131–140 of 243 posts
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://)
Honest question: who's using ssb://?
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…
not exactly sqlite-lite, but it's sqlish and it's build on top of IDB: https://github.com/google/lovefield
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…
Why would you want SQL on the browser? You cannot sync it to any SQL backend. Are you shipping pure client-side apps with complex data structures?
To perform efficient storage and querying of client-side data. I'm having a hard time understanding why one wouldn't want SQL in the browser given the alternatives.
> You cannot sync it to any SQL backend.
Sure you can, most client-side frameworks these days (React, Angular, ...) keep track of application state. On state change push to client and/or server database via REST API depending on network connectivity.
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…
YMMV, but as someone who was stuck on ESR for a long time for this reason I am now completely satisfied on 57.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Regardless of what RMS thinks, users should be protected from code downloaded from the Internet. There have been too many problems with malicious extensions not to do this.
I use Firefox precisely because I can (or, rather, could) override basically all browser functionality with addons, without having to set up a custom build server and apt repo myself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of what RMS thinks, users should be protected from code downloaded from the Internet. There have been too many problems with malicious extensions not to do this.
Restricting what users can do for their own "safety" is what gives us walled gardens such as iOS. I use Firefox precisely because I can (or, rather, could) override basically all browser functionality with addons, without having to set up a custom build server and apt repo myself.
Obviously, I can't end decide this debate, such as it is, in a single comment (or, likely at all, with an acolyte!). But someone should get the message into the tech message board bubble that in the modern software security world, the controversial argument to make would be that iOS isn't the most secure OS out-of-the-box.
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?
You can make your own but it will need a prefix like "web+catgifs:" or "ext+catgifs:" depending on how the custom url is handled (redirect vs webextension), to be able to use custom urls without the prefix, you need to be on the whitelist. Thats why that little patch is cool, it enables us to build add-ons without requiring a prefix for the custom procotols used by popular dex stuff.
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…
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…
Anyone working on this reading the thread? Can we ever expect an extension that will allow the far better tab management that Chrome has? Namely: Being able to scroll between tabs with the scroll wheel, and being able to select multiple tabs with shift/ctrl to drag them/merge them/close them/etc. It's crazy to me that Firefox's original selling point was tab management, and today Chrome's is so much better.