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Extensions in Firefox 59

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#101

Post by oblio »

adambyrtek wrote: post #91
btschaegg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many tiling windows managers like i3 and XMonad have a tabbed layout: https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_changing_the_container... https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib-0.13/docs...

You don't even need to go that hard core. Either Fluxbox or Openbox has it. Or you can program^Wconfigure FVWM to do it.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#102

Post by oblio »

noloblo wrote: post #99

its painful see most of the extensions don't work yet in latest firefox keychain access manager ublock and others why do every Firefox version break extensions ?

uBlock works, it always worked. They had a WebExtensions version early.

And the point of WebExtensions is to provide a stable API and prevent the constant breakage.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#103

Post by kuschku »

hobofan wrote: post #73
kodablah wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So how do I make an extension that supports Firefox 57 or later and does mycustomprotocol:// without prefix? Do I have to Rowhammer my access through Firefox' code? I do not see how it is in Mozilla's right to restrict what a user can do with the user's browser.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#104

Post by kbenson »

anigbrowl wrote: post #89
kbenson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referring to? The containers addon does grouping, sorting, color coding, auto group association, and sandboxed cookies. Is there something else you're looking for?

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to assign an open tab to a specific container.

You can't assign an already open tab as that would require cookie merging in a lot of cases, but there is a related solution. It took me a few weeks to realize what it was (but once I did, it all clicked, and works well now).

You select a container to open a new tab, then open what you want in it (type/paste link).

After you are on that URL in a container, the container control panel has an option to always open that domain (path too?) in that container. Check that.

Next time you paste a URL/link or follow a link to that domain, there will be an interim page asking you whether you want to open in the container the link came from, or the one you specified you always want it to open in. You can check a box to make that the default from then on.

Before I realized this is how it works, I was looking for a way to submit something like this as a feature request. After I realized it, the number of containers I used exploded, since I just default domains to always open in their containers and it's fairly transparent now.

As a real world example, I have a "Reddit" container, and a "Google - Personal" container (and a "Google - Work" for work G Suite stuff). I don't have Google default to anything (but I have some containerized pinned gmail tabs), but I do have youtube default to "Google - Personal". I have reddit default to "Reddit". I can view /r/videos and stream embedded and the views and tracking is in Reddit's container, but if I click to follow a youtube video to youtibe.com, it loads in the "Google - Personal" container and I can like or subscribe as I want.

At this point I have containers for banking, shopping, github+stackoverflow, facebook (I don't use it much at all, but at least this allows me to be logged in and worry less about tracking), Pandora, Reddit, Work/Home google, News (for a recent WaPo subscription), and I'm probably going to add a few more (including HN) within the next few weeks.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#105

Post by Zarel »

jay-anderson wrote: post #76
swang wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I right-click and use "Open in Incognito Window" in these sorts of situations. I assume Firefox has an analogous feature.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#107

Post by cpeterso »

kibwen wrote: post #4

Happy to see that Mozilla was serious about their intentions to extend the WebExtensions API in post-57 Firefox. I'm also happily surprised at the section about user notification of extension overrides; having a nice UI for this sort of thing is a difficult yet worthwhile problem (and I'm also a big fan of the new Preferences tab in general, it works far better than the old popup window). Hopefully some of this will…

Firefox 60 will be the next ESR version, so all of the Firefox 59 extension APIs described in this blog post should be available.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#108

Post by setr »

kuschku wrote: post #103
hobofan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So how do I make an extension that supports Firefox 57 or later and does mycustomprotocol:// without prefix? Do I have to Rowhammer my access through Firefox' code? I do not see how it is in Mozilla's right to restrict what a user can do with the user's browser.

The hell does the prefix have to do with user rights? This is a matter of convenience, not capability.

You want arbitrary protocols? The prefix is available to you. You want blessed protocols? The non-prefix is available to you.

There's no restriction in place. And anyways, given OSS, you can bless your protocol with a custom build. But just because you want it blessed doesn't mean it should be forced onto everyone else.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#109

Post by virtualwhys »

Was hoping to see Web SQL make its way back into Firefox.

Yes, it's been deprecated for years, but that hasn't stopped the browser makers with majority of market share (Google > Chrome, Apple > Safari) from continuing to ship it along with the strictly worse alternative (IndexedDb).

Now that pretty much every language compiles to Javascript it's a shame to lose SQL functionality on the client. Shared model, shared validation, shared SQL layer, etc. -- it could all be a unified whole, but no, now one has to wait for sqlite-lite to be built on top of IndexedDb; that or throw everything out and go NoSQL on client and server.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#110

Post by kuschku »

setr wrote: post #108
kuschku wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do I make an extension that supports Firefox 57 or later and does mycustomprotocol:// without prefix? Do I have to Rowhammer my access through Firefox' code? I do not see how it is in Mozilla's right to restrict what a user can do with the user's browser.

The hell does the prefix have to do with user rights? This is a matter of convenience, not capability. You want arbitrary protocols? The prefix is available to you. You want blessed protocols? The non-prefix is available to you. There's no restriction in place. And anyways, given OSS, you can bless your protocol with a custom build. But just because you want it blessed doesn't mean it should be forced onto everyone e…

I follow Stallman’s school of thought that software should never restrict the user in ability.

A user should not be protected from themselves, if a user wants to install an addon to intercept paypal:// requests for whatever reason, that should be their choice. And it should not require the user to do custom changes to the system.

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