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Extensions in Firefox 59

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#111

Post by setr »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #40
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…

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.

I think its largely a showcase of an ideal: it changes the entirety of the interaction model, and this is ideally what the extension system should be capable of, even if relatively few people want such a significant change.

And, ideally, we should see extensions upturning the interaction model as users experiment with alternatives; that this is no longer possible, that the fundamental model is defined and hardcoded (with minor flavour differences), is, I think, a significant loss.

Its a shame there are few extensions like vimperator; its a greater shame there are none.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#112

Post by guelo »

soapdog wrote: post #96
madez wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralization and safer protocols are needed. Plain HTTP and even HTTPS are really not the best one could come up with. There are better alternatives, but using them is not always easy. So, thanks a lot for your work on making that easier!

Thanks a lot for the kind words! :-) talking about safety and integrity, have you seen how Scuttlebutt works? Check the secret handshake part of: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#handshake In essence, your connection to a given peer is encrypted in a way that only you both have the keys, even if someone breaks that key (such as the peer being a bad agent) it would not compromise your connection with…

It's nice but the fact that you can never delete a message in your feed means that it doesn't really work as a social media protocol. Some people see that as a feature since it is theoretically uncensorable, but that's not how humans like to interact.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#113

Post by neil_macintyre »

virtualwhys wrote: post #109

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 va…

Is IndexDB slow at querying a database or is it just a pain to implement?

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#114

Post by soapdog »

kuschku wrote: post #110
setr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have the source code and can create a build that works like that. The current way it works, which is with a whitelist, makes it a lot harder for some malware to exist and hijack a protocol and this is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Remember that Firefox is used by millions, and a whitelist is a measure that adds a bit more safety to the millions out there that are not as tech-savvy as you and still want to browse the web.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#115

Post by nicklaf »

xg15 wrote: post #77
gogoengie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know if this is the case, but the API ought to also let you kill any active video or audio streams playing in a tab. Then you'd be able to go ahead with hiding them.

If this is not possible or planned, it feels kind of broken in my view.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#116

Post by classichasclass »

soapdog wrote: post #82
classichasclass wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. I think this is based on the `registerProtocolHandler()` means, and if so, you can redirect this to an internal page in your extension. See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/overbitewx/ (disclaimer: authored by yours truly). The more pressing concern is how you would speak these protocols because there's still no direct socket support. In my case, the addon just acts as a history and redirect sh…

Hi, I did just like you said using Native Messaging API[1] to communicate with a local companion app using standard input/output shell calls, this app can handle the socket communication, that is how I am handling it for the scuttlebutt experiments I am doing (I mentioned them above with some URLs if you want to check), I hope to start a conversation soon on the add-ons list about the needs of having UDP and TCP avai…

Is this bug 1247628?

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#118

Post by calcifer »

xg15 wrote: post #77
gogoengie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if tabs with active audio or video can't be hidden

That's for a good reason. I don't want a tab I can't see to record audio or video. Why would you want to?

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#119

Post by calcifer »

floatboth wrote: post #29
shmerl wrote: post #5

Mozilla should fix no exit confirmation for Ctrl+Q. It's just too easy to close the browser this way, and extensions that offered this feature aren't working anymore. It's really a problem in general, there is no way to make an extension that customizes browser behavior itself (rather than page behavior), since WebExtensions can't do that.

browser.tabs.warnOnClose = true, browser.showQuitWarning = true, DO NOT SET "Show my windows and tabs from last time"

> browser.showQuitWarning

I tried setting this (and only this) to true, but ctrl+q still quits without a prompt.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#120

Post by fro0116 »

Not really related to extensions, but one thing I've been curious of for a while now: Does the Firefox team have any plans to implement something like Chrome's expensive background timers throttling feature?

https://blog.chromium.org/2017/03/reducing-power-consumption...

It seems more and more relevant these days with the advent of cryptocurrency miners.

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