No keychain support in mac, still can’t use firefox :(
Extensions in Firefox 59
151–160 of 243 posts
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#152Happy 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.
At least some of the mentioned APIs appear to be experimental and unstable, so it's still worth being measured in our optimism. :P
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
What practical benefit would that really have over just using your choice of SQL engine with wasm, though?
I don't know, is my choice of SQL engine (sqlite) via WASM a realistic solution? How does one compile sqlite to WASM, and how is this made available to the end user? sql.js[1] is a pure JS implementation of sqlite and it weighs a ton (2.6MB) compared to browser supplied native sqlite. Ideally the user doesn't have to pay the price of downloading a large binary (on top of already large SPA). [1] https://github.com/kri…
Sure, but that's the JS version. wasm is meant to produce smaller, less resource-intensive versions (and there is a wasm version of sqlite I believe [1]). I'd much rather see CDN and caching tech improve along with other low-level tools such as wasm and CSS Houdini to let us build whatever we'd like. I can see that being better for devs than waiting for vendors to standardize a watered-down spec for each feature we might want like SQL (and there's a lot of them).
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#154I 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…
Would it be possible to implement ssh:// ?
I know it's theoretically possible to make some browsers respect ssh:// urls. But to actually do so requires a lot of work.
Presumably this is to avoid some security problem that I'm not immediately aware of. Or maybe just plain caution?
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#155Mozilla 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.
I thought the gaining philosophy here was to make "destructive" operations easy to undo, rather than having warnings and confirmations before carrying them out? Quitting Firefox and then starting again and restoring all tabs fits well with easy to undo.
Unfortunately, restoring state after quitting on MacOS is not trivial. Specifically, restoring all your windows to the right spaces. No browser on MacOS (not even Safari) manages to do this...
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, is my choice of SQL engine (sqlite) via WASM a realistic solution? How does one compile sqlite to WASM, and how is this made available to the end user? sql.js[1] is a pure JS implementation of sqlite and it weighs a ton (2.6MB) compared to browser supplied native sqlite. Ideally the user doesn't have to pay the price of downloading a large binary (on top of already large SPA). [1] https://github.com/kri…
Sure, but that's the JS version. wasm is meant to produce smaller, less resource-intensive versions (and there is a wasm version of sqlite I believe [1]). I'd much rather see CDN and caching tech improve along with other low-level tools such as wasm and CSS Houdini to let us build whatever we'd like. I can see that being better for devs than waiting for vendors to standardize a watered-down spec for each feature we m…
Agreed, browser vendors may not always have the best interests of developers in mind.
If WASM approach can deliver a relatively small binary with better-than-js performance, then that may be a viable alternative, thanks.
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where by "safety" you mean "the most secure mainstream computing platform currently available, setting a standard to which other platforms approach only asymptotically and with significant end-user effort". 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 softwar…
The safest computing platform is an airgapped 386, that doesn’t make it useful. In the same way, iOS may be safe, but entirely useless for many people’s use cases. And additional, safety is entirely orthogonal to restricting choice. You can have a walled garden that is insecure, e.g. the Amazon Kindles, or you can have an open system that is secure, e.g. OpenBSD.
AviD's rule of security: Security at the expense of usability comes at the expense of security.
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#158> ... 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…
FWIW, I have this in my userChrome.css to fix that horizontal tabs annoyance: `#TabsToolbar{ visibility: collapse !important;}`. Not ideal, but a workaround I can forget about most of the time.
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh no, persistency is great. But the problem is how non-functional their implementation is. Say I write a user.js file with a few options. I can't have the typical dotfile model, where removing options from this file will lead to defaults on the next run. I need to unset them. Explicitly. Thus, using a dot file to set up Firefox (user.js) is incredibly clunky and people don't use this much.
Firefox actually retains all the default values for the preferences, and bolds the ones that are set to non-default values.
If you could export the diff, or import settings, that would be adequate.
Re: Extensions in Firefox 59
#160I'm still annoyed by some fx changes that are purely out of chrome jealousy.
The address bar suggestions used to be 2-lines and were so readable until someone just blindly copied the unreadable version of chrome.