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Waterfox Browser

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Re: Waterfox Browser

#71

Post by ce4 »

bscphil wrote: post #50
sjwright wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved DownThemAll, but I'm not sad to see it go because I realised how rarely it was actually needed these days. The downloading interface built into Firefox really is fine 99% of the time. On the rarer occasions that I need to download extremely large files, I send them to an HTTP download client (pyload) that runs directly on my NAS in docker.

I didn't really use the segmented downloads feature. The important part of it for me was the fact that I could download all the files of a particular type and download URL ranges. Stuff like https://example.com/[0-999].png .

You can do that rather easily with curl (comes with Windows nowadays) or wget. Just copy the resource location of the object you want as curl command line string from developer tools (cf https://stackoverflow.com/a/33384016 ) and adjust the range (same syntax as DownThemAll) and download it manually.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#72

Post by deadbunny »

smacktoward wrote: post #9
ravenstine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if someone really needs to use a legacy extension, it's a good thing that it's around, but I'm personally glad that XUL is dead both from a developer standpoint and as a user.

Yeah, projects like this give me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest. NPAPI and XUL were discontinued for really good reasons. Some users say they still want them, but that's because (1) people hate change, even when it's good for them and (2) they don't really appreciate all the security baggage those old APIs were lugging around with them. Projects that assure those users that they can keep on trucking with their old…

And (3) they are still having to support old broken shit at work which requires NPAPI plugins or even shudders java. Not everyone lives in a tech utopia.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#73

Post by Paianni »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #63
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #61

I really think that it is cool that there is a browser that is looking towards maintenance of what we had (XPCOM, NPAPI for old plugins) versus creating something new. Very little of that out there nowadays. It seems like a very conservative project. It is good that we have this choice.

It feels a bit like SeaMonkey, repeated a decade later.

At least Seamonkey was somewhat well maintained for a while, for at least the first eight years of its existence.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#74

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

smacktoward wrote: post #9
ravenstine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if someone really needs to use a legacy extension, it's a good thing that it's around, but I'm personally glad that XUL is dead both from a developer standpoint and as a user.

Yeah, projects like this give me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest. NPAPI and XUL were discontinued for really good reasons. Some users say they still want them, but that's because (1) people hate change, even when it's good for them and (2) they don't really appreciate all the security baggage those old APIs were lugging around with them. Projects that assure those users that they can keep on trucking with their old…

... And (3) we lost perfectly good extensions that we were using.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#75

Post by abacadaba »

bscphil wrote: post #48
ronjouch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm still waiting for a way to hide the tab bar which is a privileged UI feature now" userChrome.css to the rescue: - Tree Style Tab's wiki offers tips to do exactly that: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo... . - Or you can combine the address and tab bar: https://github.com/rstacruz/firefox-stealthfox If none is to your exact taste, https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ may help.

That's the correct solution for now, but we can only hope Mozilla won't disable the ability to use these files. They're disabled by default in FF 69: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefox-69-userchrome-css-... And the key to reenable them has legacy in the name: toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets

Ugh, if you're gonna pull this shit make sidebar tabs first class! They knew this way before they switched, gave some lip service to make sure the most popular extensions would get the support they needed, and now however many releases later i still have to dig through hidden files and hash-named profile directories to make this work right. And still no usable alternative to tab groups last time I checked, which they took out of core with the reasoning that it should be an extension. At least adblock still works.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#76

Post by smacktoward »

mort96 wrote: post #67
smacktoward wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, projects like this give me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest. NPAPI and XUL were discontinued for really good reasons. Some users say they still want them, but that's because (1) people hate change, even when it's good for them and (2) they don't really appreciate all the security baggage those old APIs were lugging around with them. Projects that assure those users that they can keep on trucking with their old…

Saying that "people hate change, even when it's good for them" has to be the most arrogant thing I've read today. If someone is most comfortable using their browser with a certain extension for which there is no good WebExtensions-based alternative, how can you say that forcing them to stop using that extension is "good for them"? Even if there is a suitable alternative, which requires re-learning a bunch of things t…

> If someone is most comfortable using their browser with a certain extension for which there is no good WebExtensions-based alternative, how can you say that forcing them to stop using that extension is "good for them"?

If supporting that extension requires exposing the user to security risks.

The downside of “extensions can do anything!” is that it means extensions can do, well, anything, including things that are hostile to the user’s interests. A more restrictive API means some things extensions used to be able to do aren’t possible anymore, but that’s as true of the bad things as it is of the good. And the bad things were bad enough that it was worth losing the good ones to protect users from them.

Look, I get it, it sucks to lose an extension you like and rely on. I lost a couple of these in the move myself. But the browser’s first responsibility to the user is primum non nocere: “first, do no harm.” And those old APIs, which were naïvely designed twenty years ago in a time when the Internet was far less weaponized than it is today, were exposing an awful lot of people to a great deal of harm.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#77

Post by Fnoord »

godelski wrote: post #32

> Waterfox does not collect ANY telemetry, meaning you don't have to worry about any tracking or usage information about what you do inside YOUR browser. This is woefully uninformed or malicious. There's a lot of tracking that is out of your hands. Such as canvas fingerprinting. Even sending back 0's (like tor does) doesn't prevent fingerprinting. In either case I lost confidence for the browser just by reading what…

> Or they are aware and lying, which begs the question of how we can trust anything else.

It raises the question [...].

I'd also say that while your points are valid, its perhaps a bit too black/white to completely distrust them based on such a statement. On the other hand, who's behind this browser exactly? With Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla is behind it, and development is in the open.

For Mozilla Firefox I can recommend CanvasBlocker [1] to mitigate the technique you described. However, it comes at a price: you'll have a harder time with captcha's.

[1] https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker/

Re: Waterfox Browser

#78

Post by saurik »

smacktoward wrote: post #76
mort96 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that "people hate change, even when it's good for them" has to be the most arrogant thing I've read today. If someone is most comfortable using their browser with a certain extension for which there is no good WebExtensions-based alternative, how can you say that forcing them to stop using that extension is "good for them"? Even if there is a suitable alternative, which requires re-learning a bunch of things t…

> If someone is most comfortable using their browser with a certain extension for which there is no good WebExtensions-based alternative, how can you say that forcing them to stop using that extension is "good for them"? If supporting that extension requires exposing the user to security risks. The downside of “extensions can do anything!” is that it means extensions can do, well, anything , including things that are…

> The downside of “extensions can do anything!” is that it means extensions can do, well, anything, including things that are hostile to the user’s interests.

This is also arrogant: why do you think it is OK to say I can't do something I want to do because it is possible that I use that freedom to do something that harms my own interests? People fundamentally should be allowed to do things that harm them if blocking them from harm restricts their ability to do things they wanted to do; I mean, you aren't even suggesting some kind of user-controlled sandbox: you are advocating for putting the user themselves in a sandbox because you think they are too stupid to handle power.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#79

Post by teh_klev »

godelski wrote: post #32

> Waterfox does not collect ANY telemetry, meaning you don't have to worry about any tracking or usage information about what you do inside YOUR browser. This is woefully uninformed or malicious. There's a lot of tracking that is out of your hands. Such as canvas fingerprinting. Even sending back 0's (like tor does) doesn't prevent fingerprinting. In either case I lost confidence for the browser just by reading what…

I'm sorry, but this is a somewhat uncharitable analysis given the audience this browser is aimed at.

I took their statement in good faith to mean that their software doesn't actively send telemetry to all and sundry without you knowing.

Anyone concerned about privacy would already be aware of tracking that occurs once traffic has left the browser which is clearly difficult to influence.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#80

Post by mort96 »

smacktoward wrote: post #76
mort96 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that "people hate change, even when it's good for them" has to be the most arrogant thing I've read today. If someone is most comfortable using their browser with a certain extension for which there is no good WebExtensions-based alternative, how can you say that forcing them to stop using that extension is "good for them"? Even if there is a suitable alternative, which requires re-learning a bunch of things t…

> If someone is most comfortable using their browser with a certain extension for which there is no good WebExtensions-based alternative, how can you say that forcing them to stop using that extension is "good for them"? If supporting that extension requires exposing the user to security risks. The downside of “extensions can do anything!” is that it means extensions can do, well, anything , including things that are…

I'm not trying to argue that Firefox shouldn't have deprecated XUL or NPAPI. I'm one of the people who didn't depend on any add-ons which aren't available anymore; I just had to update the add-on I wrote to work with the new API, which was easy because it's one of those add-ons which essentially just needs some javascript to be injected into all web pages.

I'm just saying that when Mozilla decided to break the browser for many people, it wasn't "good for" the people who ended up with a browser which doesn't let them do what they want. It's not even "good for" the people who "only" had to invest hours into learning a new workflow with a new set of add-ons. Pretending that it is, is harmful; there are very real drawbacks which have to be weighed up against the advantages of a cleaner API which it's easier to maintain and which might be more secure. I think Mozilla absolutely made the right choice; I just don't think we can focus exclusively on the benefits and pretend that the costs don't exist.

I'm also kind of curious about how the security angle works. Currently, any WebExtension which asks for the proper permission can just read the content of your banking websites if it wants, and send what it finds (your social security number, your password, your bank account numbers, etc) to an attacker. With the new API, you still have to make sure not to install malicious add-ons. How is that different between XUL and WebExtensions?

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