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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 ?"
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
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?
...and not even offering the features I'd come to love in the competition.
FF had tabs long before most other browsers (except perhaps Konquerer), had anti-phishing, and in general was once light and fast.
As for features today? AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, NoScript... those three alone are more than worth the weight, not to mention the tons of multimedia add-ons.
Also, FWIW, Firefox isn't the only big boy on the bloat scale, at least in Windows. IE only appears light because it has a habit of stuffing most of its weight into a pile of processes hidden under the catch-all name of "svchost.exe", with additional chunks hidden in the OS itself.
As a sysadmin, I love the fact that I get far better diagnostic info from Firefox when something isn't working right (especially in troubleshooting certificate errors).
Safari and Chrome aren't bad, in fact they're pretty good. OTOH, I stick with Firefox because it's nearly universal - from Linux, to Mac, to Windows, to FreeBSD... Most of the others go a good distance in cross-platform as well, but not as far. IE I only bother with for work and work-related sites (boss drank the koolaid and asked for seconds).
So insofar as the 'bloat' goes, I don't mind that as much, given the featureset.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
FF had tabs long before most other browsers (except perhaps Konquerer)
I think that feature (and many others) were primarily copied from Opera.
While I do think Firefox is bloating, and really think they've made some questionable decisions (such as force-feeding the terrible Awesomebar), I can't think of anything wrong with this move. The extension model needs revision, and only elitist bastards would be upset that they're making it simpler and more accessible.
This is exactly why sysadmins shouldn't pretend to be developers, and vice-versa. I don't use IE a lot (only if Firefox and Chrome both fail) but this statement is just wrong, a lazy repeating of a tech 'urban legend'. Go run Process Explorer and it'll show you what the svchosts are doing (hint: hosting services like DNS clients, etc). As for "additional chunks hidden in the OS itself", where exactly is this hidden, especially now that modern IEs don't even have any filesystem-browsing capability?
IE (like Mozilla, like Chrome) uses a lot of DLLs, but memory use etc is counted per process, and what IE reported upto IE7 was actually a fair representation of what each process used. With IE8 on, there are per-site processes like Google Chrome (not per-tab for both browsers as usually thought -- in fact, IE8 released this feature before Chrome) and you can get a better idea of how much memory a site is consuming.
Go somewhere random
It doesn't sound like the old extension mechanism is going anywhere:
http://steelgryphon.com/blog/2010/01/09/on-personas-and-themes/#comment-107468
(that comment is by the blog author; the key part is "I personally don't think we're anywhere near the point where we can look at the old-style extension model and claim it's not needed anymore. But the goal is to drive everything that can be moved to Jetpacks to that model, because it's a better model for users and developers." )
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Microsoft did nothing "nice". They were dragged, kicking and screaming, into court and had their fingers slapped to the tune of over one billion US dollars by the EU for their misbehavior. And they attempted to poison the well by inserting patents into the published documents, patents incompatible with GPL software such as Samba. There are plenty of references to the court cases, but the interview with such developers of Samba as Jeremy Allison at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070919214307459 are particularly enlightening.
The Samba site also has this note about the patent encumberment and GPL incompatibility Microsoft tried to slip in: http://us1.samba.org/samba/ms_license.html.
And if you think there's anything "nice" about their efforts, go read the documentation. It was apparently written by monkeys trying to produce Hamlet, and bears little if any resemblance to how the protocols actually work.
Well, to be fair, they had a lot of help from the US pharma and IP industries and the elected government.
Enough blame to go around.
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
As for "additional chunks hidden in the OS itself", where exactly is this hidden, especially now that modern IEs don't even have any filesystem-browsing capability?
The trident engine loads when Explorer loads. Replace the shell with an alternative shell, and disable DLL preloading with a tool like Autoruns. IE start time will shoot up to crazy levels. When I did it on an old Win2k-AthlonXP PC (obviously with IE6), it jumped from about 6 seconds cold start to 20 seconds.
Not much point doing it though. Lots of programs depend on Trident, like Steam.
P.S. Disabling Explorer knocked off 45MB memory usage. Disabling Trident knocked off another 25MB. Since 25MB is roughly what Firefox uses to display Google, shouldn't IE8 use 1MB? The rendering engine is already loaded into memory - unless it has to make copies or something.