The fact that you need a 3rd party service to send a file between two computers is a failure of the Internet as a whole.
Instead of addressing it, the technical community as a whole just keeps putting bandaids on it.
What happened to Firefox Send?
211–220 of 267 posts
Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We" as in "the people who knows how to use the command line". Unfortunately very few of the people I send files to knows that. There's https://webwormhole.io/ and https://file.pizza/ , but can I know what they really do behind the scenes? Native open-source software for this would be a dream come true. It's 2020 and I still wrestle with sending files between devices. And no, don't take this as a wish for creating ju…
Couldn't someone pretty easily write a native GUI or browser app that wraps Magic Womrhole?
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Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but a team of 50 persons in total to support a project as complex as Firefox is not reasonable speculation at all.
Is it? I feel that people vastly overestimate the actual number of competent programmers (not managers, CxOs, etc) many projects need. Consider that even here on HN we have one person who wrote their own HTML5 renderer, JS-like scripting language, CSS, etc from scratch (csmile). How do you figure that to go from that to what is needed to make a browser that renders sites properly you need to add more than 49 addition…
Sciter doesn't even come close to a fraction of what Gecko or WebKit offers or does, and it still took the author many years to get to that point, so I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. The "JS-like engine" is an excellent example. It turns out, you need an actual JS engine to run real websites, not a "JS-like" engine. The difference between 80% and 100% of that problem is massive, and it also turns out running that fast is a ridiculously complex project on its own. (And, unsurprisingly, the recent Sciter FOSS Kickstarter announced that it would pivot to QuickJS instead. It might be educational to think about why they would do that.)
This doesn't even get into things like translations, technical writing (manuals, help pages, etc), infrastructure needed to actually deliver updates and downloads, collaboration on web standards, etc.
Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#214The fact that you need a 3rd party service to send a file between two computers is a failure of the Internet as a whole. Instead of addressing it, the technical community as a whole just keeps putting bandaids on it.
We have FTP, but are you willing and/or able to manage an FTP server open to the Internet on your personal pc?
I can do it, but FFS I won't.
Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#215This is due to people sharing malware: https://www.techradar.com/news/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send... The content can't be scanned server-side because uploaded files are encrypted
How do related products, like Mega, deal with this?
Require accounts, tracking, no throwaway emails, heavily logged, no anon uploads, fingerprinting clients on register to prevent multiple-account freeloading, making money off plans to have full time abuse team
Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearly all their "side projects" look like greenfields used by the project teams to boost their CVs so they can land better jobs. Those teams know very well that those projects have no use case, but they dont care. Foundation does not care either, since it is busy with increasing own remuneration and politics. Meanwhile their core product lost around 10 percentage points of market share (from 15% marketshare to 5%):…
If you think Firefox has stagnated you clearly aren't aware of the substantial and complex improvements that have been made to the firefox core over the last couple of years: * Faster Quantum Engine (multi-process architecture, etc) * Faster CSS rendering with Stylo * GPU-based rendering with WebRender Any Moz engineer who worked on the above will have boosted their CV's substantially. They don't need to work on tang…
I honestly don't see these as a good sign for a browser as a tool, instead of some software development adventure.
Firefox has a much smaller team than Chrome to begin with, and they can only work on so many things. If they keep spending time in "re-inventing the wheel" (in addition to what you listed, they also revamp their mobile client quite a few times in my recent memory), what left behind is attention to details in UX and UI that users can feel, which is what Firefox was famous for.
I'm not a developer, but I've submitted or engaged in many bug tickets on Bugzilla. What I can tell from my experience is that the response to bugs (critical or not) are getting slower and slower. Not just patches, sometimes you will have tickets that took years to have someone even looking at it. My feeling is most of developers are more likely to spend their time on Mozilla's "big goals" than maintenance.
Just to give one example, there is still no full range video support in Firefox in the era of video game streaming. This alone lets me to have to use Chrome to watch Twitch.
Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic wormhole is your friend
Magic Wormhole is a security disaster. Do not use if you have other options. 1) By default, authentication key has only 16 bits of entropy. (I wish I was making this up…) 2) There's no good UI to make the key stronger: you can either use, say, "--code-length 16", which makes the receiving code ridiculously long, or provide your own code with "--code", in which case it's visible to other local users via ps(1). 3) Betw…
> There's no good UI to make the key stronger: you can either use, say, "--code-length 16", which makes the receiving code ridiculously long
So you want short, high-entropy keys in a restricted alphabet? That might be tough.
Anyway, if it’s not brute-forceable and/because attacks are visible, it’s not really an issue.
Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never had any such problems in my life with FF... not even when opening over a thousand tabs (of course not all active at the same time, lol)... sux they removed actually useful extention format, but otherwise it's great, even if it's only on google's and cloudflare's life support, pretty much...
Tragically I installed it recently on mac and it "froze up" after awhile. Chrome never freezes for me. I like FF but dislike instability. Maybe it's just me...
My experience across several devices is that Firefox's performance is much better on Linux and much worse on macOS. Not sure why.
Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought Mozilla was a non-profit. And couldn't they have added a malware scanner to deal with the problem directly? As for illegal content that's true with any private communication but maybe DCMA or similar got involved. I can accept that fighting for private large file transfer detracts from the main goal.
The files were encrypted, Mozilla didn't have access to the contents.
Which is, of course, exactly why they couldn't use any of the normal methods of dealing with malware.
Technically, there are ways of scanning files without necessarily having access to them [1], but they're not production-ready yet.
[1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/12/08/on-clien...
Re: What happened to Firefox Send?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic Wormhole is a security disaster. Do not use if you have other options. 1) By default, authentication key has only 16 bits of entropy. (I wish I was making this up…) 2) There's no good UI to make the key stronger: you can either use, say, "--code-length 16", which makes the receiving code ridiculously long, or provide your own code with "--code", in which case it's visible to other local users via ps(1). 3) Betw…
> There's no good UI to make the key stronger: you can either use, say, "--code-length 16", which makes the receiving code ridiculously long So you want short, high-entropy keys in a restricted alphabet? That might be tough. Anyway, if it’s not brute-forceable and/because attacks are visible, it’s not really an issue.
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