Firefox Support For NPAPI Plugins Ends Next Year (mozilla.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla announced that it will follow the lead of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge in phasing out support for NPAPI plugins. They expect to have it done by the end of next year. "Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users. ... Moreover, since new Firefox platforms do not have to support an existing ecosystem of users and plugins, new platforms such as 64-bit Firefox for Windows will launch without plugin support." Of course, there's an exception: "Because Adobe Flash is still a common part of the Web experience for most users, we will continue to support Flash within Firefox as an exception to the general plugin policy. Mozilla and Adobe will continue to collaborate to bring improvements to the Flash experience on Firefox, including on stability and performance, features and security architecture." There's no exception for Java, though.

Comments

Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much use of the word 'experience' shows that Mozilla has been taken over by managers.

Re: Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a nice first post experience you had there!

Re:Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it means they are older than 14 and have a corresponding vocabulary.

Re:Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, experience is a bullshit bingo word because it triggers the positive association that people have with knowledge which is gained through experience. But while it sounds positive, it doesn't actually make a qualitative or quantitative claim one way or the other in the way it is used by business people. "The web experience" just means that people are using the web. They could be hating it from start to finish, not learning a thing on the way, and it would still be their web experience.

Re:Experience?

[idji]

Too much use of the word "features" leads to bloat and forgetting what people are using the software for.

Re:Is this goodbye?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong type of plugin. This is about plugins like Flash, such as ... uh ... I dunno, Adobe PDF reader? The Java plugin, I guess. Things like that. Basically nothing anyone will miss.

Of course, they're also killing support for NoScript and requestpolicy, except that happens earlier than "the end of next year." The timeline for support for those to be removed is mid-2016, as I recall.

Moral of the story:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Of course, there's an exception: "Because Adobe Flash is still a common part of the Web experience for most users, we will continue to support Flash within Firefox as an exception to the general plugin policy. Mozilla and Adobe will continue to collaborate to bring improvements to the Flash experience on Firefox, including on stability and performance, features and security architecture."

The moral is, if you screw up in small scale you pay the price. If you screw up in gigantic scale, others will accommodate you. Small borrowers get foreclosed. Gigantic debtors get bailed out. Minor plug-ins with stability and security issues get pulled.Even major ones like java. But you screw up in gigantic scale like Adobe Flash, the market prices your misdeeds in and expects others to act knowing, "yeah, Adobe Flash is a mess, but we know it is a mess, we need to work around it".

Re:Moral of the story:

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to post pretty much the same thing. Yes, let's close off all those insecure plugins, but give FLASH a pass. The worst offender of the bunch for security and stability issues. Flash: the Citibank of plugins.

Re:Moral of the story:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's not even as if Java is a huge security problem today. It's effectively been click-to-play by default in all major browsers for a long time, and the plug-in itself then has a bunch more security safeguards before it will trust remote code to do just about anything.

As I seem to have to point out every time this subject gets raised, this is a horrible move in terms of preserving useful content on the web. A lot of things that have been done with plug-ins like Java or Silverlight are small and in-house, like the math lecturer's interactive visualisation of something in their course, or the applet some guy in sales wrote a few years ago for the intranet so the group managers could see a quick overview of how everything is going and copy the data straight into their Excel spreadsheet. Of course they have also been used for a lot of GUIs for networked devices, where things like drawing interactive charts wasn't possible using native web technologies until relatively recently.

Many of these useful tools won't have dedicated maintainers and they aren't magically going to get rewritten to use the new blessed technologies. Closing them off in Firefox as well just means anyone who actually relies on them is now left on IE forever. Again.

Re:Moral of the story:

[JesseMcDonald]

Closing them off in Firefox as well just means anyone who actually relies on them is now left on IE forever. Again.

They could just as easily use an old version of Firefox instead. It's not like the previous versions are going anywhere, and it isn't unreasonable for ancient, unmaintained web sites using obsolete plugins to require a contemporary web browser.

Re:Moral of the story:

[isj]

The content plugin support has always been a mixed blessing. It was sometimes useful as a stop-gap until the browsers supported some new form of content (eg. SVG, MathML, ...). With the removal of plugin support and acceleration of the death of plugins it means that new content forms will have to be implemented in all browsers, which seems wasteful to me.

On the other hand, with the current feature set of html5+javascript+canvas+webgl you can make quite good interfaces. In the odd (but not completely rare) cases where it isn't enough you can go for a stand-alone program, like java webstart, stand-alone flash player, etc.

So what we lose is the ability to display new content forms inside a web page which (imho) is not a big loss nowadays.

For the legacy sites (java applets for configuration or secure "VPN" access, flash for ditto) the backward compatibility has never been great: random applets required exactly JVM 1.4.x.x, flash only worked with FF version x, silverlight only worked with IE, etc. so I don't think the impact is worse than what would already happen. I hope that the developers of such solutions go for html5 replacements primarily, and if that doesn't work then downloadable stand-alone binaries (or even better: open source).

Re:Moral of the story:

[myowntrueself]

It's not even as if Java is a huge security problem today. It's effectively been click-to-play by default in all major browsers for a long time, and the plug-in itself then has a bunch more security safeguards before it will trust remote code to do just about anything.

As I seem to have to point out every time this subject gets raised, this is a horrible move in terms of preserving useful content on the web. A lot of things that have been done with plug-ins like Java or Silverlight are small and in-house, like the math lecturer's interactive visualisation of something in their course, or the applet some guy in sales wrote a few years ago for the intranet so the group managers could see a quick overview of how everything is going and copy the data straight into their Excel spreadsheet. Of course they have also been used for a lot of GUIs for networked devices, where things like drawing interactive charts wasn't possible using native web technologies until relatively recently.

Many of these useful tools won't have dedicated maintainers and they aren't magically going to get rewritten to use the new blessed technologies. Closing them off in Firefox as well just means anyone who actually relies on them is now left on IE forever. Again.

Internet explorer won't keep up with this forever. Does anyone have experience of the new Windows 10 browser (Edge) and Java?

Where I work we have to deal with many sites where we are absolutely forced to use Java browser based apps. We have no option. Theres been talk that we might just have to write our own application to do this as browsers just can't be trusted not to lock us out of these systems.

Some people I work with keep an old XP VM around with an old version of Java and an old browser just to be able to use the IPMI console on (fairly new) servers. I don't see any sign that the server manufacturers are going to stop using Java for their IPMI consoles.

This is ridiculous.

Re:Moral of the story:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Edge doesn't support Java applets at all.

I think IE will continue to do so indefinitely, because Google and Mozilla just gifted a significant advantage to Microsoft for a significant number of their business customers.

Re:Moral of the story:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I make browser-based user interfaces for a living, and I can say without hesitation that a lot of these new technologies aren't ready for prime time yet (though that's not going to stop Google, Apple and Mozilla treating them as if they are).

SVG and Canvas performance is highly variable. There are sometimes serious rendering glitches in some of the browsers as well, even looking at quite simple cases. Plus issues with events not propagating properly, which variation of animations we're supporting this week, etc.

MathML is only supported usefully in Firefox and Safari.

HTML5 audio/video is just a gigantic mess, not only in the lack of any portable format for each that works just about everywhere, but also in terms of browser controls, cache behaviour, even basic stuff like triggering corresponding JS events at the right time or showing the right poster image for a video. Plus of course there's the whole ECE mess, which is corrupting the open web with DRM, creating whole new attack vectors, or just another kind of plug-in that now needs to be developed and then ported across platforms instead of the old ones, depending on who you'd like to hate it the most right now.

WebGL is interesting but support is generally still patchy. It's also worth noting that like any of the other hardware-accelerated features here, it's going to create more attack surface, which is why the argument that browser features are somehow more likely to be secure than the equivalent plug-in features they're replacing is just silly.

As a final comment, a lot of those sites using plug-ins that you call "legacy" were doing things the only way they could just a few years ago. Even if they all worked properly today, those technologies I mentioned above have only been viable alternatives very recently. It's not realistic to expect everyone who has been developing tools built with plug-ins and sunk large amounts of time and money into developing them to just do a Big Rewrite into HTML5-friendly technologies to suit the browser makers. Given that most of those browser makers have made it abundantly clear that they don't really care about providing meaningful long term support for anything any more, I suspect before long they are going to start reaping what they have sown as they find people who build web apps increasingly sceptical about relying on unproven features. Ironically, they could even be strengthening the native software and mobile app markets in the long run.

Re:Moral of the story:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

...it isn't unreasonable for ancient, unmaintained web sites using obsolete plugins to require a contemporary web browser.

Where by ancient you mean written more than a year ago, by unmaintained you mean without dedicated resources available to rewrite the entire thing every few months, and by obsolete you mean no longer working in browsers with rapid updates but still working just fine in trusty, stable IE?

The idea that something that worked just a year or two ago should no longer work on today's browsers is unreasonable. Much of the reason the web has been successful is that it has been standardised and future-proof. There were widely respected and mostly reasonable standards. There were multiple browser implementations that would let you view anything developed using those standards. Content on the web has been widely and permanently accessible for as long as its host cared to provide it and anyone else cared to visit the host's site. Sacrificing all of this just to make life easier for browser makers who prefer to write fire-and-forget software with no longevity is not progress.

Re:Moral of the story:

[JesseMcDonald]

The idea that something that worked just a year or two ago should no longer work on today's browsers is unreasonable.

There will always be a cut-off point where support for older interfaces is dropped. The standard is not whether something worked a year or two ago, but whether it followed the recommended best practices in effect at that time. If you write a site using standards on the verge of being declared obsolete, you have no one to blame but yourself. Dependence on NPAPI plugins hasn't been best practice for a long time now, much longer than one year; Flash is the only plugin with any widespread support left, and it's been on its way out for a while. Sites which depend on such plugins already fail on mobile browsers, which are becoming more and more popular and haven't even supported Flash for several years, much less other plugins.

Much of the reason the web has been successful is that it has been standardised and future-proof. There were widely respected and mostly reasonable standards. There were multiple browser implementations that would let you view anything developed using those standards.

The part that was standardized and future-proof was HTML. That part still works everywhere, and even supports most of what people used to use plugins for thanks to JavaScript and HTML5. Plugins, on the other hand, have always been a compatibility nightmare—non-standardized, proprietary, and non-portable.

If you like standards and cross-browser compatibility, you should be backing this change. It means more standards-compliant web sites and fewer one-off, closed-source, browser- and OS-specific binary plugins that may or may not receive updates for security and/or compatibility with future software.

The idea that something that worked just a year or two ago should no longer work on today's browsers is unreasonable.

IE itself is deprecated, and its replacement, Edge, doesn't support NPAPI (or ActiveX) either. Using IE is no better than using an old version of Firefox.

Re:Moral of the story:

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

Yeah, chrome killing support for napia plugins has made a java remote appliance stop working the same way, a building lighting control system built on silverlight to stop working, and an hvac systems web interface. And thats just the building I work in....

Right now, everyone is hoping microsoft or oracle or whomever will update plugins so that they work again in chrome. IETAB is a work around, however it sucks ass that internal tools firewalled off from the internet also get shafted. Upgrades for these kind of systems aren't cheap either.

Re:Moral of the story:

[skastrik]

It's not even as if Java is a huge security problem today. It's effectively been click-to-play by default in all major browsers for a long time, and the plug-in itself then has a bunch more security safeguards before it will trust remote code to do just about anything.

Agree. Expensive enterprise software often relies on applets, that's the way it is and how it will remain for some years.

Now if Java or browsers had the ability to whitelist Java applets, then for an enterprise with control over its own applets, I actually don't see any particular security problem with applets running within a browser. Why not allow enterprises to run software they control and trust?

Re:Moral of the story:

[Billly Gates]

IE 11 is the new eternal IE 6. Yes Windows 10 includes IE 11 AND Edge.

Too many corporations refuae to ever upgrade unless their is a business case with a return on investment can be documented. Java desktop applets were depreciated in 2006 9 years ago!!

Most require IE 6 anyway to render right so firefox won't help. Our customers at work require IE 6 emulated to 1998 quirks mode through citrix to run. Oddly it is still upgraded and developers just work around the 15 year old rendering bugs rather than rewrite

Re:Moral of the story:

[squiggleslash]

But was the screw up Flash, or the fact Flash was needed to make websites able to show animations, videos, and play audio, because until HTML5 nobody was willing to set the standards necessary?

Flash didn't come out of no-where, it was necessary to implement certain concepts over the web - and to a certain extent, still is.

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Re:Moral of the story:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The standard is not whether something worked a year or two ago, but whether it followed the recommended best practices in effect at that time.

The important thing is always whether something works properly. Everything else -- formal standards, compatibility work, portability work -- is just a means to that end.

If you write a site using standards on the verge of being declared obsolete, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Which is an easy argument to make until someone points out that in these cases the people declaring something "obsolete" are frequently biased and, in particular, advocating a new and inferior replacement.

Dependence on NPAPI plugins hasn't been best practice for a long time now, much longer than one year

And yet viable alternatives to the things we've been doing successfully with various plug-ins for literally a decade or more have barely been around that long, and in many cases are still obviously and objectively worse in significant respects today.

Flash is the only plugin with any widespread support left, and it's been on its way out for a while.

Not in corporate use. Not even close.

Sites which depend on such plugins already fail on mobile browsers, which are becoming more and more popular and haven't even supported Flash for several years, much less other plugins.

And the corporates mostly don't care, because they have real work to do and provide their staff with real computers to do it. No-one is preparing their quarterly accounts presentation on an iPhone.

Plugins, on the other hand, have always been a compatibility nightmare—non-standardized, proprietary, and non-portable.

And yet Java applets were recognised as early at the <applet> tag somewhere back in the 90s, while Flash has been one of the most successfully standardised parts of web history in terms of both portability and longevity. I suspect only HTTP, HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 have been more successful in those respects.

If you like standards and cross-browser compatibility, you should be backing this change.

I like things that work. To be fair, I also like the new "standard" and "cross-browser compatible" features, but for a very different reason: they are still so badly implemented so often, and broken so often by browser updates, that I make an awful lot of money fixing things that rely on them.

fewer one-off, closed-source, browser- and OS-specific binary plugins

Because ECE for multimedia playback and graphics drivers to accelerate WebGL are so much better?

IE itself is deprecated

It really isn't, in any practical sense. Realistically, Microsoft are going to continue supporting it until at least 2020 because of the Win7 support, and because dropped it would cost them the support of the business community that makes up the lion's share of revenues.

For perspective, that is more than 30 six-weekly update cycles of various other major browsers where businesses don't have to worry unduly about something they rely on being arbitrarily broken.

Hypocrites

[Viol8]

"Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users"

So is your browser. And whatever happened to choice? If I want to use a plugin that may crash occasionally thats up to me - not you. What next - I can only view web pages that your browser deems acceptable? Asshats.

Re:Hypocrites

[MadMaverick9]

So is your browser.

Which is exactly why Mozilla will very soon now get rid of the browser.

And Mozilla will make that decision unilaterally. Mozilla will not listen to you. Mozilla knows what's best for you. You don't.

One fine day your browser will simply remove itself. Because Mozilla said so.

Those are add-ons, not plugins.

[WD]

Add-ons will continue to work. This is talking about NPAPI plugins.

Re:Those are add-ons, not plugins.

[cfalcon]

Will noscript continue to work? That's the only 100% mandatory one IMO, and it sounds like they might be working to keep noscript available somehow.

I think we'll need those features for the next generation of in-browser ad blockers, though. I dunno that for sure.

Re:Those are add-ons, not plugins.

[PPNSteve]

I sure hope so.
I too have at 2 must have mandatory inclusions to Firefox, no script and firebug. Then there is a couple nice to have such as the YT center plugin that "fixes" the ads, on-demand or as needed loading, etc. and some media plugins (Google talk, VLC, QT, etc.) that helps with embedded media on this old xp machine.

Re:Is this goodbye?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plug-ins != add-ons

NPAPI Plug-ins

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome removed them. IE hasn't supported them, if ever, in at least 15 years.

I don't think you know what an NPAPI plug-in is. There is Flash, PDF, Java and about anything else is a malware attack vector.

On an iPhone, as an example, none of the above are supported. Chrome and FireFox include their own PDF viewers to evade PDF. Flash is being killed by every browser in favor of HTML 5 video. Java is just being non-supported.

Re:NPAPI Plug-ins

[BenJeremy]

Flash is supported by Chrome as built-in. Every release of Chrome has an updated flash player.

The problem is more that NPAPI is bad, PPAPI and built-in support is the path to future plugins. Expanding HTML5 is part of it, but not all of it.

Re:NPAPI Plug-ins

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is supported by Chrome as built-in. Every release of Chrome has an updated flash player.

Which should remind everyone that Adobe was discontinuing Flash on GNU/Linux. Only Google was to support a PPAPI version themselves. This was announced to start on 2012-05-04, with the release of Flash 11.2, the last major GNU/Linux version released by Adobe. Adobe then committed to 5 years of security updates. So Adobe was to stop supporting Flash on GNU/Linux entirely by 2017-05-04, in less than two years now.

Does this collaboration means that Flash will now be fully supported again? (they do talk about "feature improvements"...). Or that Firefox will finally go the PPAPI route and collaborate with Google too for the PPAPI version of Flash...?

Re:NPAPI Plug-ins

[BenJeremy]

Flash will now be fully supported again?

Why support Flash at all? Flash is dying and these days it doesn't offer anything over HTML5.

I think for Adobe, it is more of a time-buying exit strategy for Flash, until their tools are able to output HTML5-compliant media as nicely as they currently do for Flash. ...yet they continue to upgrade Air, which also might just be a matter of supporting existing users (as in developers), more than trying to attract new ones.

As a mobile app developer, I am moving away from Air as a platform, but appreciate Adobe's commitment to improving performance and reliability for those apps I have that are still using Air.

Re:NPAPI Plug-ins

[isj]

I want ads to be in flash because that makes them easy to block :-)

Re:NPAPI Plug-ins

[jaklode]

Too bad for you that Google automatically converts them to HTML5 ads.

Re:NPAPI Plug-ins

[Pinky's Brain]

PDF is a vector regardless of where I open it, the JS reader sucks so I use the Sumatra PDF plugin (no longer supported, but still working).

VLC plugin.

OpenH264 is a plugin.

I put more faith in those not being a malware vector than Flash, which Firefox will continue supporting. So I agree with OP, Mozilla disease.

Re:NPAPI Plug-ins

[drinkypoo]

Also let us not forget mozplugger, which lets us swallow any well-behaved X app into Firefox on Unix[like operating systems] to handle any content type we like...

Re:Whoa! Waiddamin there!

[BenJeremy]

I think the problem with Java is that Oracle doesn't seem to want to play nice with the browser developers.

It's not like they haven't had the time (or have the resources) to fix the issue. Oracle is letting Java-in-the-browser die over their spat with Google and their desire to control Java on the desktop.

At least Adobe was smart enough to step in and work out the issues with Google and Mozilla so Flash Player would continue to have support. If they could do that, why couldn't Oracle? I'm sure Google and Mozilla both would like to continue to support Java for their customers, but not at the expense of keeping NPAPI support - though I won't say there isn't a bit of negativity towards Oracle in that decision, as well.

Re:Question

[Sigma 7]

What is NPAPI ?

NPAPI is the legacy plugin system used by browsers that allows webpages to serve executable content without the user having to download a file.

This system is used by Flash, Unity, Java, and various unimportant plugins. Of these, Flash has an arrangement with Adobe, Unity has an exit strategy, and Java is completely neutered as it was for quite some time. The unimportant plugins are unimportant (and if they were, they'd have fixed it by now.)

and does this have anything to do with the add=ons and plug=ins specific to Firefox and Seamonkey
SAome of which break every time they put out a new version of FF

Those are extensions, which is completely different.

Noooo!

[JBMcB]

How am I going to play at NetBabyWorld without shockwave?

Re:Is this goodbye?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, they're also killing support for NoScript

Odd. Giorgio Maone, the author of NoScript, says Mozilla isn't doing that. It's almost as if you don't know what you're talking about.

Plugins != extensions

[Samare]

NPAPI plugins are not to be confused with Firefox extensions.

The fact that they have both been found in about:addons for some time now is a source of confusion.

All of them

[Samare]

All Firefox plugins use NPAPI.

By the way, real plugins are found in about:addons in the "Plugins" tab.

I honestly wish you were dead

[Anonymous Coward]

see subject

Interesting article by Steve Jobs

[tarlek1234]

https://www.apple.com/hotnews/... (A bit old, but probably still relevant.)

Re: No Jarva support?

[binarylarry]

Nope, applets were a dot bomb idea that never really panned out because of how awful they were/are.

Re:Firefox 64-bit Windows doesn't exist yet?

[ArhcAngel]

There are several 64 bit variants available compiled from Firefox source. I have been using WaterFox for a couple of years as my daily browser. It's usually about two weeks behind official FireFox releases.

Electrolysis

[tepples]

There isn't much advantage to a 64-bit browser anyway

There is if all tabs are running in one process, as opposed to one process per tab like in present-day Chrome or the experimental Electrolysis feature of Firefox.

Re:Electrolysis

[Cardcaptor_RLH85]

If you have dozens or hundreds of tabs in one process you may indeed use over 2 GB of RAM in a web browser.

Re: Electrolysis

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen my wife leave a hundred tabs open for days, using 10GB of RAM.

Re:Electrolysis

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have dozens or hundreds of tabs in one process you may indeed use over 2 GB of RAM in a web browser.

A dozen or two I can understand. But if you have hundreds of tabs open at one time, you're doing it wrong. I know everyone has their own styles and methods of getting around on the web, but there are zero valid use cases for having hundreds of tabs open. Zero cases, full stop.

I've seen this many times with clients and coworkers. They'll log a ticket saying their PC is too slow, it's taking 5 minutes to open a spreadsheet, etc. I take a look and their tab bar is so crowded with open tabs it's become useless; the tab icons are so tiny and squished together, you can't tell what site, much less what page, is open in each one. The browser has sucked up all physical RAM and all of the page file to the point that even moving the mouse around requires the OS to swap, so of course a spreadsheet takes forever to open. When I ask why they have so many tabs open, the answer is always "I might need to go back there." This is indicative of a user who hasn't ever been shown what features are available to them. A little education goes a long way here.

I had one guy who didn't understand the concept of a webmail inbox, and that you can click to get to the next page of messages. Our webmail lists 25 messages at a time by default; he had never noticed, and no one had ever pointed out to him, the "Next Page" link to find older messages beyond those 25. So he was using tabs to store his most important emails. He didn't know he could login to his webmail anytime, scroll to or search for those messages, and open them again. As far as he knew, they were gone forever if he closed the tab or if the browser crashed and lost state. I spent 10 minutes showing him how to navigate his webmail and he was off to the freakin' races with a snappy, responsive PC.

Then there was a girl in Marketing. Part of her job is managing social media for the company. Any time she sent or replied to a tweet, she kept it open in its own browser tab "so I can see if anyone replies." Every morning she'd cycle through a few hundred tabs reloading the page and looking for responses. I still don't understand how she got a job managing social media when she doesn't know how to use Twitter, which puts a new item in your Notifications panel whenever someone replies to a tweet. After I pointed that out, she stopped keeping months worth of AJAX-laden Twitter pages open in hundreds of tabs.

Thankfully these aren't typical users. For most people I just need to explain and demonstrate how to use bookmarks. Y'know, the feature that exists solely to "save a page for later" in case you want to go back to it.

Re:Electrolysis

[KGIII]

I've seen and questioned multiple Slashdotters who claim a need for (and beneficial use of) hundreds of tabs being open at the same time. I've asked and they've had a variety of reasons but not one of those reasons actually made sense to me. Yet they do it. I'm reminded of the user that would send himself links via email, open the email, open the link (that he'd already sent to himself), and then print the page. I start getting cluttered at 20 tabs or so. I am most comfortable in the 3 to 5 range. I'd probably do better with fewer but my memory isn't what it used to be.

Re:Electrolysis

[Gavagai80]

Go to a discussion forum, open all the threads that look interesting and come back to read them later. Come to slashdot, open all of the today's articles. Go to stack overflow and open ten questions related to yours. It's not hard to end up with a lot of tabs.

Re:Electrolysis

[KGIII]

Read them and close them. Why open them all up at once? That doesn't make much sense to me. I don't think it'd make you any faster. It just adds overhead, confusion, and means that when you do open them to read them they're no longer current (unless they update dynamically).

Re:Electrolysis

[squiggleslash]

Not OP, but same workflow: They are being closed. After they've been read. Which is later.

My suggestion is rather than insist there's no reason someone would open links to read later, you propose either a sane alternative that's just as comfortable as opening tabs for things you plan to read using technologies in Firefox et al already (I don't think there are any, otherwise we'd be using them. No, we don't want to clutter up our bookmarks with them, and bookmarks aren't exactly a solution anyway given you can't really quickly add an unopened link to a bookmark, which might not work anyway given referrers and other nonsense.),

...or you could propose to Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Microsoft some other solution that means this perfectly normal workflow can be replaced by something else.

Until then, I question why you're complaining about other people opening a lot of tabs. It's none of your business (that applies to anyone making this complaint, not just you personally), you've made no effort to understand why people do this, and you're attempting to micromanage how other people read the web.

You're not helping. You're borderline trolling.

Re:Electrolysis

[KGIII]

I did propose a solution - open them as you need them and close them when you're done. However, use what works best for you and in the method that suits your work flow best. You can be that guy who emails himself links if you want...

What really confuses me is you exclaiming that this is something you do like it is some grand achievement. Let's use Slashdot as an example. So according to the description given they (and presumably you) open the main page. You then scroll through, reading and opening things in new tabs as you see fit, and then go to those new tabs and read those, correct? Except, by the time you've done this there have been all sorts of people who may have (or might not have) commented. By the time you get to the last Slashdot tab you opened you're quite late to the content and not viewing the more up-to-date conversation unless you refresh which is just silly because you could have saved yourself the effort and viewed each one, one at a time.

What possible good are you getting? And no, I'm absolutely not trying to get you to change your work flow. Do what suits your needs. I'm just letting you know that there's a better way that lets you interact with pages in a more timely fashion and with far less confusion than needing more tabs open than you can possibly read the titles for. Even if you span all these titles out across multiple monitors you're still not able to look at and visualize them all (or read their titles, I suppose) because they're too scrunched up to actually show you more than a portion of the first letter.

To continue with the Slashdot example, and here's my method, I go to the first unread page - and this kind of sucks but it's what I've come up with. I scroll down. I open a tab on a thread that I want to read. I read it. I close it. I am now back at the main page (well, page 2 for this example) and then I look up to see the next story and decide if I want to read the thread or not. If not then I go to the next one. Then I work my way back to page 0 (the real main page) that way. Auto-refresh or a big thread will still sometimes mess this work flow up a bit and it isn't perfect. However, it's better than having a bunch of tabs open (to my mind, at least) and then seeing now stale threads when I read the comments.

Perhaps you have a strange definition of trolling? Perhaps you just have a frail ego? I don't know but, for fuck's sake, don't think I'd do anything more than mock your use - I've nary a nickel invested and don't actually care how you use your computer. You're free to do it any way you want and your emotions (riled or not) aren't important to me so, rest assured, that trolling you hasn't a damned thing to do with my objectives. You're not that important.

What I do want is a reason - because you might actually be correct in your usage and it is I who can stand to learn a lesson. So far, nobody has given me a reason that makes their way seem superior. I'm certainly willing to try (and have) because my own system has its faults. I haven't even reached the mocking stage yet. In fact, I'm still hoping to learn something which is why I ask or comment - hoping someone will actually give me a new way. Perhaps that new way will be somewhere betwixt your solution and my own. I've yet to find it, read about it, or even be able to start on the trail to discovering this mythical ideal work flow - but that doesn't mean I'm not still trying.

"I open 400 browser tabs at once!" This is not a viable solution to a mere mortal. I'm not 100% positive but I bet it's slower - it was much slower when I tried this. At best I can deal with 20 or so per browser instance. I sometimes put multiple instances up in a few different desktops or on separate monitors. Usually I do not. Even then it's not as rapid as just using the address bar and a new tab as required. A history of closed tabs is also excellent. Either way, I'm still sure my method can be optimized and I'm 100% certain your method is inferior *for* me. I know, because I've tried the large number of tabs and i

Re:Electrolysis

[zippthorne]

Leaving tabs open is the workaround for a problem that all major browsers currently have:

They refresh the damn page when you navigate back to it.

This may not seem like a big deal to people living in Mountain View or the Bay area, but in the entire rest of the country, the javascript include cascade that results form this combined with the lag per-request due to the network delay of having to cross the country to get to where all the internet apparently is, adds unacceptable re-loading times to very common navigational events. And it gets worse if the page is a web-app like google docs or sheets.

As a workaround, people often open links in "another tab" (it's an option on the context menu of most major browsers, probably for just this reason...). While you're only ever "using" a few at a time, it's quite easy over the course of a day with a lot of task-switching, to accumulate a large number tabs per browser window and have several such browser windows open at once as you flip through your various duties and occasionally clean things up a window-at-a-time.

If you want to cut down on tab usage, then put the user in control of when the page refreshes and how many rendered pages to keep in memory or in the on-disk cache (which would let the OS decide when to actually put it on-disk if done right). Browsers used to have a "snap-back" feature to do pretty much exactly this, for one page back. Why did that go away instead of getting generalized?

Re:Electrolysis

[arglebargle_xiv]

Access to more than 2GB of memory? For displaying web pages?

You haven't used Firefox much have you?

Re:Electrolysis

[crbowman]

I do this exact thing all the time. Or open the top answers in a google search because you don't know which one will have a really good answer.

Re:Electrolysis

[crbowman]

Because it can take a while for a page to open whereas I can zip through and open twenty and during the day as I have time to read I go to a tab and start reading. Sometime I have had enough of a subject for now, but may want to come back and continue at the same place I was reading, I can flip to another of my open tabs and start a new subject. Close all tabs and I've read all the slashdot stories for today. Rarely do I want to come back once I've finished reading so book marking isn't really the right model. I get it, it's not the way you want to work but it's efficient for me.

Re:Electrolysis

[Dahamma]

I live in the Bay Area and I think it's annoying as shit. It's almost unconscious habit at this point to right click, "open link in new tab"...

Though your suggestions are a bit simplistic compared to the actual issues involved. These days there are very few true "rendered" pages, and caches just cache Javascript *source* files. Most "pages" are constantly running Javascript to retrieve data/refresh and update the DOM, rather than some simple HTML. There is a TON of state to keep track of for each "page". Keeping a separate Javascript interpreter, DOM, etc around for each page in the browser history will start chewing up system resources pretty quickly.

Re:Electrolysis

[squiggleslash]

: I did propose a solution - open them as you need them and close them when you're done.

That's not a solution, that's what we do already. That's what everyone does.

What really confuses me is you exclaiming that this is something you do like it is some grand achievement.

Uh, what?

Let's use Slashdot as an example. So according to the description given they (and presumably you) open the main page. You then scroll through, reading and opening things in new tabs as you see fit, and then go to those new tabs and read those, correct? Except, by the time you've done this there have been all sorts of people who may have (or might not have) commented. By the time you get to the last Slashdot tab you opened you're quite late to the content and not viewing the more up-to-date conversation unless you refresh which is just silly because you could have saved yourself the effort and viewed each one, one at a time.

I'm really not getting it. You appear to be arguing, if I understand this correctly, that because an article might be slightly out of date by the time we get around to reading it, that we must - because somehow we know that we'll read it one day later - decide it would be better not to read it at all than to risk the chance we might have to hit the Refresh button to get the latest version.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

I'm just letting you know that there's a better way that lets you interact with pages in a more timely fashion and with far less confusion than needing more tabs open than you can possibly read the titles for.

You haven't proposed one.

Thus far, your latest screed argues that we should do exactly what we're doing already (closing tabs once we're done with them), and that somehow what we're doing already is the worst thing ever because we might have to hit the Refresh button by the time we look at the tab.

One is not actually telling us there's a "better way", the other is simply criticizing us over something so obviously pathetic I can't even fathom why you'd bring it up.

Perhaps you have a strange definition of trolling?

It's borderline trolling because you're immediately launching into an attack without even trying to determine why someone is doing what they're doing. It's like "Look at those stupid people writing numbers and squiggly lines on chalkboards! Don't then know that if they want to exercise their arms dumbbells would build up their muscles far more quickly?"

"I open 400 browser tabs at once!" This is not a viable solution to a mere mortal.

Nobody has 400 browser tabs, the fact you feel the need to exaggerate already should tell you you're on the wrong path. As to your complaint that I accused you, you poor delicate flower, of trolling when you have no interest in how I work and just don't care, how many words have you devoted to this issue that you clearly (sarcasm) don't care about?

But that said, I come back to my original comment. Having multiple tabs open is, in reality, the only way to look at a constantly changing index page - of forums, news, whatever - and say "I'm interested in this, in this, in this" without risking those pages disappearing before I've had a chance to look at them. So what is the viable solution? I don't want to clutter up my bookmarks, and besides, right-click, add book mark, and create a name, would be infuriatingly annoying compared to middle-click.

So what is the "real" solution?

Because opening multiple tabs is that solution. In fact, it's probably the #1 reason tabs were invented. Otherwise could just have three windows open and tabs are overkill for that.

Should a different solution have been implemented instead? Possibly. tabs aren't perfect. But let's stop pretending that people who have more than three tabs open are doing something wrong.

Re:Electrolysis

[KGIII]

20 isn't bad. 30 isn't too bad. 50 is starting to get crazy. Hundreds - and yes people claim they do - are moronic.

Re:Electrolysis

[KGIII]

*shakes head sadly*

No.

Re:Electrolysis

[zippthorne]

Users are already saving the state, in the form of tabs. Wouldn't it make sense to have a built-in dedicated and optimized version of that?

Re:Hey Idiot (Yes, You)

[jaklode]

Amazon has a HTML5 player too, but it does not work for all content yet.

Moral of the story: Fork it if you want it.

[sethstorm]

How long until we see forks of Firefox that don't give up on plugins?

vSphere Web Client HTML5 needed soon

[Joe_Dragon]

They need to get rid of the flash based one.

Re:Is this goodbye?

[narcc]

Your disbelief does not affect reality in any way.

Re:Pity

[tepples]

What would replace Flash Player for viewing Newgrounds?

Re:Is this goodbye?

[myowntrueself]

Of course, they're also killing support for NoScript

Odd. Giorgio Maone, the author of NoScript, says Mozilla isn't doing that. It's almost as if you don't know what you're talking about.

This is the Internet, and Slashdot! How dare you accuse someone of not knowing what they are talking about!

Re:Question

[fahrbot-bot]

What is NPAPI ?

Jesus you're lazy: NPAPI

Re:Is this goodbye?

[Anonymuous Coward]

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/

O God.

As if the xml/xul/xpcom repetitive cargo cult nighmare wasn't bad enough.

Just as the code started to mature a little bit, and despite its ugliness and brittleness, people started to make (a little bit) sense of it, they plan to tear everything down and put into place another mumbo-jumbo of Web 3.0 idiocy (rewritten in Rust, no less!)

Just like the xorg/wayland bunch of idiots.

And to add insult to injury, they will make everything closed-garden: no more addons not reviewed by mozilla.inc, even if they're signed and you explicitly trust the developer's certificate!

Will Pale Moon still have them?

[cfalcon]

Pale Moon is based on an older Firefox base, but I'm very curious as to whether it will continue to support NPAPI after Firefox axes them. Anyone know for sure?

Re:Will Pale Moon still have them?

[hughperkins]

Pale Moon is trademarked, https://github.com/MoonchildPr... If you fork it, you have to change the name, just like the original Firefox, and also Truecrypt.

Re:Will Pale Moon still have them?

[cfalcon]

I don't think your reply is topical?

Mozilla also harms its browser extension market

[Anonymous Coward]

In August Mozilla announced they are going to deprecate XUL-based extensions, which hurts popular extensions such as DownThemAll. In fact the DTA dev has posted an insightful comment in his blog regarding this decision:
http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/

Re:Whoa! Waiddamin there!

[KGIII]

I was reading your post and expecting it to end with a joke about Oracle being Republicans, hating browsers, wanting them to die, and that being the way of their kind. I must say, I'm kind of disappointed, actually. I guess I'll have to just imagine it.

Larry is a Republican. He hates the freedom offered by Mozilla. He hates everything, even children who use Firefox. He wants them and us to die. It is the way of their kind. He rides around on his yacht while children starve. He hates them and wants the children to die.

*sighs*

It doesn't make me feel as good as I was hoping.

Multiprocess = more stable memory use and speed

[Samare]

With a fresh profile and no or few extensions, Firefox's single process model is nice.
However, with some extensions, Firefox may slow down in a matter of hours or even less depending of usage.
That's why I hope that Firefox will switch sooner than later to the multiprocess model. I prefer it to use more memory if it means it won't slow down.
And of course, it will still be possible to disable it if we have too little memory.

By the way, don't worry about extensions, they won't go away anytime soon if ever.

Re:Pity

[tepples]

How will Newgrounds manage to contact all authors of uploaded SWFs to get them to reupload as HTML5? How many authors even still have the original FLA and an up-to-date Creative Cloud subscription to make an HTML5 version?

Re:Is this goodbye?

[arglebargle_xiv]

And that's the crazy thing about this, they're deprecating NPAPI, whose main user is Flash, "for security reasons", but specifically leaving in support for... Flash, the most dangerous, buggy attack vector there is. It's like the TSA announcing that they're going to continue running their long-running security theatre performance in order to annoy all travellers, but will be waving through anyone with dynamite strapped to their body.

Re: No Jarva support?

[Dahamma]

Nope, that's just not true.

While Java was originally designed to run interactive TV apps, browser-based applets were the first popular use and were supported in the first public release of Java 1.0 in 1995 (well predating the ".com" era).

Agree that applets are mostly pretty awful, though.

Re:Is this goodbye?

[TheCarp]

Actually you know what it reminds me of....

Back in days of old there was a Place called Buzzy's in Boston. It was a tiny little corner take out place downtown. They had roast beef and the whole menu was cartoon art. They were open late, and right by a train station.

Well One day they were shut down, if I remember, there was a big IRS sign about the property being seized. Then a year or three later, there was Buzzy's again, under new management. Mostly the same menu..... but then I saw an interview with the new owner....

He said there was one thing missing, and customers kept asking for it. You can even still find reviews and articles on line talking about their "kinish", which is said to have been the old owners wife's recipe.

What I can't find now is the interview, where he described why it wasn't coming back, and called it a health hazard and meat going rancid in a vat of sauce.

But.... people kept asking for it.....

It's still about contacting uploaders

[tepples]

Either build a Flash decompiler to translate it to HTML5

Which would need permission from each uploader, and I'm not sure whether the submission agreement that was in effect at the time of each upload already granted this permission. I imagine it's not like YouTube, where transcoding is mentioned from day one as an expected part of video delivery. If not, how will Newgrounds manage to contact all authors of uploaded SWFs to seek permission to convert to HTML5?

Re:It's still about contacting uploaders

[tepples]

Thank you. Now that the legal stuff is out of the way, the onus lies on Newgrounds to find SWFs that don't survive conversion with existing tools such as Shumway.