one tab per window, middle click always opens a new window, normal click always opens a page in the current tab. (I'd like to do tab management with my window manager instead of browser so I can have a consistent tabbing interface across all of…

Interesting. What do you use for tab management on the OS level?

It's almost certainly not what OP is using, but if you're interested in tabbing of arbitrary windows as a built-in OS feature, I'd suggest you have a look at how BeOS used to do that. You can still try it with Haiku[1].

I'm also fairly certain that functionality could be implemented with a handful of scripts in awesome (in a floating way instead of using pre-existing tiling WM features).

[1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#73

Post by hobofan »

kodablah wrote: post #63
npongratz wrote: post #3

I find this pretty exciting for (hopefully; someday) wider adoption of alternative protocols: Starting with Firefox 59, several protocols that support decentralized architectures are available for use by extensions. The white-listed protocols are: + Dat Project (dat://) + IPFS (dweb:// ipfs:// ipns://) + Secure Scuttlebutt (ssb://)

Why does it require a whitelist? If I make my own, do I have to contact Mozilla or is the user prompted when first access is attempted?

I think the whitelist on what you can register as protocol handlers is a security measure. E.g. if Paypal uses "paypal:" links which are handled by a OS native application, you can't write a extension that hijacks those links.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#75

Post by gs7 »

swang wrote: post #66
carussell wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I missing something You're not. This was one of jwz's big complaints when he wrote about why he doesn't use Firefox[1] several years back, and nobody has ever fixed it. 1. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of...

don't bother to link to jwz from hn since he redirects you to (what i guess is) a nsfw image

Off topic, but for anyone curious what that image is without clicking: it's a hairy testicle in an egg cup. The title reads "Hacker News" and the caption is "A DDoS made of finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers".

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#76

Post by jay-anderson »

swang wrote: post #66
carussell wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I missing something You're not. This was one of jwz's big complaints when he wrote about why he doesn't use Firefox[1] several years back, and nobody has ever fixed it. 1. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of...

don't bother to link to jwz from hn since he redirects you to (what i guess is) a nsfw image

To get around this you can disable the inclusion of the referrer. In firefox set `Network.http.sendRefererHeader` to `0` in about:config. Of course this only lets you avoid it. But, yeah, I agree. That's pretty rotten behavior and worth avoiding linking there.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#77

Post by xg15 »

gogoengie wrote: post #15
neuland wrote: post #8

> ... one of the most requested features has been the ability to hide tabs with the WebExtensions API. It was a key element of some very popular legacy add-ons ... It's weird that they are not mentioning Tree Style Tabs by name. But, at least they're listening the the user requests. I don't use the plugin myself, but I heard that one of the gripes of the new WebExtensions version is that it still shows the normal hor…

They are referring to hiding individual tabs, not hiding the horizontal tab bar. The legacy extension they are referring to is Tab Groups [0]. It allowed you to separate the tabs of a single session into groups. Selecting the active group would hide the other tabs. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

Still, it seems that the current API couldn't really support that use-case if tabs with active audio or video can't be hidden. At least there will be some random tabs hanging around that don't belong to your group.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#78

Post by [deleted] »

carussell wrote: post #50
nathcd wrote: post #33

I have a tangential question for anyone who might know more about tab stuff than me. Awhile ago, I looked into making Firefox not do any tab management. Basically, always have one tab per window, middle click always opens a new window, normal click always opens a page in the current tab. (I'd like to do tab management with my window manager instead of browser so I can have a consistent tabbing interface across all of…

> Am I missing something You're not. This was one of jwz's big complaints when he wrote about why he doesn't use Firefox[1] several years back, and nobody has ever fixed it. 1. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of...

[deleted]

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#79

Post by icebraining »

bringtheaction wrote: post #58
JohnTHaller wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that vimperator is mentioned every single time Firefox extensions are brought up on HN even though it only has about 11,000 users out of the hundreds of millions that use Firefox.

Well, 1) it's a legitimate use-case and 2) certainly the amount of Vimperator / Pentadactyl / Vimium etc users are a much higher percentage of HN users than among the population at large. I used to be one of the users, but after the millionth time that an upgrade broke the extension I gave up on being able to use it. I don't think about it often but even though I am mostly over it I get a little sad thinking about it…

For me, macros alone are worth installing Vimperator. Just record a series of steps once, then you can effortlessly play them back how many times you want. I just used it today to skip 20 pages in a dumb interface that only offers previous/next links.

  qafnextq20@a

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#80

Post by soapdog »

npongratz wrote: post #3

I find this pretty exciting for (hopefully; someday) wider adoption of alternative protocols: Starting with Firefox 59, several protocols that support decentralized architectures are available for use by extensions. The white-listed protocols are: + Dat Project (dat://) + IPFS (dweb:// ipfs:// ipns://) + Secure Scuttlebutt (ssb://)

Hey! I made that patch! :-D

so basically the explanation is simple. There is a whitelist of protocols you can have your WebExtension take over.

If the protocol you want to control is not on that whitelist such as an hypothetical "catgifs:" protocol, you need to prefix it like: "web+catgifs" or "ext+catgifs" depending if it will be used from the Add-on or by redirection to another Web page. This makes it inconvenient to use with lots of decentralization protocols because in many other clients we are already using urls such as "ssb:" and "dat:" (eg, check out beaker browser). In essence this allows us to implement many new cool decentralization features as add-ons now that we can take over protocols, so, you could be in Firefox browsing the normal web and suddenly see a "dat:" link, normally you'd need to switch clients to a dat enabled app, now, you can have an add-on display that content in the current user-agent you're using.

Still, there is another feature that we need before we can start really implementing decentralization protocols as pure WebExtensions, we need both TCP and UDP APIs like we had in Firefox OS (as an example, Scuttlebutt uses UDP to find peers in LAN and its own muxrpc TCP protocol to exchange data, DAT also uses UDP/TCP instead of HTTP).

I have been building little experiments in Firefox for interfacing with Scuttlebutt which can be seen at:

https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25csKtp9VmxTjJoKy17O7GA6%2F3S8...

https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25uBev5w8m8iZGVbQDo9fpr%2BCXLB...

I hope to start a conversation in the add-ons list about TCP and UDP APIs for WebExtensions soon :-)

Post reply on HN