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DownThemAll (2019)

addons.mozilla.org

111–120 of 133 posts

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#111
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

That's funny, my internet provider (funky little wireless provider for people who live on mountains) was blocking torrents which made me gravitate towards rapidshare et similia as well.

Incidentally, I wrote several premium link makers back in the day (including one particular implementation which I tried to sell and pirates leaked - oh well, that's what you get when trying to sell to pirates) and I don't remember rapidshare allowing you to download things directly, unless you were premium.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#112
post #68
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…

> I am still not happy mozilla decided they had to break all extensions

Actually, the weird thing - for those who see FF or TB from the inside - is that the same kind of code we have in regular extensions is still what's used in FF and TB's own chrome (which is in many ways like a bunch of "core extension"). They haven't changed things in a way which makes using extensions impossible, they simply removed the loading mechanisms for them.

Interestingly, for Thunderbird, there's a loophole which most popular extensions use, that allows them to keep loading and running the same kind of extension code they always have:

https://github.com/thundernest/addon-developer-support/tree/...

https://github.com/thundernest/addon-developer-support/issue...

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#113
post #58

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.

SeaMonkey is still around. Though i'm not sure about the capabilities of its addon api.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#114
post #89
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bro…

It's not exactly that they put up with it, but rather that projects under Mozilla - speaking from my TB experience - are ruled with an iron fist: Censorship, internal secret trials for supposed misconduct, summary expulsions etc. I don't know what it's like for core developers, but I suspect they either keep their head down or it gets chopped off (and thus, the developers who didn't put up with it are probably gone).

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#115
post #13

We are still talking about Download Manager in 2021. Something went wrong somewhere.

What's wrong with download managers? Should I only use the one provided by my Web browser? Should I not download the content that I want to access locally or share between devices without being obliged to stream/download it again from a server?

The thing is, a browser is already "managing" downloads. If browsers implemented their internal download management reasonably, people would mostly not need to bother with an extension.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, youtube-dl is dead at the moment for reasons of private life of the maintainer. So people now use a fork called yt-dlp. Which is ironic, because most people moved when google started to use a new harsh speed-limitation.

Does yt-dlp fix the speed limitation problems?

Yup!

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. The first one seems to rely on the fact that aria2 can be remotely controlled. This is good, and in case of aria2 may be even the preferred way of using the combo, but it's not the substitute for the basic launching of one program from the other with some data passing. The second one needs the "native client" which I mentioned above. It uses effing python to pass the link from the browser to the player! It's…

(I'm the author of ff2mpv.) Yeah, it's unfortunate that it needs the Python (or Ruby) script as a shim to MPV. But it's not an inherent requirement: the extension could execute MPV directly if MPV understood the weird length-prefixed JSON protocol that Firefox and Chrome use.

To be clear, I'm not carping at your or other extensions, it's great they still manage achieve their goals.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#118
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I am still not happy mozilla decided they had to break all extensions Actually, the weird thing - for those who see FF or TB from the inside - is that the same kind of code we have in regular extensions is still what's used in FF and TB's own chrome (which is in many ways like a bunch of "core extension"). They haven't changed things in a way which makes using extensions impossible, they simply removed the loading…

So all that was needed, was a hack to load it ?

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#119
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…

I used this extension to download lecture pdfs. Really good stuff. Also the CMS product page looks slick.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am still not happy mozilla decided they had to break all extensions Actually, the weird thing - for those who see FF or TB from the inside - is that the same kind of code we have in regular extensions is still what's used in FF and TB's own chrome (which is in many ways like a bunch of "core extension"). They haven't changed things in a way which makes using extensions impossible, they simply removed the loading…

So all that was needed, was a hack to load it ?

Old extentions had way more access to the internals of the browser. When they disabled that access, they also meant they could change internal interfaces faster without breaking so many extensions. So I think it would be possible to make a small source-level tweak and compile a browser that loads old extentions, the individual extensions might not work anymore.
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