DownThemAll (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#131

Post by badsectoracula » Fri, Nov 05, 2021, 8:52 AM UTC

maxwelldone wrote: post #105

badsectoracula wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Firefox Developer Edition and make your own addon. It isn't exactly straightforward, especially the "communicate with external software" part (e.g. in Windows you need to put some entry in the registry to let Firefox know what program you need to communicate with) and communication has to be via JSON which in practice means you need to write some sort of proxy app. But it is possible. I have made my own l…

Any specific reason to use FF dev edition? You can use your own addon with regular FF by signing it with web-ext CLI tool.

I'm using Firefox Developer Edition so that i can install my addon without having to bother with signing at all.

I do not like the whole signing thing - just like i do not need to sign any -say- Emacs scripts i write, i shouldn't need to sign any browser scripts. Also last time i checked i need to register with Mozilla for this to work and i especially do not want to have some 3rd party's permission so that i can install my own scripts on my own browser. I might have misunderstood that last part but i didn't see much of a reason to bother when i could jus ignore the entire thing with the Developer Edition.

Finally this seems to need npm, node.js, etc to work and i do not want to bother with these things. All i did to make my addon was to use a text editor, make 2-3 files and done. Well, and use regedit but whatever...

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#132

Post by tn123 » Fri, Nov 05, 2021, 9:13 AM UTC

KwanEsq wrote: post #121

einpoklum wrote: post #112

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…

This isn't actually (entirely) true. One of the core technologies of the old extension model, XBL, has been completely ripped out. XBL-defined elements and XBL overlays were how a lot of the old UI customisations functioned, so even if you enable loading the older code it just flat won't work. Obviously custom JavaScript, as in the example you linked, can still do whatever when loaded without restrictions, but then y…

As I said elsewhere, I reviewed thousands of addons for addons.mozilla.org back in the day. The number of extensions which used XBL directly were just a handful, and usually by the most capable developers. I have no doubt these developers would have adopted to XBL going away, especially as WebComponents is basically a replacement for most of it.

That some of XUL has gone or was moved to HTML doesn't really matter much either. People could have adopted to this as well. Adopting to ongoing changes in Firefox was the bread-and-butter of extension development before WebExtensions (or the add-on SDK/jetpack), a necessary cost of doing business with the reward of very powerful things you could then do in and to the browser. With JetPack and the Addon SDK mozilla tried to provide stable APIs with some success. Adding WebExtensions to the mix would have helped, just to make it easier for Chrome extensions devs to port their stuff. People not in need of anything besides these stable APIs could use these and be done. People who needed more powerful capabilities would have went the other route and tracked Firefox changes, just like they used to for over a decade already anyway.

There were tons of major breaking changes over the years (Firefox 3.5 to 4 was particularly "bad" IIRC), and while those caused some causalities over the years with abandoned extensions not getting updated (tho most popular add-ons affected got new maintainers or were forked), most extensions kept going, adapting as needed.

I am pretty sure that I could pick up my "legacy" DownThemAll! code now and today, spend a month adopting it, and have a working version for Firefox 94+. A month may sound like a lot for some hobby project, but in an alternate reality where "legacy" add-ons still would be supported, I would have spent that month over a duration of the last 5 years.

But in this reality, I have no supported way to actually load such a "legacy" extension. I could add such a capability back to a Firefox fork, but then only I would be able to use it, but nobody else would... Unless I released the fork, and really, I don't have the resources to maintain an entire Firefox public fork.

Re: DownThemAll (2019)

#133

Post by AnnoyedComment » Fri, Nov 05, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

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 creating this! Great work, and saves so much time.