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DownThemAll (2019)

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Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#81

Post by dblohm7 »

eitland wrote: post #58
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was responsible for extension author outreach at Mozilla at the time. The anger was terrible. And justified.

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.

> 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

Why bother with the overhead of a fork? Perhaps a team of volunteers could put together a good enough proposal to be accepted by the WebExtensions team.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#82

Post by billwashere »

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…

Thank you! You made my dial-up connection usable.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#83

Post by errantspark »

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…

Thank you so much for this! It was truly a lifesaver for a young pirate. My dad blocked torrents on our home network and I hadn't yet learned enough linux to crack our neighbors WEP DownThemAll was key to pirating games and movies off 20+ part rapidshares. <3

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#84

Post by anoncow »

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…

Mozilla’s self-sabotaging actions made it seem to me that it was Google’s money talking. That it was a Google funded plan to kill everything that made Firefox great. Really enjoyed Firefox’s heydays and DTA. You guys were a part of saving the internet from IE.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#85

Post by anoncow »

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…

Thank you for making the internet that much more usable. I would install Firefox and DTA on all machines I configured back in the day.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#86

Post by notjulianjaynes »

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 still use it in cases when a page links to a bunch of individual media files I want to download quickly and without making a complete mess of my downloads folder. Rare nowadays, but find it a lot on academic type websites.

Perfect example: https://www.ubu.com/sound/antin.html

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#87

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

eitland wrote: post #71
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I don't see how the maintainers can patch security vulns or add support for newer web features (e.g. CSS variables) when the upstream fork is no longer maintained. They would have to write the fixes themselves, which just does not scale for a project that has 1 or 2 developers working on it part-time.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#88

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

eitland wrote: post #74
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Me too.

Leadership at Mozilla is interested more in social justice, diversity, and equity issues than engineering issues. Don't look for this to come from today's Mozilla.

There is lately a push for privacy issues at Mozilla, which is nice to see.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#89

Post by wackget »

tn123 wrote: post #68
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…

Hi Stefano, Nils here, long time no see. Yeah, it was 2006 when I joined you and Federico, if I remember correctly, while you and Federico started DownThemAll! in 2004. #201 is correct :D 2006 was really a long time ago... DownThemAll! went through a lot of revisions since that time, including the work it took to make it restartless, then make it compatible with "electrolysis" and so on. And in the meantime ensure it…

As a life-long Firefox user who has been increasingly angry with Mozilla's direction for the browser for the past ten years, I honestly don't know how developers like you could put up with it.

Trashing an entire swathe of extensions - hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work - and then making breaking changes in nearly every subsequent version after that... it's precisely why I've never even considered making a browser extension. It would be pure hell.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#90

Post by jonathanlb »

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…

Thank you for helping to make the Internet a delightful experience.
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