221–230 of 267 posts
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Was this shutting down as surprising and out-of-left-field to yourself as someone more closely connected to the project, as it seems to me?
Pretty much. They suddenly took it down for 'maintenance'. The relaunch was delayed. Mozilla released a statement on laying off 250 employees. That's when I figured it wouldn't come back online again.
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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…
Its not just about the code though. Somehow that code needs to keep up with the latest standards and magically be delivered to my client device. To think that a project as complex as the Firefox ecosystem can be maintained with less than 50 engineers doesn't match my experience working on large product teams. Here's my estimate: * A dozen build engineers to support development and builds for X client platforms * A do…
I'm not saying you're wrong. Just that you might not be right.
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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.
"--code-length 16" gives you 137 characters on average.
With base64, you could have the same amount of entropy in 22 characters.
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Magic Wormhole is awesome. I've recently come across croc and like that too: https://github.com/schollz/croc/
Hmmm. Several of the listed feature seem like valuable improvements over Magic Wormhole. That leads me to think that maybe several people should go to the bother of an IETF working group so everybody's platform gets at least a baseline interoperable thing in this class (PAKE driven single file transfer) like with TLS or SecSH, rather than all having their own preferred option that's incompatible.
....oh. I have used it a few times in the past for the classic task "move large file between two computers that are next to each other, how the hell do I do this simply", but yeah, I can't see how that would be cost-effective for Firefox.
Between Unix-based machines on the same network my go-to is netcat. receiver$ nc -l 2000 > file sender$ nc receiver 2000 I usually check MD5 sums when I’m done.
receiver$ nc -l 2000 | zcat > file
sender$ nc receiver 2000 Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost as if Mozilla does not understand how the Internet works!
They also don't understand how to make money. They think eating in the hand of Google is a viable financial strategy.
I really don't understand it. - Content was used to spread malware/illegal content - It was not profitable How are those two things something you find out after the fact? What was the reasoning for launching the product in the first place?
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.
Mozilla Corporation is a for profit subsidiary of the non profit Mozilla Foundation, technically.
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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…
To be honest, I think some form of abuse was bound to happen. Your files are encrypted client-side with JavaScript before uploading, so to the server it's just an opaque blob. Out of curiosity, I did some technical analysis¹ of how your files were being encrypted to see if they were really secure and as a side-effect, also wrote a Go client for it. An interesting property I did discover about the way the encryption k…
You said that "note that URL fragments are never sent to the server", which is true when uploading the file. But when someone is downloading the file, they need to use this full URL with secret key right? By then, the server will get the key and can decrypt the file themselves.
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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%):…
> Recently they shipped Firefox for android that feels like alpha version. It is even unclear why did they ship it, they could have waited. Apart from extensions requiring whitelisting, how is it worse than the old mobile FF? I didn't notice any new bugs and it fixed the issues I had with the address bar hiding being fickle.
This is the most important point by far. First-class add-on support was the one differentiating feature that Firefox for Android had over every other browser on the platform. There are a handful of other browsers with add-ons on Android, like Kiwi, but they aren't nearly as seamless as Firefox was.
I'm using Fennec to write this comment because of Refined HN, I just turned off auto-updates. Not going to switch (at least for now) and I love Firefox but who knows where we'll be in a year? If we're in the same spot then I'll have to switch to Kiwi for these use cases.
I have Nightly installed and it's faster - whitelisted uBlock Origin alone solves a lot of problems in addition to GeckoView's massive speed improvements - but it doesn't fit every use case, so I have to keep Fennec installed.
The devs seem obstinate about ever allowing non-whitelisted add-ons outside of Nightly, which is... odd, it's the one feature they have over the competition. They seem similarly obstinate regarding about:config on stable.
There are other grievances (I actually disagree with the detractors on the default position of the address bar - it's far easier to use on tall devices) but this is the one thing that can't be found elsewhere, and it's gone now.
To reiterate, this feedback comes from a position of love, not hate, and I think most other people here feel the same. The devs are getting a lot of heat on places like reddit though, and the Play Store reviews for another. My limited understanding is that Fennec had to go eventually.