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Firefox 64 Released

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Re: Firefox 64 Released

#501

Post by derefr »

IChrisI wrote: post #433
derefr wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear on why you would want TST as an extension rather than built into the browser chrome. It'd be like wanting the tab bar, or the address bar, to be an extension. Those things belong in the browser chrome; they're what the browser chrome "layer" is for . Just dig into the Firefox code and add TST to the browser itself. (It wouldn't be all that much work; it'd just be 1. adding "parent" and "children" proper…

Given that Tree Style Tab has 7,500+ commits, 10 pull requests (200 closed), almost 400 issues (almost 1,500 closed), and the download is 5.6 megs (2.7 megs zipped), there may be more to it than your two-step solution.

Not necessarily. Sometimes 99% of the work of something is the patches you must make for a constantly-leaking abstraction that you introduced by solving the problem on the wrong layer.

For an example I've experienced personally: LinkedIn provides a data API... for a price. There are entire companies, however, that scrape LinkedIn's data instead of paying that price, and then try to work with the scraped data (which has been "baked down" through all sorts of views, localization, projections, etc.) as if it was the API data.

How much more code do you think such a scraper consists of, compared to an API client?

(The LinkedIn case is even worse because LinkedIn has stateful firewalls that actively thwart scraping, and these scrapers have to have code to trick the firewall, as well.)

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#502

Post by derefr »

michaelmrose wrote: post #387
derefr wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear on why you would want TST as an extension rather than built into the browser chrome. It'd be like wanting the tab bar, or the address bar, to be an extension. Those things belong in the browser chrome; they're what the browser chrome "layer" is for . Just dig into the Firefox code and add TST to the browser itself. (It wouldn't be all that much work; it'd just be 1. adding "parent" and "children" proper…

It's pretty clear that people desire it as an extension because a good and functional extension exists whereas first party support in a browser does not. There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points. An extension exists NOW that people enjoy using. Building THIS into firef…

> unless you suppose that first party developers can think or implement all the good ideas that will ever come about.

Er, no. What I think is that becoming a "first-party developer"—when you already know as much about the internals of Firefox as is required to maintain an extension such as TST—isn't that hard. Firefox is a FOSS project, with internals that are well-maintained and well-documented, and the UI layer is abstracted out to make working with it easier for frontend engineers (which is why, unlike any other browser, you constantly see versions of Firefox with new "experimental UIs.")

> There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points.

I mean, that was my argument, yes. And I don't see how it misses the point, because I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a Firefox user, nor am I coming at this from the perspective of one of the existing TST maintainers. I have no dog in the fight of Firefox's extension system, because—at the earliest point I'd even start using Firefox—it'd already be a “fact of life” that it only has WebExtensions. I'd just have to take it as a given that you can't do what TST does (did) as an extension, and ask the question afresh: how do you implement something like TST?

And the answer is: natively, in the browser chrome, and thankfully so, because that's what TST should have done in the first place and it'll make many parts of the implementation a lot easier. (See my sibling reply.)

Though, also, never mind Firefox. I'm also coming at this from the perspective of a developer who would want to implement TST-like functionality for any FOSS browser. For example, TST-like functionality for Chromium.

The fact that TST already exists for "old Firefox" doesn't really matter. That's a different web-browser than the one we've got now, and no current browser lets you do what TST did at the extension level. I don't care about ideological arguments about whether they should let you; I care about the practical facts of how to go about having TST functionality in the present/future of the browser landscape.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#503

Post by joemi »

Serious question: Is this a special 64-bit edition, or is it just version number 64?

I wondered this yesterday because suffixing with "64" is a common way to denote such a thing. I looked into it and as far as I could tell, no, it's just version 64 of Firefox, so I mentioned that in an attempting-to-be-helpful comment here, but it got downvoted. So now I'm wondering if my research was wrong. Can anyone clarify, please? I'm really confused about this now.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#504

Post by Dylan16807 »

marcolinux wrote: post #498
Dylan16807 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's really easy to modify Firefox to work as you want it to. Apparently support for doing gestures correctly would "break the security model" and the code would be rejected, so I'm going to disagree there.

About gestures: firegesture seems to have just vanished, so Im using easystroke (linux). It works with any app, not just firefox.

But can it save the image under the cursor? I'm currently using foxy gestures despite the brokenness.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#506

Post by ImaCake »

joemi wrote: post #503

Serious question: Is this a special 64-bit edition, or is it just version number 64? I wondered this yesterday because suffixing with "64" is a common way to denote such a thing. I looked into it and as far as I could tell, no, it's just version 64 of Firefox, so I mentioned that in an attempting-to-be-helpful comment here, but it got downvoted. So now I'm wondering if my research was wrong. Can anyone clarify, pleas…

It's a coincidence that the version number is the same as the 64-bit naming convention.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#507

Post by rosser »

acdha wrote: post #296
rosser wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This specific problem is one of those exceptions. This is a known issue, and has been around since at least v57. There are multiple Bugzilla issues on it. The cause is known. It isn't extensions. The fix is just invasive, and apparently ongoing.

That’s true but not what this thread was about. The person I responded to above was making a very broad claim, which is wrong, and jillesvangurp agreed with the observation and added a general point which is correct. There is a specific issue affecting a subset of people with less common configurations but that doesn’t make the sweeping claim true or the recognition that browser performance issues are notoriously poo…

No, it's specifically what this thread is about.

The thread-parent absolutely cast a wider net than warranted, but everyone in this discussion who has experienced this problem knows exactly which one we're talking about, and the rest are all, "I've never seen a problem!" or "It's probably just extensions." Meanwhile, there's reliably a sub-thread somewhere in the discussion on nearly every article about Firefox, about this problem.

I find it profoundly ironic that you comment down-thread that "humans are very prone to confusing things which affect them personally with the general case" about a thing which you haven't personally experienced. You talk as if those of us for whom this is a 100% reproducible problem are an edge case, based AFAICT solely on your own not suffering it, coupled with your (not incorrect) beliefs about people poorly attributing performance problems in general.

That juxtaposition is really galling.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#508

Post by bastawhiz »

zapzupnz wrote: post #371
bastawhiz wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming the only scrollbar is on the far right-hand side of the screen. There are plenty of inline scroll bars and scrollbars in parts of the UI that are not adjacent to "native" chrome. Always using the OS default does not make for a good experience.

I don’t see in anything I wrote any implication that I assumed anything about what scroll bars needed or would be themed. A browser-wide scrollbar styling system, able to be opted into by use of particular CSS, doesn’t imply anything about whether we are talking about just one scroll bar or all of them. I also disagree about native controls not always being the best solution when it comes to scrolling. We all know ho…

Changing the appearance and the behavior of scrollbars (or replacing them entirely as you mention) are very different concerns.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#509

Post by lucideer »

derefr wrote: post #363
lucideer wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big issue here is that Chrome's extension API (which Firefox adopted) doesn't allow this directly, so any extensions trying this need to: 1. rebuild the UI from scratch 2. rebuild basic tab handling behaviour from scratch 3. build tab stacking on top of that 4. (ideally) hide Firefox's existing tab bar And there's two issues with the above steps: (a) 4 hasn't been possible with the new extensions API sofar (it wa…

I'm not clear on why you would want TST as an extension rather than built into the browser chrome. It'd be like wanting the tab bar, or the address bar, to be an extension. Those things belong in the browser chrome; they're what the browser chrome "layer" is for . Just dig into the Firefox code and add TST to the browser itself. (It wouldn't be all that much work; it'd just be 1. adding "parent" and "children" proper…

Not sure why you're being downvoted, I completely agree. This is absolutely something that I think should be in core.

There are some features that are rightly being removed from core in favour of being served by an extension (Container Tabs is a great example—one of my favourite and most-used features personally, but I prefer it in an extension for a few reasons). Better tab management is the opposite: this is something Firefox should work on getting right out of the box.

I get that unless/until it makes it into core, we need good, working, popular extensions to bridge the gap, and perhaps to convince core devs there's an audience, but that's no reason to stop asking for it.

Would also recommend people trial Vivaldi, or even Opera 12 (probably still downloadable from somewhere out there) to try out the general UI concept.

Re: Firefox 64 Released

#510

Post by JohnFen »

robin_reala wrote: post #495
JohnFen wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I’ve no doubt that Chrome is very secure, but I do doubt that Google does much to stop it sending data back to Google controlled domains." Either Chrome is sending data home, or it is "very secure". It can't be both.

Well, Chrome comes from Google, so if you don’t trust Google to store your data I’d recommend not using the browser at all. I certainly don’t (apart from for unlogged-in development testing), but if you do then there shouldn’t be a problem.

I certainly don't trust Google, and I don't use any Google products. But that's a bit beside the point.

What I was trying to get at is that if data is being sent from a product to the manufacturer without your knowledge and consent, then that is a data breach no matter how trustworthy the collector of the data is. Such products cannot reasonably be called "very secure" in a blanket way.

Saying something like "very secure against outside attackers" would be more correct as, to use the Chrome example, Google is an inside attacker.

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