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DownThemAll (2019)

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Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#71

Post by eitland »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #66
eitland wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have knowledge and connections: Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a simple tab strip api to let Tree Style Tabs work properly again, that kind of stuff, then go on to put Mozilla out of business as soon as the economy allows it? I'm only halfway joking here, and only about putting Mozilla out of business.

Either of these may fit the bill: PaleMoon Waterfox Classic

Both are forks of older versions of Firefox, aren't they. This makes it harder to keep them patched I think.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#72

Post by CodeMage »

steffoz wrote: post #40

Wow. Didn't expect this :) I was the author of this tiny extension back in the days (extension #201, I still remember it) together with a friend who recently passed away, Federico Parodi. We hacked the first version when we still didn't know much about JS, but it immediately exploded (500k daily users). Donations were super helpful at that time, being 22 years old with a newborn. After a couple of years (iirc) Nils M…

Thanks for making DTA! I used it a lot back in the day.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#73

Post by tn123 »

pkrumins wrote: post #16
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice to see a finished piece of software.

You mean abandoned software. Software is never finished.

I (Nils) am the maintainer, and I would more characterize it as slumbering, not entirely abandoned or dead. I keep meaning to fix bugs and make new releases, but as we all know the last two years have been a bit crazy ;) I know, that's a lame excuse, and I already planned to do better now that things in the world finally seem to settle down a little, even before seeing this little reminder pop up on HN.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#74

Post by eitland »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #64
eitland wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have knowledge and connections: Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a simple tab strip api to let Tree Style Tabs work properly again, that kind of stuff, then go on to put Mozilla out of business as soon as the economy allows it? I'm only halfway joking here, and only about putting Mozilla out of business.

No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want Tree Style Tabs? Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project. By the way, Nils from DownThemAll is a great guy. He wrote a scathing blog post at the time Mozilla announced dropping support for "legacy" extensions. Wish I could find it.

> No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want Tree Style Tabs?

No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users that have left during the last decade because of being annoyed or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox doesn't offer any experienced direct advantage anymore while Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced direct advantage: that Google web properties are optimized, not sabotaged on it.

> Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project.

Here I should have been more precise: I mean to start with a soft fork. Start by building from ordinary Firefox with just small patches to fix the worst offenders like the tab strip API and restoring the UI.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#75

Post by Qub3d »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #46
jeroenhd wrote: post #7

Woah, this gives me flashbacks. I remember using this to download files from shady websites on the school computers in the Firefox 3.5 era. These days, connections have become so fast that I don't really use a download manager anymore. The last place I download large files from through the browser is Mega, and its encryption is inherently incompatible with this addon.

Download Managers is still being used to this day. I have to use a download manager to download a 250MB file that capped the speed at 50KBps... And this is coming from a well-known but shitty printer company. So it took ages to down that and often it would failed. JDownloader2 took care of that since it can do multiple connection to do a quicker download. If you need a download manager for MEGA, check into JDownloade…

It might be more of an annoyance for the basic "I got a link to a file and I just want to download it" use case, but I use rclone's mega backend: https://rclone.org/mega/

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#76

Post by mamurphy »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #64
eitland wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have knowledge and connections: Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a simple tab strip api to let Tree Style Tabs work properly again, that kind of stuff, then go on to put Mozilla out of business as soon as the economy allows it? I'm only halfway joking here, and only about putting Mozilla out of business.

No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want Tree Style Tabs? Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project. By the way, Nils from DownThemAll is a great guy. He wrote a scathing blog post at the time Mozilla announced dropping support for "legacy" extensions. Wish I could find it.

Nils's blog post[0] that I found linked here[1] from here[2]. I found that last link from the google search (Nils Maier blog post Firefox extension).

[0]https://www.downthemall.org/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/

[1]https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

[2]https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-changes-firefox-apis-d...

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#77

Post by Xamayon »

tn123 wrote: post #70
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for making this! I too used it back in the day. I thought the project died with WebExtensions, good to hear it's back.

I (Nils) was the maintainer of it for many years at the point already, and I was genuinely considering to let it die for quite a while. I was furious at what mozilla did to the loyal and active extension community and especially on how they did it - essentially by decree without community interaction at all. I was part of the mozilla volunteer army, not just with DownThemAll! and a few other more minor extensions, bu…

I felt the same way about how they killed off the old extensions. It took a lot of work to rewrite my (much smaller) Image Search Options extension, and lots of once key features had to be removed... I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast. The new extension works, but it's a shadow of its former self. Although I did also port it to chrome (why not, right?) I wound up not publishing the full version. For better or worse, I still feel Firefox is the best browser. Its a small measure, but if my extension has helped keep even a few users, I count that as a win.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#78

Post by tn123 »

Xamayon wrote: post #77
tn123 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (Nils) was the maintainer of it for many years at the point already, and I was genuinely considering to let it die for quite a while. I was furious at what mozilla did to the loyal and active extension community and especially on how they did it - essentially by decree without community interaction at all. I was part of the mozilla volunteer army, not just with DownThemAll! and a few other more minor extensions, bu…

I felt the same way about how they killed off the old extensions. It took a lot of work to rewrite my (much smaller) Image Search Options extension, and lots of once key features had to be removed... I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast. The new extension works, but it's a shadow of its former self. Although I did also port…

>I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast.

Yeah, unless you actually write the code, there is no way. And writing code for the mozilla code base can be quite intimidating with their mix of C++ and js and XPCOM and not-XPCOM and webidl, etc. I once submitted a patch (unrelated to my extensions) that bounced from the who-is-who of mozilla rockstar devs at the time, and nobody wanted to really even look it because it was changing something so deep within the XPCOM-Javascript bridge and nobody really remembered how it even worked. I finally got my r+ from some brave soul who just said "I don't really know the code it touches either, but somebody has to do the review".

Even if you do the work, it can be an uphill battle to get code in, especially if you're trying to add new features and not just fix existing bugs.

I spoke to people within mozilla back in the day - I was part of the community after all and knew a lot of folks - and they weren't exactly happy, but weren't in a position to make things better, either.

DownThemAll! was big enough that they eventually "officially" reached out and ask me what I need, and then essentially said they couldn't really do any of it, "sorry" and they know "that sucks" (refreshingly honest, at least, but I wasn't talking to upper management but a developer-turned-developer-relations). The person who contacted me, one could tell, was given a mission to appease developers by showing mozilla cared, but wasn't actually provided any resources to really help or support people. All that person could do was to apologize and suggest to read the docs and read the docs on how to propose and implement new APIs - but at the time I had already proposed some new APIs that in my opinion would not just have benefited DownThemAll! but all kinds of add-ons dealing with downloads, and was struck down as "not generally useful to a lot of add-ons, sorry, we do not want to maintain such an API" already.

What I said almost 5 years ago still is true in that regard: they tried to a certain degree to accommodate some of the really popular add-ons, and with some success too, and the smaller add-ons were left in the dust. Not because of ill-will of mozilla, but simply because they lacked the resources to do anything more.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#79

Post by m4rtink »

Xamayon wrote: post #77
tn123 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (Nils) was the maintainer of it for many years at the point already, and I was genuinely considering to let it die for quite a while. I was furious at what mozilla did to the loyal and active extension community and especially on how they did it - essentially by decree without community interaction at all. I was part of the mozilla volunteer army, not just with DownThemAll! and a few other more minor extensions, bu…

I felt the same way about how they killed off the old extensions. It took a lot of work to rewrite my (much smaller) Image Search Options extension, and lots of once key features had to be removed... I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast. The new extension works, but it's a shadow of its former self. Although I did also port…

The mobile Firefox situation is even bigger mess - there used to be a mozikka maintained Firefox build based on older Firefox cidebase that supported quite many Firefox extensions. Then last summer Mozilla decided to update the codebase and rewrite the GUI on Android. End result ? A hand picked list of essential extensions (Ublock Origin basically and little else) that are available that hardly gets ever extended.

You can add arbitrary exebsions to the android Firefix nightly build, but it involves a lot of unnecessary steps, such as custom extension list creation, id passing and other bullshit.

End result is that the best bet for using extensions on Android is actually Chrome extensions & the Yandex browser of all things, which will just install anything from the Chrome web store (and it often will even work).

Oh how low we have gone...

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#80

Post by rzzzt »

jeroenhd wrote: post #7

Woah, this gives me flashbacks. I remember using this to download files from shady websites on the school computers in the Firefox 3.5 era. These days, connections have become so fast that I don't really use a download manager anymore. The last place I download large files from through the browser is Mega, and its encryption is inherently incompatible with this addon.

I took GetBot for a spin recently from my downloaded apps archive, but unfortunately it doesn't handle files above 2GB very well -- the remaining bytes/time counter goes nuts. Too bad, I liked its clipboard support where you could also paste a list of URLs it needs to go through.
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