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Mozilla To Ditch Firefox Extensions?
An anonymous reader writes "Although some have raised concerns about how sane switching to Jetpack is, it seems that Mozilla's new gadget is bound to replace the powerful extension mechanism we know. Maybe Mozilla wants to replace all the great add-ons we use daily with gadgets that add an entry to the Tools menu, or maybe they just want to draw thousands of inexperienced developers into putting together a bunch of HTML and CSS that won't integrate in the UI. It seems to me that in light of recent decisions we've discussed before, Mozilla isn't going in the right direction. What do you think ?"
Seriously. Provide a link to the main stori(es) and that's about it. All this extra stuff is simply extraneous. How can we RTFA if we don't know which is the real frikken article?
chrome here i come
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Removing extensions from Firefox is like removing the guns from a tank.
I never did think Mozilla was headed in the right direction. I've long shunned their browsers because, to me, they were bloatware, overly complex and bug-prone and not even offering the features I'd come to love in the competition.
But that didn't prevent Mozilla from making a very successful browser.
So, if now I say that I don't think they are headed in the right direction, what does that really tell anyone? Obviously, their success depends on other things than what I think about it. I wish them all the best, I hope they'll enjoy working on their products, and we'll see how they pan out in practice.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's rabblerousing. Slashdot, news for the hard of thinking.
Editors, please try to give these stories at least a pretense of fairness. Unless you need this for your application to work at Fox News.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
OMG programming is HARD! We need to reduce features and make it simpler so any moron can do it!!!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Or may be they are going in the right direction. If companies such as google, litl webbook and projects such as bespin are thinking along the lines of creating a GUI/web platform its possible that their's a new direction that computing is headed. One where older heads like us may not necessarily think to go.There are many parallels in computing (PC, Minicomputer, Internet) Not saying the above is so (I find the above net GUI idea restrictive), it just pays to think about possibilities, such as a more robust GUI without the need for adding complex libraries.
...or maybe they just want to draw thousands of inexperienced developers into putting together a bunch of HTML and CSS that won't integrate in the UI...
And this is different than the current system how? Sure, there are TONS of great add-ons/plug-ins/whatever-they-are-called for FF, but honestly, the entry bar is pretty low, and for as many great ones there are, there are two crappy pieces of shit.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I think that if you want to spread FUD you should make sure that you don't link to a web page that makes this statement in the second paragraph Mr. Billmer.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
...or maybe they just want to draw thousands of inexperienced developers into putting together a bunch of HTML and CSS that won't integrate in the UI...
Just change the scripting engine to PHP... IT'S A JOKE...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Extensions and the customization they provide is THE reason I use Firefox. If they are so foolish as to eliminate this capability, they're going to lose a lot of users. If this happens, I won't upgrade for as long as I can, and when I'm eventually forced to switch, I'll find a browser that supports allowing me to customize it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the OSS community forks the project over this.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Right now, it looks like AdBlock, Flashblock, CustomizeGoogle, and my own AdRater couldn't be implemented under JetPack. The Jetpack API documentation has a section "Content - Methods for interacting with web pages. That's the mechanism anything that deals with ads needs. That leads to "Page modifications", which leads to This documentation is under development. Please see the page modifications API proposal for now."
That leads to Jetpack Extension Proposal #17 - Page Mods, which discusses how to implement Greasemonkey-like functionality using Jetpack. Current status is "Implementing (since May 27, 2009)".
So the functionality needed for AdBlock, etc. is vaporware. It's not even clear that, if implemented, the proposed mechanism would support AdBlock. The author of Adblock Plus wrote last month "Jetpack has to support Adblock Plus, not the other way around. As it is now, Jetpack isn't suitable for complicated extensions."
It's significant that Mozilla gave priority to implementing "themes" and such, which are needed for vendor-branded browsers, while putting off implementation of user-oriented features like ad blocking. Is this a back-door effort to get ad-blocking out of Firefox?
Chrome extensions are entirely HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and so are many Chrome pages (the New Tab Page, the Downloads Tab, etc). I'd tag this badsummary, because it's not the idea of Jetpack that's the problem here, it's the implementation. From the first article, which is the only one that seems to be seriously concerned:
I like its power, I dislike its syntax. I _really_ dislike its syntax.... images are inline as data URLs because Jetpacks misses offline support and packaging; the HTML element inserted into the statusbar has to be precisely positioned and that will suck depending on the preferred user's font size;
Contrast to Chrome's extension API, which is fairly clean where it isn't strictly what's already available to any webpage. In particular, those two issues are addressed: Chrome extensions are packaged (more or less) as a cryptographically signed zipfile, so you can have separate images, scripts, etc; there are currently very well-defined ways to add a button either to the URL bar or to the browser itself, and when toolstrips were available (I don't think they are anymore), they were exposed as HTML pages with most of the work done for you in predefined CSS, so no absolute positioning (at least not that you have to do yourself).
integration with native or native-alike (hear xul) UI and cross-platform issues, a major concern
Basically, the article seems to be assuming there are (and will always be) advantages to XUL. To me, the answer to this is not to expose XUL, but to fix/extend the HTML used. In a way, I think Chrome proves that users really don't care that much about the UI looking and feeling "native", but care much more about it being themable.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Without Firefox folks doing something about these leaks, I will continue to bash their otherwise good product.
Heck, leaving Firefox running overnight on Windows XP means a reboot for the computer since it becomes unusable after Firefox has consumed megabytes of memory! This is insane.
May be the upcoming 4.x release series will have all the goodies one can be proud of. Time will tell.
"Integrating with the UI"? So whatever happen to XUL
I actually sometimes find myself preferring Safari for actual web-browsing... especially for Slashdot! Firefox seems to slow down when loading long discussion pages, whereas Safari is quite fast. But extensions are Firefox's killer feature. AdBlock Plus, but also Zotero (citation management, only available for Firefox), Greasemonkey + DownloadThemAll... without the extensions, there's little that would make me prefer Firefox to Safari.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
When Firefox was first released, it was a breath of fresh air -- a fast, effective browser that discarded the bloat which plagued Seamonkey.
Firefox laid the groundwork that has brought us to the current state of browsers... there's a competitive market, except in the business space, where the inability to manage browser settings has made the enterprise the last refuge for Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the project doesn't have the desire to expand its impact further -- they refuse to accept bug reports or feature requests regarding issues that are critical to business users, and shout you down when you try to complain.
So you have this great browser, but you can't script the install, can't manage update distribution (ie. autoupdate is not appropriate in many use cases), and manage config in a sane way.
Now instead of fixing those issues, they are "fixing" something that isn't broken -- the extension system that makes Firefox so cool for so many people!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I have never liked the Firefox design, and I have never trusted the XPI installer mechanism. Switching to an extension mechanism that doesn't open up the whole performance and security bag of worms the Firefox extensions do would be worth trying.
Extensions - specifically AdBlock Plus and LiveHTTPHeaders - are the only reason I use Firefox over Chrome. If those extensions go away I'll have no reason to continue using Firefox over Chrome, which is insanely fast by comparison.
rooooar
I checked out the featured "jetpack image editor" and how EASY it is to write such a complicated feature in JUST 14 lines.
... } )
Gluing in some one elses code is not coding: $.get("http://developer.pixlr.com/_script/pixlr_minified.js", function(js){
In fact, how many levels of derivation could a popular feature possibly use, my plugin references yours, references a library, that includes another external, etc.. all because some kiddies liked another kiddies script ad infinitum.
How many dependencies on servers having uptime, and being secure? Imagine a world of plug-ins that rerference each other so heavily that a cat on a certain keyboard could crash everyones extensions.
One area where FireFox (or even IE) is better than Chrome is in the tab handling.
Chrome should ALWAYS open up new tabs adjacent to the source tab, but it doesn't! At least as of recent versions I've got (maybe they've fixed it by now).
Chrome's tab handling is terrible for me. If I'm on tab "A" and open up a new tab with "middle click", it opens up tab "B" adjacent to "A", which is good BUT the next new tab is adjacent to "B", not "A"! And the next is adjacent to "C".
This sucks in a major way.
Why? Because if I open up a few new tabs from various tabs, and I ask people to predict where the next new tab is going to appear, most of them CANNOT predict where it will appear. Those that do will need to keep in their heads the history of the tabs. So it is not much better than random in practice.
Where the latest new tab appears is important. It's the one you finally decide you want to read NOW - the rest you didn't mind reading later.
I agree that Firefox is slow. It takes ages to launch - it's a badly designed browser that's been patched up over the years to be better.
How many dependencies on servers having uptime, and being secure? Imagine a world of plug-ins that rerference each other so heavily that a cat on a certain keyboard could crash everyones extensions.
"Dr. Schroedinger, the veterinarian is on line one. He said something about your cat, but then my computer locked up."
John
...and I must say that for the last few months I've been using daily builds of Chromium for linux and the beta for Windows simply so that I could use extensions. However, most of the extensions are just horribly written or simply do not work or work as well as their FF counterparts. Not to mention that I believe that some functionality provided by FF extensions as they are now could NEVER be implemented in a simpler extension framework if it's anything like Chrome's. (The only Chromium extension that is even close to it's FF counterpart's functionality are the session managers, which I use "fresh start" ATM as most of the others(forgotten which now) were broken in various ways, as are some of the ad "block" extensions, none of which work as well as Ad Block+ and noscript anyways.)
As far as FF extensions, I primarily install Ad Block+, noscript, session manager, tabmixplus, and greasemonkey which NOTHING similar exists for Chrome. The Chrome adblocks merely hid display elements, and so far I've turned up nothing like noscript for it. I suppose that you could argue that greasemonkey is sort of builtin already as the default is js scripting, but I must admit that I really don't use much greasemonkey functionality any longer and have pretty well forgotten all of it's nifty features.
Speed:
Seemed like last Fall that chrome(beta)/chromium felt faster than FF AND had some useful extensions.however I've found performance problems popping up with the Windows beta of Chrome while the linux version daily builds still seems as quick as ever with approximately the same extension set and environment(open tabs, etc.). In fact performance seems to have degraded enough that I'm actively considering going to daily builds for the Windows version if not back to FF primarily as Chrome beta is significantly slower than FF.
MSNBC and Fox News are equally biased for instance
If you think that MSNBC, or any other major news station, puts out a tenth of the lies that Fox News pumps out constantly, you're biased and deluded yourself.
While I share the general dislike for Microsoft, it doesn't change that /. is very biased against Microsoft at the same time.
Did your post actually have some information while still being developed in your brain, and only became content-free once typed in? The unquoted part has no content either, first complaining that releasing document is treated as evil, then admitting it was only released under duress. But it is the quoted sentence that really shines with its meaninglessness.
Most people share the general dislike of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Benedict Arnold, and Captain Hook. That doesn't make it worth commenting on as if all bias is politically incorrect.
Just because something is disliked doesn't make it bias.
Infuriate left and right
How much machine language programming do you do? Assembler? Do you use system calls for file I/O, do you roll your own TCP/IP protocol because standards are for wimps and you can get more speed without all that packet overhead? I think not. I think you are a wannabe elite.
I for one welcome our new programming partners, the unwashed masses, the hoi poloi. The more people write their own programs for their own needs, the more time I can spend on writing more challenging programs that rise to the top.
Sounds to me like you are not particularly skilled, that you want to feel elite, and it is easier for you to do so by keeping others out of your priesthood than by becoming better.
Infuriate left and right
Because that is the only point over using any other browser out there.
Firefox is not exactly fast or lightweight, you know. And without extensions it can’t hold a candle to Opera.
If extensions are going to get replaced, it will be by something that is so equal in what it offers, that it most likely still will be called extensions.
If they really kill their reason of existence off, I’ll switch over to Opera in the blink of an eye. The Opera guys never disappointed me, and always were pioneers.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
For me , personally, virtually every change since FF2.0 has been for the worse; the gui has gotten harder to use, simple things i need are hidden, extensions are constantly breaking....
What has surprised me is that a group of devs hasn't forked to keep FF2 and all that was great in it, and try to add things that are really neat: how about a powerful business contacts manager, a la windows BCM, that is native in side FF
How about video that actually works ? (vlc has never worked well for me)
how about serious privacy (its clear 'they" are getting new tricks faster then ff can stop them)
how about a decent calendar - the thunderbird type calendars suck .....
instead we get all sorts of useless tinkering with the gui..
Removing extensions from Firefox is like replacing the wheels of a car with a single wheel in the middle, then hoping it doesn't tip over.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
if so, how many people still read keith laumer, and get the ref ?
Mozilla isn't ditching anything.
Your favorite extension isn't going away.
The developers are working on building a new platform for safer, faster, and easier to upgrade extensions.
If that system gets powerful enough to do what the current system does, with the added benefits of being safer, faster, and easier to update, then it should replace the old system.
Right now the new system cannot do what the old system does so it isn't ready to replace it. It's that simple.
Have anything to back this up, or are you just talking out of your ass?
There's this new thing called The Google. It works really well. You just type something like "Gates.Foundation drug patents" and it lets you start to find out things for yourself. In this case, the first few links will lead you to find out about UNTIAID. Basically, the story goes like this. During the 1990s, developing nations (especially India and Brazil) began to amass the manufacturing capability and expertise to produce advanced pharmaceuticals for minute fractions of the wholesale cost of those drugs on the world marketplace, the price being set by the IP holders in Western countries who enjoyed the political access necessary to keep extending patent lifetimes and extensions almost indefinitely. At the start of the Noughties, a crisis was looming when several companies, mainly Indian, began retailing vast quantities of anti-HIV/malaria/TB drugs to poorer countries (mostly African) at costs way below what Western companies were prepared to sell at. For a while it looked as if literally half the world was ready to secede from the international patent system in an effort to provide medication for as many of their sick populations as possible. After several rounds of negotiation, within which the Gates and Clinton foundations were major players, a compromise was established. Rich Western countries, NGOs, and foundations made it clear that their aid money was contingent on poorer countries recognising Western patents and refusing to buy from "rogue" companies or countries. In return, their access to grant/loan/development monies was assured, and several cartels and exchanges established whereby these countries could purchase Western patent-protected medications or the right to produce such medications at "below market" costs (but still literally several times the cost of producing such medications outside the patent system). UNITAID is one of these exchanges. The Gates foundation is one of the major players in UNITAID, and its lobbying recently has concentrated on maintaining relatively high remuneration fees to the Western IP holders, thereby maintaining relatively high costs for the drugs. For the poorer countries, it's a classic Faustian bargain: they get grant money, but they have to spend much of this money buying higher-priced drugs. Given the public-private partnerships and funding/tax arrangements, it's a classic example of corporate welfare where grant money nominally allocated to developing countries is funnelled back to Western IP holders, either as actual cash or as tax deferments.
Da Blog
mozilla has been going in the wrong direction since they sold their sole to AOL .Use Opera .
Mozilla's UI team has a ten year history of cluelessly grandiose blunders - so if it seems like they're doing the wrong thing, they probably are.
Look, to be honest, I don't use FireFox because it is awesome, although it is pretty awesome. I use FireFox because it has AdBlock, which is the killer app for websites. Without AdBlock, the internet becomes immediately useless, with too much noise-to-signal. Other browsers have less compelling ad-blocking extensions; not compelling enough to use. My opinion of this "JetPack" thing will rise or fall with the success of AdBlock.
They are stupid morons, Firefox is only popular because of the extensions it has accumalted and third party developers have worked on improving, its really only been since last year that its come into being the best, fuck with that, and Mozilla can fuck off back to insignificant existence.
Without the powerful extensibility Firefox has to allow others to sort out and fix the defaulty shit provided, it really has nothing to offer. And looking at future Firefox jetpack (more like shitpack) same with shity personas.. its just pathetic theming for retards, when what they should have done was improved Firefox ability to change full theme styles without a fucking RESTART! As for the new Firefox 4.0 gui and layout retardation.. I think it says one thing.. Mozilla are infested with fucking retards. Where are the real feature improvements!?!?? tab splitting dual screen browsing modes, and other power features.. not dumb down retard shit and removing features! They FUCKING REMOVE features like the [element properties] dialog, what fucking morons are working at Mozilla!?!?!
The majority of extensions are the only reason I use Firefox over another browser, some of them are bare essentials, without them I wouldn't even touch shitfox:
Enabled Extensions: [81]
* Adblock Plus 1.1.3
* Add to Search Bar 1.8
* All-in-One Sidebar 0.7.10
* Auto Close Folder In Library 1.0
* Auto Context 1.5.0.3
* AutoAuth 1.3
* Autoclose Bookmark&History Folders 0.5.6.3
* BetterCache 1.24
* BetterPrivacy 1.45
* BlockSite 0.7.1
* Bookmark Previews 0.8.0
* CacheViewer 0.6.2
* CheckPlaces 1.6.4
* Clear Form History 0.2
* Console 0.5
* Cookie Whitelist, With Buttons 1.0.3
* CookieCuller 1.4
* CookiePie 1.0.4
* CuteMenus Classic 0.7.5
* DOM Inspector 2.0.4
* Download Manager Tweak 0.9.0beta
* DownloadHelper 4.6.5
* Easy DragToGo 1.1.2.4
* Favicon Picker 3 0.5
* FfChrome 1.7
* Find Toolbar Tweaks 2.1.0
* FindList 0.8
* Firebug 1.5.0b9
* Firefox Throttle 1.1
* FireGestures 1.5.5.1
* Firesizer 1.0
* Fission 1.0.9
* FlashGot 1.2.1.09
* FlickrFox 1.3.0
* Form History Control 1.1.4
* Get File 1.3.1
* Get Mail Plus 3.2
* Glazoom (formerly known as Zoom It!) 0.4
* Greasefire 1.0.4
* Greasemonkey 0.8.20091209.4
* gui:config 0.4.4
* HttpFox 0.8.4
* Image Zoom 0.4.2
* IMDb Preview 0.6
* InspectorWidget 2.11.20090429
* Intelligent Middle Clickums 0.0.1
* JSView 2.0.5
* keyconfig 20080929
* Lazarus: Form Recovery 2.0.5
* Link And Forminfo 1.0.6
*
the people are still getting the drugs they need
Many hundreds millions of people are getting necessary drugs. But many hundreds of millions are not. Transporting drugs at cartel prices from developed nations or even manufacturing them under licence has the effect, still, of restricting access to those drugs for poorer at literally orders of magnitude less cost, and also retarding the development of manufacturing and research industries within developing countries dedicated to producing their own drugs at fractional cost. Sometimes "aid" has the effect of eliminating development, a pattern we've seen again and again enacted in post-colonial economic systems.
grant money freely given to them
Grant money given along with conditions that it be spent within certain cartels with pricing set not by market forces but by manufacturers' lobbies is not "money freely given". Especially because the manufacturers get a double benefit: sales proceeds and tax credits because of their "charity" in selling their drugs "below cost" (that is, below the high cost they claimed they could seel these drugs for, whereas in reality their sales at these prices in developing countries would have been close to zero).
As for "mass murderer", well, that wa snot my choice of phrase. It's a matter of perspective. In a couple of hundred years, when people are writing the history of late capitalism, they will add up the death toll, the literally billions of people who were allowed to die over a century or so because of the need to maintain the IP cartel system. Whether they will call that "mass murder" or "acceptable outcomes" depends on what economic system occupies the greatest mindshare in the most historians, and how out contingent, transient stage of late capitalism is viewed by them.
In an analogous system, think of the hundreds of millions who perished because of slavery, that is, the labor-intensive practices of early capitalism designed to produce agricultural commodities within monocultures at low cost. At the time, even though many agitated against it, the slavery system was regarded for generations as a necessary evil. With time, as the utilisation of fossil fuels and the employment of non-slaved masses within the system industrialisation replaced slave labor, the slave system lost mindshare. It began to be seen not as something desirable and even ordained by God, but as an unnecessary evil. For the most part, its economic output was replaced by in-situ colonialism, a system whereby the laboring masses were forcibly employed within the borders of coutnries rather than being transported en masse to remote destinations. In time, that economic system also lost relevance and was supplanted by more efficient modes of production and consumption.
Regimes change. Until it had developed sufficiently and established its own R&D and scientific regimes, the USA was one of the world's largest "pirate" nations. Right up until the start of the 20th century it was notorious for ignoring and refusing to recognise the IP and copyright systems of the "established" economic empires, allowing its industries to "steal" what they needed to ramp up their manufacturing. The more expensive products from the empires rarely had much chance of succeeding in the USA, unless they either sold at radically low cost or sub-contracted out their manufacturer at very unfavourable terms to native USA companies. Now that the USA has a huge stake in the current economic system, it effectively erects barriers to entry that prevent other emerging economies from doing what it itself did to emerge from backwater underdevelopment and a permanent existence as a low-margin commodities producer.
Da Blog
If they do get rid of all the current extensions for the feature releases of Firefox I will not upgrade..... I will be 3.5.7 for life.
During the 1990s, developing nations began to amass the manufacturing capability and expertise to produce advanced pharmaceuticals for minute fractions of the wholesale cost of those drugs on the world marketplace, the price being set by the IP holders in Western countries who enjoyed the political access necessary to keep extending patent lifetimes and extensions almost indefinitely.
Were these manufacturers producing new drugs or generic versions of the western Big Pharm product?
There is a difference - and it is a difference that matters.
Big Pharm has the money to research and develop new drugs.
It has the resources - though perhaps not always the will - to test its new products in meaningful and ethical ways.
There is a western market for the AIDS drug or vaccine.
But it does not take the same shape, it is not as large or as urgent as what is needed in Africa.
There are other diseases of course which are almost entirely third-world - and Big Pharm is not a charity.
If you want - if you need - its participation, you have to offer incentives. You have to help pay the bills.
Any open source software project has to accept third party plugins, extensions, and add-ons or else it isn't considered to be open enough to really matter. I love Adblock and NoScript and if Mozilla shuts them out I will move to Chrome or Opera.
Mozilla keep the extensions feature, but just design your own extensions and come up with a way to blacklist the bad extensions that are malware based or Microsoft's .Net Helper crap which you really should blacklist and then disable and block because it is really fricken annoying. Have the users use a feedback system to rate how annoying an extension is so they can be warned not to install them or risk security or being annoyed. I'd rate the Microsoft .Net extension as being annoying to the level of 11 out of 10, none higher than that.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Or exercise some good ol' open source muscle and fork it.
Mozilla is backed by Big Daddy Google.
That buys a lot of muscle. Do you think you can cut it?
A footnote in Mozilla's 2006 financial report states "Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006, however Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and has now renewed the contract through 2011. Approximately 85% of Mozilla's revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract, this equates to approximately US$56.8 million. Mozilla Foundation
Our revenue and expenses are consistent with 2007, showing steady growth. Mozilla's consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2008 were $78.6 million, up approximately 5% from 2007 reported revenues of $75.1 million. The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others. State of Mozilla and 2008 Financial Statements
I'm thinking it's about time for a Firefox fork...
Or, if not a Firefox fork, then maybe picking up a browser based on the WebKit engine (pick one). Seriously, aside from Extensions, what does Firefox have over the other browsers right now? The only other thing I can think of is its standards compliance. It's got these things going against it:
Bloated, lots of memory use
no internal resource (extensions, etc.) memory management
No multiprocess ability
Slow user interface
Archaic code base
Hell, even Microsoft is rumored to be working on a replacement for Internet Explorer due to architectural issues. I'm not saying the gecko engine and/or Firefox can't be fixed, but from history, I think it's pretty safe to say that Mozilla won't be able to accompish what needs to be done. Just look how long it took them to get from 3.0 to 3.5, and how relatively marginal the improvements were (though they were improvements).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Sorry Mr. Billmer, your misdirection won't work, and Slashdot is not an "Anti-MS" site. It is a site which is populated with lots of people who understand technology and won't buy in to ridiculous claims, so I can see how you would confuse the two. (And as you well know there are quite a few M$ schills here on Slashdot.)
Even you have to have read your own companies internal memos, Stevo. M$ is absolutely trying to fight Open Source in forums and in every way possible, even though they cannot possibly win because we are much smarter than you, and nothing is going to change that.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Well yeah, isn't that the point. Isn't the whole concept underlying the internet is that anyone can get on and anyone can contribute. Isn't this shared experience about offering people knowledge, helping them learn a new skill, try things out and possibly contribute what they've learned for other people to use and learn from. Then we as a collective get to rate, tag, comment, sort, and share those bits of knowledge allowing the cream to float to the top and the less useful bits fade into obscurity.
And let's give up on the elitist snobbery thinking that more "advanced" programming languages create a barrier for morons. There are plenty of morons programming in Java, .Net, C, C++ and other languages. Take a look at TheDailyWTF or talk to any programmer in the business and they can point out moron after moron developing absolutely shit products. Just because it's harder to do doesn't stop people. So it's JavaScript, HTML and CSS, big deal. I've found that the biggest reason programmers don't want to switch over isn't because of limitations in the technologies, but because it's outside of their comfort level and they want to stick with [insert favorite programming language here]. Done right, the API can provide hooks into more robust features in the OS and Browser callable from JavaScript. Plus with HTML5, newer improvements in JS, and CSS, plus Canvas we should see a boon in RIAs and widgets built off of just JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
I don't think this will happen, they are not going to destroy the firefox product in a crowded market with opera,google,ms and others. They would quickly drop in user share - it would be browser suicide
Extensions are the ONLY reason I use firefox. We will have to fork if they do something this stupid. We have a RATING SYSTEM now - problem is that we don't have feedback about the impact of add-ons so users can rate up or down based on that information.
A COMPROMISE would be simply to have 2 classes of extension. Jetpack add-ons would be something people could filter out when looking for add-ons.
SOME work better as HTML while others are impossible.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I've tried both Midori and Arora and I loved using them both until they decided to crash and burn with an hour of (my) normal (ab)usage. Firefox doesn't crash, and it hasn't for many versions. Webkit may rule the web some day, but that day won't come until browsers based upon it stop crashing all day long.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Not working so well with China, is it.
The relative weakness of China over the past century is a very late, very transient and almost completely ahistorical situation. In a fashion similar to only a handful of other such periods in history, China's political and economic system entered into a period of systemic crisis during the early-to-middle 19th century, which culminated in the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), a Christian fundamentalist uprising that, together with its successor rebellions triggered by the general chaos, constitutes in terms of lives lost and the proportional erasure of economic production the single most destructive period of war of that century, and possibly in known history (excepting, of course, the European introduction of plagues and invasion to the world's richest, largest cities in the Americas during the 15th and 16th centuries).
China's misfortune during that period, as distinct from other such periods, was that new travel and transport technology had enabled foreign powers to establish themselves within the political and economic centres of a weakened and siunited China and establish disruptive economic regimes of their own. Coupled with that centuries' invention of new pharmaceutical techniques capable of manufacturing and delivering vast quantities of highly addictive and lucrative opiates, China's position as a Great Power declined significantly from its historical level. What we are seeing now in its re-emergence is not so much a novel emergence of a new Power, but the restoration of one of the oldest continuity Powers to a position more closely approximating normality.
Da Blog
if firefox get rid of addon capability, then they will shoot themselves in the foot. It's the ONLY reason why i use it as my browser. If they did so, I would migrate to either opera or chrome since theyre faster. To remove add-ons would be a total illogical decision
The reason I'm using Firefox is the because the extensions are so much better than on any other browser. AdBlock, FlashBlock, DownloadStatusbar, RefControl, NoScript. You can half-ass these on other browsers like Chrome or Opera, and I've done it, but in the end the ease and simplicity of it wins out, especially when I have to explain to other people how to do it and the first thing you do on a new machine is install a decent browser and extensions. I do not want to have to locate the profile directory and hand edit or copy things on every machine, much less have to explain to my parents how to do this.
If you cripple this to the level of Opera UserJS, which is fairly powerful but also a pain in the butt, then I have no reason not to move to Opera or Chrome.
Now if they can somehow make this transition while preserving the addon manager functionality and allowing actual browser extensions like DownloadStatusbar or TabMixPlus to work, then I'm fine with that. It's the results that count, not how it's implemented.
Not putting a car in your so-called "car analogy" is kind of like eating your waffles without cocaine.
would like that very much. also it would bring a whole new wind to the browser market because many people (like myself) depend on specific extensions.
Jetpack is the addon system for Firefox... It aims to allow addons to work in any browser version. It also aims to split apart the browsers performance being impacted with the more addons installed (in the current firefox the more addons the slow the browser is). To find the truth about the new addon system watch this: https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/
"Mozilla isn't going in the right direction. What do you think ?"
They have not been since netscape.
I don't care for their program and dont use it.
Konqueror conquerors all! KDE 3.5.10 FOREVER!
1311393600 - Back to Black
It's so simple. The new should not be allowed to break the old. If the new has to do that, then it's design is bad.
This is like a manifesto that should apply to all programming and not just browser plugins! Say it loud and proud! Users love this. Programmers hate it. With open source programmers get more say.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Try Seamonkey 2.0 and compare it to Firefox 3.5 you will understand what I mean. The decision to cater to grandma and stupid users was about as dumb as what KDE and Gnome are doing right now. They don't want to focus on the needs of the user. Instead, they want to write cool new stuff that nobody has done before, never mind if anyone wants it.
they already have that..
http://www.blackbirdhome.com/
Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face! Without the very powerful extensions one can add to Firefox, it becomes just another browser without any particular reason for using it. I'd probably use Google Chrome instead, were Firefox to lose its powerful extensions.
Firefox is a great operating system, it just needs a decent web browser.
Perhaps someone should write one in flisp?
I can tell you that as far as I know, there are no plans to scrap the current extension system. The plan is to provide an easier way of developing extensions, that will be powerful enough for the vast majority of extensions, and easy enough to allow a far greater amount of people to take part in the process.
I believe much of this confusion could be alleviated if everyone concerned watched this video http://www.vimeo.com/8372101 (a talk on the topic by Aza Raskin, head of UX at Mozilla) - and for those who can't be bothered with it all, you can skip to 35:10 or read this rough transcript:
"The rough plan for where we're going with this, is that by Firefox 3.7, this will be baked into Firefox in some degree, so that's end of Q2. [snip] And by Firefox 4 we're really going to be pushing for making Jetpack or Jetpack enabled extensions the premier way of writing extensions, and while I don't think we're ever going to phase out the old model entirely [...] we're going to be pushing that almost everything happens inside of this." -- Aza Raskin
-- cers / Christian Sonne
Out of all the extensions I use httpFox is by far the one I use the most and integral in my job. Losing this would single handedly make my job 10 times more complex as we'd have to use inefficient mechanisms to visualise what the browser is calling. As has been said already there are much bigger bugs and issues for them to fix before going after this one. Or is this Google working behind the scenes trying to push FF in a direction where users simpler giveup and move to Chrome?
I've written 4 popular greasemonkey scripts and two extremely targeted FF extensions for small web communities. Jetpack always struck me as being promoted by people who had an oversized view of their own importance. Check out how active Jetpack discussion is on the userscripts.org forum: http://userscripts.org/forums Yeah. Come back when you have something interesting that works, until then leave me alone.
if they break it too much, it will be forked or old Portable version will always work. Backing up recent state, moving along to next topic :-)
God's gift to chicks
"Right now, it looks like AdBlock, Flashblock, CustomizeGoogle, and my own AdRater couldn't be implemented under JetPack" - by Animats (122034) on Sunday January 10, @11:40AM (#30715050) Homepage
Per my subject line above? How about a GLOBAL solution, instead, & one that extends to ALL of your "webbound apps", instead, & NOT just to Mozilla softwares which is all your solution works for... (think IE, Outlook & other email programs even, + more), AND, the solution I propose also acts as "layered security" in combination with the FF/Mozilla only methods you use (which sadly, your methods are KNOWN to slow your browser down, use CPU cycles & more (like having bugs & security flaws in themselves too)... where this solution does not & covers ALL webbound apps, globally)??
Here is a GOOD SOLID WORK-AROUND, CALLED A HOSTS FILE!
HOSTS files also work to YOUR ADVANTAGE, for your money, because you pay for your linetime out of pocket most likely as I do, you can get back your speed, AND, gain security easily, & from a single easily edited file & a file eats no CPU cycles like a local DNS server can (& are not as security vulnerable either if you protect write access to a HOSTS file also)... Anyhow/anyways - Here goes:
SO - "that all said & aside"? Well, per your reply?? You're solutions cost CPU cycles & are KNOWN to slow down FF/Mozilla variants (as browser addons do), but... Hey - NO PROBLEM, because HOSTS files work alongside those addons too, & offer you more speed online AND more security, via a SINGLE EASILY EDITED + POPULATED FILE (called a HOSTS file):
I use a custom HOSTS file, in addition to the tools others here in this thread have noted (which MANY like FF addons only really function for FireFox/Mozilla products, but don't extend globally to all other webbound applications, & that is part of what HOSTS files give you above the methods you extoll + utilize: "GLOBAL COVERAGE", & of ALL webbound apps, not just FireFox/Mozilla ones via the addons you noted + use yourself...).
HOSTS files can be used to blockout KNOWN "bad" adserves, maliciously coded sites or adbanners, and "botnet C&C servers" too!
You can obtain reliable HOSTS files from reputable lists for more security online, but also for speed!
(More on that later & WHY/HOW (I use reliable lists for that, such as these HOSTS @ Wikipedia.com -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file or those from mvps.org (a good one this one))
I also further populate & keep current my custom HOSTS file with up to date information in regards to all of those threats, via:
----
A.) Spybot "Search & Destroy" updates (populates HOSTS and browser block lists)
B.) Sites like ZDNet's Mr. Dancho Danchev's blog -> http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/
C.) Sites like FireEye -> http://blog.fireeye.com/
D.) SRI -> http://mtc.sri.com/
----
My HOSTS file incorporates ALL of the entries from the HOSTS files shown @ wikipedia as well... gaining me speed online (by blocking adbanners, which have been compromised many times the past few years now by malscripted exploits (examples below)).
(I combined ALL reputable HOSTS files with one of my own (30,000 entries), & I removed duplicates removed via a Borland Delphi app I wrote to do so called "APK HOSTS File Grinder 4.0++". That program also functions to change the default larger & SLOWER 127.0.0.1 blocking 'loopback adapter' IP address to either 0.0.0.0 (for VISTA/Windows Server 2008/Windows 7, smaller & thus faster than 127.0.0.1 default) or the smallest & fastest 0 "blocking 'IP ADDRESS'" (for Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 which can STILL use it (& it was added in a service pack on Windows 2000, only on 12
So what, the GNOME developers got bored changing their own interfaces last year and decided to change around all of Mozilla's?
Thanks, Mozilla!
You made a great browser that I used from version 0.3 (then named Phoenix, IIRC) to 3.5. More than that, you acomplished your mission to make the web a better place. Now we have a handful of good mostly-standards-compliant browsers to choose from. I'm leaving you for Chromium for now, but you'll always have a place in my heart.
factor 966971: 966971
Per my subject-line above, & in keeping with my original post's topic (HOSTS files, vs. ADBLOCK)?
10 POINTS IN FAVOR OF HOSTS FILES vs. ADBLOCK:
----
1.) HOSTS files eat no CPU cycles like browser addons do no less!
2.) HOSTS files are EASILY user controlled, obtained (for reliable ones -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file [wikipedia.org] ) & edited too.
3.) HOSTS files aren't as vulnerable to "bugs" either like programs/libs/extensions of that nature are, OR even DNS servers.
4.) HOSTS files are a solution which also globally extends to EVERY WEBBOUND APP YOU HAVE
5.) HOSTS files are also EASILY secured well, via write-protection "read-only" attributes set on them, or more radically, via ACL's eve
6.) HOSTS files are also NOT severely LIMITED TO 1 BROWSER FAMILY ONLY... browser addons, are. HOSTS files cover & protect (for security) and speed up (all apps that are webbound) any app you have that goes to the internet (specifically the web).
7.) HOSTS files allow you to bypass DNS Server requests logs (via hardcoding your favorite sites into them to avoid not only the TIME taken roundtrip to an external DNS server, but also for avoiding those logs OR a DNS server that has been compromised (see Dan Kaminsky online, on that note)).
8.) HOSTS files will allow you to get to sites you like, via hardcoding your favs into a HOSTS file, FAR faster than DNS servers can by FAR.
9.) HOSTS files also allow you to not worry about a DNS server being compromised, or downed (if either occurs, you STILL get to sites you hardcode in a HOSTS file anyhow in EITHER case).
10.) ADBLOCK DOES NOT ALLOW A USER DIRECT EDITABLE CONTROL OVER WHAT IT BLOCKS (afaik, @ least - feel free to correct me IF I am in error here (thanks)).
----
"too, Too, TOO EASY"... just too easy!
APK
P.S.=> That ought to do, as an "addendum" to my original post above I am replying to (to keep SPECIFIC to this very topic, adblock (& how HOSTS files are its superior on MANY GROUNDS no less, though BOTH can be used concurrently/simultaneously for "layered security" too, for the "best of all possible worlds", mind you))... apk