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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?
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.
It's going to be like the new AppMakr framework that allows any idiot with an RSS feed or twitter account and $200 to make an iPhone app. You'll have to wade through more junk to find the good stuff.
I don't doubt that there will be good add-ins via this. There's just going to be so much more trash.
That was actually one of the things I was thinking of. Do we really need to lower the barriers to entry? Are good ideas really going missing because "extensions are too hard?"
As a consumer of extensions, I have installed about 20 out of the 8,000 available. If I have a catalog of 80,000 jetpacks, does that mean I have to look through 10 times as much crap just to find the 10 useful ones?
John
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!
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!
"Integrating with the UI"? So whatever happen to XUL
Since you gave your conclusion first, I made the silly mistake of assuming you actually supported it somewhere in your post instead of undercutting it by demonstrating it isn't clear one way or the other.
You did make a populist plea, though. I'll give you points for excellent rabble rousing technique.
Extensions were broken from day one. You only need to look at the fact that they are bound to specific versions for proof of that. Extensions see too much of the internals of the browser without any insulating abstraction. This means they are insecure, unstable and break when new versions are released.
This is in some cases a strength, because extensions can be very powerful, but it also a huge liability for both the programmers of the extensions, and for the programmers of Firefox itself.
This change would just be a long overdue fix for this fundamental problem.
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
Yes, we need to reduce features IF we want any moron to do it. But do we want any moron to do it? I don't.
Dilbert RSS feed
Or exercise some good ol' open source muscle and fork it. Isn't that supposed to be one of the benefits of open source? You aren't enslaved to a particular developer if a feature you want/need is dropped or not developed.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
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..
That's the actual strength of AdBlock, and the reason it currently cannot be implemented as a JetPack: AdBlock has the option of blocking the ads when the URL is found in the source, therefore not loading it. It works at a lower level than what the JetPack platform offers.
To me, ad-blocking is more than just not showing ads, it's about not being tracked by ad brokers that leave "web-bugs" all around the World Wide Web. Blocking requests to the ad servers themselves is what makes AdBlock far more useful than CSS and layout modifiers, and the primary reason I stay with Firefox in spite of its shortcomings. Adblock, together with the ability to black-list servers in the cookie manager with a simple "Remember this setting" checkbox, are actually the only reasons I continue to use Firefox.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
So, what you are saying is that, while the people are still getting the drugs they need, due to grant money freely given to them, they have to spend it in the countries where the money is coming from, which makes the people giving the grants mass murderers?
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
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.