11 ms·

The likely end of DownThemAll

257 points by deltaprotocol 11y ago

brillenfux 11y ago
At this point, would it make sense to fork Firefox?
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  There's already GNU IceCat. Pale Moon is quite popular among Windows power users, I've read.
  - jd3 11y ago
    Ridiculous. I've never heard of power users using Pale moon. it seems like the current `hot fad' in comparison to products like SeaMonkey, which power users have always used since the de-coupling of the Mozilla Suite (netscape suite) in 2005. my personal thoughts on pale moon can be found here[0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3ay037/pale_moon_to_switch_from_gecko_to_goanna/csh6ond https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3ay037/pale_moon_t...
    - steve-howard 11y ago
      I still use Firefox, but I looked at the status of some of the forks after today's news. It seems that Pale Moon, at the very least, is a true fork, but I don't have a whole lot of confidence that it would be right for me. In particular, it seems that they take a _very_ old-school approach to media on the Web [1], they really only bother with XUL addon compatibility [2], and an attitude that they should only open-source what is legally required of them [3]. There's nothing wrong with these views, but they don't work well for me. I just want my browser to work, with the extensions I like, and until now the way to go about that has been to stick with regular Firefox. Looks like that might not work for very long either. [1] "Media support is a regularly-discussed topic for Pale Moon users, [...] This is, however, not a goal of Pale Moon because of the inherent shift of focus from document content to media content." https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml [2] "If you still like to develop JetPack add-ons for Pale Moon, you will likely have to make a completely separate extension specific for Pale Moon targeting." Ibid. [3] "There is no requirement or even reason why I should be forced to also release helper applications that are in no way tied to browser operation as Open Source as well." http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7818 http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7818
- smalley 11y ago
  I think that's what the Pale Moon (https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/) folks were doing some time ago. I'm pretty sure they support most of the original firefox extensions without the signing etc.
  - cmcnally 11y ago
    I have been using Pale Moon x64 as my daily browser for years now. I have run into a few issues with extension compatibility, (ex: Greasemonkey has issues with versions newer than 1.15.1) but support is generally pretty good. I see it as a viable alternative to Firefox, but it could benefit from a little more mainstream support.
  - cauterized 11y ago
    Too bad there's no Mac version.
    - richardboegli 11y ago
      Pale Moon for Mac OSX 24.7.1 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=41 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=41 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099556
- ionforce 11y ago
  Would such a thing even be sustainable? Forks are free. Good, maintained, used forks are another.
johansch 11y ago
They should spearhead the work on pushing the spec people (and in extension the actual developer teams) at the browser companies to support what is needed to implement DownThemAll in Chrome/Opera/Safari/New Firefox. I have the feeling there isn't that much that is lacking today (sparse file writing support?). This is clearly a use case that users want. (DownThemAll is the sole reason I have Firefox installed. Would love to have it work in e.g. Chrome.)
timdafweak 11y ago
Not just DTA, but FireGestures, Easy DragToGo, and all the amazing extensions that made me stick by Firefox even though most of my colleagues left for Chrome. It is a sad day.
- Nadya 11y ago
  It's a sad day for me because I use FireGestures entirely for their wheel gesture "[Popup] List all tabs" that allows me to scroll between my tabs from anywhere on the page. It's a strange feature that I've only been able to find in FireGestures (and wish I could find as a stand-alone extension). I use DTA! with AntiContainer quite frequently. Palemoon doesn't (properly) support Tab Groups, so I refuse to use it. The add-on is broken and doesn't restore tabs if the browser crashes. I feel like my only option is to disable FF updates and hope I never get bit by a security issue. As GNU IceCat doesn't work on my machine. Or learn how to compile from source and maintain my own personal fork... (And before anyone suggests it, using Aurora/Web Dev version is not an option for me. I've already been there, tried that.)
tunap 11y ago
This is what happens when humans achieve success. Rather than maintain the course they are obligated to exploit to the nth in order to squeeze every gram of return from an idea(product) until they can get no more. Then, they will get creative and pull out every hook & crook to squeeze some more. Thanks Mozilla, for everything up until your mass-collection, feature- bloat, entrapment blitz you've set out upon. Perhaps DTA will make their plug-in compatible with PaleMtoon now. Chances are the forks will come out on top & Moz can go f-up Thunderbird & Seamonkey for awhil as their top-heavy pyramid topples. edit:admittedly a pipe dream, markets ruled by duops and oligops never lose the top players, they just cannibalize each othet and bloat.
- AustinScript 11y ago
  I don't understand what is being exploited?
  - tunap 11y ago
    The end-user, of course. "Surreptitious spying is all the rage. Everybody is doing it."
s_dev 11y ago
Shame, I used to use it back in college. Like most colleges there was a proxy so torrenting without ssh tunnelling was difficult and I didn't have a server to tunnel in to anyway. Most people just bought RapidShare (also gone) and downthemall saved mind numbing ctrl+c/v for .rar files along with being able to pause and resume downloads which few others have seemed to grasp as well as they did.
dangoor 11y ago
As people have been saying in the thread that links to the announcement, it is not at all clear that extensions that today can do things in Firefox that are not possible in Chrome will be unable to do those things in the future. The mechanism for things like changing tab management and such would surely change, but that doesn't mean there won't be one.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  It also doesn't mean there will be one. Uncertainty about the future of an API is bad, it always causes developers who build on that API to panic and assume the worst.
  - brighteyes 11y ago
    Uncertainty is bad, but it's unavoidable in this case, for two reasons: * They need feedback from addon makers in order to design the new API. * Mozilla does all its work in the open anyhow. There is no way to avoid an announcement about an intention to change the API, before stating the API in full. Yes, it caused uncertainty, and that's a downside, but open development is generally worth it.
    - vanderZwan 11y ago
      With that in mind it's both expected and perfectly fine if addon developers are up in arms about this change, as long as it doesn't stop Mozilla from designing a new API in the open while listening to the developers. Hostile feedback is still feedback.
    - mook 11y ago
      > There is no way to avoid an announcement about an intention to change the API, before stating the API in full. Yes, it caused uncertainty, and that's a downside, but open development is generally worth it. It's quite possible to announce that they're starting to implement the new API, wait a year or two until it's capable enough, _then_ start talking about deprecating the existing one. Just like it was possible to finish implementing extension signing (or at least to the extent that people can automate signing) before deciding on a time frame to enforce it, or to get the automatic SSL certificate issuer (Let's Encrypt) working before talking about deprecating non-SSL HTTP traffic. Basically, don't put the cart before the horse, let people implement transition plans. Wanting to have better things is fine; scaring people without having actionable mitigation strategies isn't so nice.
beloch 11y ago
From the Firefox announcement: Re: Why they are removing XUL: "XPCOM and XUL are two of the most fundamental technologies to Firefox. The ability to write much of the browser in JavaScript has been a huge advantage for Mozilla. It also makes Firefox far more customizable than other browsers. However, the add-on model that arose naturally from these technologies is extremely permissive. Add-ons have complete access to Firefox’s internal implementation. This lack of modularity leads to many problems. A permissive add-on model means that we have limited flexibility in changing the foundations of Firefox. ... "The tight coupling between the browser and its add-ons also creates shorter-term problems for Firefox development. It’s not uncommon for Firefox development to be delayed because of broken add-ons. In the most extreme cases, changes to the formatting of a method in Firefox can trigger problems caused by add-ons that modify our code via regular expressions. Add-ons can also cause Firefox to crash when they use APIs in unexpected ways. Re: When XUL is being ripped out Consequently, we have decided to deprecate add-ons that depend on XUL, XPCOM, and XBL. We don’t have a specific timeline for deprecation, but most likely it will take place within 12 to 18 months from now. " Re: The gap in capability "A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons cannot possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they currently exist. Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox extensions as possible." ------------------------------- It's overly optimistic to assume add-on developers will have new versions ready in just a year if the API they're expected to rewrite everything in isn't even ready yet. I can understand why Mozilla is making this move, but it's being rushed. If WebExtension were ready today then this announcement would be more reasonable, but it's not even close! Hopefully Mozilla is just trying to scare their add-on developers into action, so they'll speak up and tell Mozilla exactly what they need from WebExtension. Starting over in a new API means a lot of existing add-ons will probably die anyways, but hopefully the important ones will make the move if Mozilla gives them enough time and support.
- cwyers 11y ago
  > add-ons that modify our code via regular expressions That's... actually kinda terrifying.
carlosrg 11y ago
I don't know if it's very smart to limit one of the most distinctive features of Firefox, the powerful add-ons available. Erodes the differences between Firefox and other browsers. If Firefox is going to be just another Chrome, people will just use Chrome.
- AstroJetson 11y ago
  I agree, if they are all going to look alike, work alike and the base is now Chrome, then might as well use Chrome. But frankly if I wanted to use Chrome then I'd be using Chrome now. I've stopped the version madness here, I have some plugins that I love that preclude me from going forward. I'd rather see the team go "Hey we have 2.3 million person years of backlogged bugs, we are going to fix them before we make a fundamental change to the browser. Security is an issue, but with my work machine I'm not hitting sites that would put me at risk.
  - mccr8 11y ago
    Visiting only trusted sites is a niche use case for web browsers.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    > Security is an issue, but with my work machine I'm not hitting sites that would put me at risk. How can you possibly know this for certain?
  - geofft 11y ago
    > Security is an issue, but with my work machine I'm not hitting sites that would put me at risk. What add-ons do you use on this extremely restricted set of internal-only websites?
- eloisant 11y ago
  The truth is Firefox already lost most of its market share to Chrome, so "powerful add-on" doesn't seem to be a strong enough selling point to retain users. It is, however, a big liability. In terms of security but also stability and performances. The way extensions work in Firefox is a bit crazy, it's like opening your belly and say "here, change whatever you want". It's the equivalent of a desktop OS where any installed application runs in kernel land where they can slow down everything, crash everything, make the browser unusable... Not only a bad written extensions can have disastrous consequences, it's impossible for the Firefox team to keep backward compatibility because they have no idea what XUL file the extensions developers are overlaying or what core JS object they've monkey-patched.
tptacek 11y ago
There is no piece of software in the world harder to secure than a browser. There's almost no other piece of software where compromises have higher stakes. Further, the verdict is probably in on whether browsers should use multi-process sandboxes, and how careful they need to be about privilege-escalated Javascript, which is an enormous loophole for runtime security measures like ASLR and DEP. Firefox's multi-process model is apparently called Electrolysis. Electrolysis apparently breaks XUL extensions. If that's the short term cost of getting Firefox to the same level of security that Chrome is at, it seems more than worth it. If this were an encrypted messaging application like TextSecure making an extension-breaking announcement for security, we'd have no trouble understanding the stakes. What some people seem to have a hard time accepting is that their browser is their most important encrypted messaging application.
- tn123 11y ago
  >Electrolysis apparently breaks XUL extensions. This is wrong. It absolutely does not break XUL extensions per-se. Add-ons will require some (moderate for most add-ons) changes when accessing out-of-process web content. A lot of add-ons may not even require changes at all, because they either do not access web content directly in the first place, or the Cross-Process-Wrappers and shims mozilla already implemented will be enough (changes might be still wise to get away from a blocking wrapper-API to the async frame script API, but that matters only for perceived performance of the browser, not for security) DownThemAll! for example does already support e10s in the Nightly builds since quite some time, NoScript supported e10s in the past, Greasemonkey spend 9 months to add e10s support (Anthony tells in a comment to the original blog post). GM is admittedly an add-on that required a lot of changes to make it work, but it does work now apparently. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_multiprocess_Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_mul...
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I'm prepared to be wrong, as I am not an expert on XUL, Electrolysis, or the Firefox runtime. I can however interpret what Mozilla says is the reasoning behind breaking XUL extensions, which is: XUL extensions, among other things, get in the way of getting Electrolysis working. That's linked from this blog post. If things have to break in the short term for Mozilla to modernize Firefox's runtime hardening, well, that breakage seems worth it. Just based on the knowledge of what security flaws in Firefox get used for in the real world. --- (few min later) As an aside: if this is the definition of "XUL extensions can be made to work with e10s": The lack of an synchronous API in the chrome side is intentional: because the chrome process runs the Firefox UI, any responsiveness problems affect the whole browser. By making the chrome process block on the content process, CPOWs break this principle and allow an unresponsive content process to make the whole browser unresponsive. ... I can kind of see where they're coming from, even w/o considering security.
fuzzythinker 11y ago
Off topic. The url reads like down-the-mall in all lower case. s/Can be a pivot if no backoff from Mozilla/s
Karunamon 11y ago
Something I just thought of... if these changes are presumably meant to keep malware addons out of the browser, then it's necessarily operating in an infected environment. (I.e. something already had the ability to do things in the context of the user without that user's permission, and we're just preventing it from doing this one thing via restricting what the user can do) In what way does this meaningfully secure the browser from malware, with that in mind? If I've got code running in the user's account, I don't need to hook into the browser engine to direct the user at popup ads, phishing sites, harvest their keystrokes, or do any number of other evil things. Hooking into the browser is one of the least interesting things that evil me could be doing. I've got access to the browser's memory, the TCP stream, the ability to launch whatever programs the user does, and am probably traveling along with a payload to allow for privilege escalation. So, WTF?
- mschuster91 11y ago
  The problem these days is established extensions that get legitimately sold or their access data hacked, and malware rolled out to the users. Or extensions which actually do their job, but after a delay, e.g. a month, deploy the malware payload. Enforcing someone from Mozilla to take a look at the actual APIs used in the extension is a pretty reasonable way to prevent a lot of this. Also, disallowing local installs of unsigned stuff is usually a good practice - lots of "download managers" is bundled with "premium" "extensions" turning out to be toolbars collecting and shipping off your data, replacing your ads etc.
  - mook 11y ago
    > The problem these days is established extensions that get legitimately sold or their access data hacked, and malware rolled out to the users. Published extensions on addons.mozilla.org (i.e. the built-in extension distribution channel) already go through a review for every update. Someone from Mozilla _already_ has to take a look. Of course, the addon review queue is currently ~ 10 weeks (according to their blog, from Aug 12). Relative to the 6 week Firefox release cycle, it's like saying if Apple enforced application signing for OSX where you need to submit your app, wait a year and a half, then get a signed version back.
tacone 11y ago
Don't be so pessimistic. 18 months are a lot of time, Mozilla folks are smart and often listen to their users, there's the browser.html experiment going on, etc. I have a gut feeling that in a way or another, things will roughly be the same for extensions developers.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Also, Mozilla are going to have their developers work with add-on developers to help port them.
blinkingled 11y ago
Speaking of Download managers - Chrome still doesn't have a decent one and I for one will miss DownThemAll if it goes away - it is definitely a useful piece of software. Wonder what the new signing and addon development policies will do to FF market share - there won't be any reason not to just use Chrome anymore. I get the security part but the reason I use FF is because it is less memory hungry and has these extensions that either are not on Chrome or work poorly on it.
- chillacy 11y ago
  I used to use DTA on Firefox but switched a few years ago to native ones. I ended up writing one http://maxelapp.com/ http://maxelapp.com/ which works for Macs. It can intercept downloads from Chrome with a chrome extension
eiji 11y ago
I'm maintaining two Add-Ons with around 20k active users. I agree with his predictions, but I also find it hard to give to much attention to voices like the one expressed here. It's hard for me to tell how much of this is genuine concern, or just how many donations or how much income he will loose because of this. I never see numbers from these Add-Ons. The one in question here has 1,300,000 daily active users. Sure, if I make $1500 per month on an Add-On, I would be very upset if things change. Then I'd rather see the XUL/XPCOM stuff around for another 15 years.
- tn123 11y ago
  Thanks for implying I'm in it for the money without even knowing me. Nice ad hominem you got there. Let's just say that the donations do not nearly cover the time I spend developing add-ons, helping other add-on developers out with their questions, volunteering on AMO, writing patches for core Firefox and so on.
  - eiji 11y ago
    I'm sorry if I offended you. All I'm saying is you could be in a position of conflict of interest. Unfortunately, your user base would never mobilize on your behalf, because they don't understand the technical details behind the comprehensive Firefox extension system that would be deprecated. That's a problem. The user don't understand what they are about to loose, but the big name developers with millions of users have a vested interest in the status quo. I don't have a solution for that. There are a lot of Add-On developers out there for which this is a business. Firefox extensions can generate an income. At least you make no secret about it. The euro coins are right next to the article. I mean that in a good way.
  - eiji 11y ago
    I'm sorry if I offended you. All I'm saying is you could be in a position of conflict of interest. Unfortunately, your user base would never mobilize on your behalf, because they don't understand the technical details behind the comprehensive Firefox extension system that would be deprecated. That's a problem. The user don't understand what they are about to loose, but the big name developers with millions of users have a vested interest in the status quo. I don't have a solution for that. There are a lot of Add-On developers out there for which this is a business. Firefox extensions can generate an income. At least you make no secret about it. The euro coins are right next to the article. I mean that in a good way.
geofft 11y ago
From a technical point of view, what is DownThemAll? It seems like it looks at the structure of the current web page, identifies all links, and then downloads them (in some cases using range requests, as with '90s-era download accelerators), with options for pausing and resuming downloads and renaming them in certain ways. What prevents this from being done using a Chrome extension to look at the page structure and render some UI, plus a bit of native code using the native messaging API to actually store the files on disk? https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/nativeMessaging https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/nativeMessaging "Developer frustration" is a more-than-valid reason, but I'm trying to understand if this is a claim that no software like DownThemAll can possibly be written without Mozilla introducing purpose-built extension APIs.
- Tobu 11y ago
  Yup, it's basically a spider. The Anticontainer plug-in enhances it to fetch images that are a few steps away from the original page. Looks like it just needs unrestricted XHR, which greasemonkey and every other chrome extension already require. Maybe off-screen rendering, which could look like this: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions/proposed-changes/apis-under-development/offscreen-tabs https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensi...
  - alexolog 11y ago
    > The Anticontainer plug-in enhances it to fetch images that are a few steps away from the original page You should look at Imagehost Grabber, which is best described as Anticontainer on steroids, http://imagehost-grabber.eu/index.php http://imagehost-grabber.eu/index.php
- aaron695 11y ago
  The main reason people install it I thought is because 1. It allows downloads to start and stop. No more 90% of that iso then having to start again. 2. It opens up 4 thingies on the file and downloads simultaneously. So 4 times quicker if the website is restricting bandwidth per connection.
hyperion2010 11y ago
This seems like a classic case if thinking people use your software for the core features you develop. I hate to break it to you but people don't use windows for the control panel. Firefox and other browsers have become development platforms and many of their "users" don't use their platform for its 'control panel,' they use it for some useful tool built on top of it. To use a linux kernel term, this breaks userspace (might be a sign that browsers have some serious OS envy). This is particularly bad because if many of your users use your platform for a tool that only works on an old, unsupported version (think XP), you actually make the security situation WORSE since those users don't care about security, they care about the tools they need to get their jobs done. They are still going to use those tools and you have just left them hanging out to dry from a security perspective. Talk about passing the buck.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  > To use a linux kernel term, this breaks userspace (might be a sign that browsers have some serious OS envy). No, the equivalent of breaking userspace would be breaking the Web platform. This is more like breaking the in-kernel API for .ko modules—and the official Linux policy on this is [1]. Firefox has always been much less inclined to break its internal XPCOM APIs than the Linux kernel has been to break its internal in-kernel APIs. [1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
  - tux3 11y ago
    The comparison only goes so far since extensions can't get "mainlined" into Firefox (well, except for that Pocket thing apparently). Mozilla can just replace their API without worrying about updating every extensions their changes broke. That's someone else's problem.
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    The way you keep comparing firefox extensions to kernel modules seems really disingenuous, the paralels are weak at best.
  - 11y ago
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nathanb 11y ago
I think some of this might be Firefox OS mentality creeping into the browser. I have used Firefox since right after it stopped being called Firebird (0.8 - 0.9 days). I loved it because it seemed to be built around an aesthetic of tinkering. Coming from Konqueror, which is like the tape deck in your mom's minivan, Firefox was like a fancy hi-fi sound system. You get decent sound with the defaults, but if you really know what you're doing you can produce jaw-dropping results. In grad school, I did some research work examining and improving a Firefox extension. I had toyed with extension writing before, but the power that extensions had over the DOM on one end and the whole browser experience on the other end was amazing. Now, I think Mozilla developers have gotten the Firefox OS mentality and are treating the browser core like a kernel. Sure, you can do anything you want in user mode, but the kernel is inviolable. I understand that Firefox is a Big Boy browser now. People are using it the world over; using it in corporate settings; trusting it to keep their personal information safe. That has got to put a lot of pressure on the Mozilla devs to make sure the browser is locked down as tight as can be. I can install the Developer Edition. I can still tinker. I can customize my own experience to my heart's content. But as an extension author myself, I sympathize mightily with the developers of DownThemAll. I want to make others' browsing experiences better too, and lately I feel like Mozilla have been working against me rather than with me on this. Firefox is actually a really good browser. They've made some pretty questionable decisions of late, but I do think their tech is as good as any browser tech out there today. But I liked Firefox not because I like their browser but because I could make it my browser, and Mozilla keep making it harder to do that. That makes me sad.
scrollinondubs 11y ago
Mozilla is dead. Long live Mozilla Extended Support Release! https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
- hadrien01 11y ago
  Here's hoping the old extension system deprecation comes after the release of ESR 45, so we can have support for old extensions until March 2017!
jfb 11y ago
People still use download managers? I honestly had no idea.
- chillacy 11y ago
  DTA was pretty good for its download acceleration abilities. That's still useful, especially for content hosted far away.
  - jfb 11y ago
    Yeah, I don't doubt it. I've been spoiled by living close to the data I want to download. I imagine that people at the far end of attenuated links would have a very different experience.
seany 11y ago
This is very disappointing. Extensions are basically the only reason I'm still using firefox. Tree style tabs and greasemonkey I use everyday :(
justin_ 11y ago
I'll be pretty upset if the addons that let you modify the Firefox UI via XUL have to go away. Tree-style tabs[1] for example is one of the major extensions keeping me with FF. There's really no alternative for Chrome since they can't completely change the tab UI like Firefox can. Check out the screenshots! [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- thristian 11y ago
  Tree Style Tabs is one of my favourite browser extensions of all time, but it's alreody pretty broken on Firefox 42, and apparently it depends quite a bit on reaching into the browser's UI code and rewritiing chunks of it. I will be very sad if it breaks completely, but not very surprised.
  - efng 11y ago
    when I lose Tree Style Tabs, I will be deeply saddened and how I browse will be greatly changed.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  As is mentioned on the WebExtensions page, they want to add APIs enabling things like that.
- hussong 11y ago
  Wouldn't something like Tabs Outliner in Chrome be a suitable replacement? What would be the UX issues there for people switching over? Docking? Tabs styling?
tomc1985 11y ago
This, along with all the other simplifications in tech lately, along with everyone's inexplicable obsession with tablets/phablets/phones, signals the end of the power user era
aidenn0 11y ago
"The new APIs would only allow for a severely limited in functionality, severely stripped down DownThemAll! at best." This is speculation. The new APIs aren't finished yet, and the announcement they linked to specifically addresses this concern, stating that the new APIs as implemented today don't allow for a lot of existing addons functionality, and specifically states their intention to work with addon developers to ensure that the functionality can be added.
akavel 11y ago
As to NoScript: - from a linked Mozilla blog post: > [...] A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons cannot possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they currently exist. Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox extensions as possible. [...] (https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...) - then, from a link posted at the end of the Mozilla blog post (in an "Update" section): > [...] One concern people have is that their favorite add-on is no longer going to be supported, especially add-ons for power users. Some of the ones being mentioned are: > [...] NoScript, [...] > We’re working with Giorgio Maone, the developer of NoScript, to design the APIs he needs to implement NoScript as a WebExtension. [...] (https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/ https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-o...)
- Excavator 11y ago
  Giorgio's post on the matter: https://hackademix.net/2015/08/22/webextensions-api-noscript/ https://hackademix.net/2015/08/22/webextensions-api-noscript...
Havoc 11y ago
How DTA is this dominant at all is a bit of a mystery to me. It allows me to download sequentially names files in rudimentary batches yes but thats not exactly mindblowing tech.
- Nadya 11y ago
  This is a large reason why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage But what you listed also isn't all it provides. Imagine being 99% done with a 35.6GB download. If Firefox crashes, you get to start that download from the beginning. As if you hadn't downloaded any part of it at all. DTA would recover and you'd download 1% of that 35.6GB instead of the entire 35.6GB. That's a large reason to use DTA over the built-in download manager by itself.
  - douche 11y ago
    One would hope that anyone providing a 35GB download would provide a torrent or magnet-link download. Maybe I'm wrong, but is seeding the torrent any more expensive than the same bandwidth from a web/ftp server? And then, it's also possible to offload some of the bandwidth onto the swarm, assuming there's more than one concurrent download. It is a little amazing that the downloading functionality provided out-of-the-box in all the major browsers is such hot garbage still.
    - Nadya 11y ago
      So instead of a download manager I need a torrenting program? ;) That's just shifting the problem of "poor downloading" to a different tool. Many would prefer to not have to install another program and would prefer installing an add-on for a program they already have installed. I do agree with you about torrent/magnet link being provided. Though sometimes large .iso downloads don't come with a torrent/magnet link. E: Regardless of file size - even if the download is only 20mb - it's annoying to have to redownload the entire 20mb instead of starting where it left off. What if I'm having connection issues? What if the server is having connection issues? Starting at n% and slowly making progress is better than starting from 0% or having the download be impossible...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rcxdude 11y ago
For me, tree style tabs and the ability to have 100s of tabs open is the killer feature of firefox, and the reason I don't use any other browser. I will likely stop updating if these cease to work, and switch to any other browser which allows me to continue my workflow (or maybe start developing my own fork). I suspect that a substantial portion of firefox's remaining users are there not because of the core browser (which is now almost indistinguishable from chrome), but because of an extension which either no-one cares or no-one is able to port to another browser.
rhelmer 11y ago
First, see https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/ https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-o... 1. these ideas are being announced far in advance of any actual changes 2. firefox devs (see link above) actively want to support current popular extensions, by adding to the Web Extension APIs In fact, you can participate in this discussion with Mozilla devs more directly: https://webextensions.uservoice.com/forums/315663-webextension-api-ideas https://webextensions.uservoice.com/forums/315663-webextensi... Nobody working on Firefox wants to take away your most useful extensions, become a "clone" of Chrome (or any other browser) or otherwise has ulterior motives. The goals is really about improving performance and security and making add-ons easier to write and port between browsers.
- nathanb 11y ago
  Unintended consequences are still consequences. Most extensions are developed by volunteers; many of the rest are, at best, subsidized as a second job through donations or ad affiliates. These volunteers don't always have the time to fight for the APIs they need. DownThemAll has been around for a long time. I'm sure its developers are as passionate and involved as you will find anywhere in the Firefox ecosystem. But for the past couple of years, and especially recently, it has felt like Mozilla are working against extension developers rather than for them. Each developer must decide individually when the sunk cost becomes too much. This move will probably be that point for a number of developers.
  - rhelmer 11y ago
    Good points, and I'll respond to the "sunk cost" bit by adding that backwards compatibility is a double-edged sword. My favorite pet example of this is MS versus Apple - the former has historically cared deeply about being backwards compatible, while the latter has gone through several hardware and software architecture changes that have required total rewrites from third-party developers. The situation with Firefox is a little trickier, staying backwards-compatible for web content has always been an important goal, but anything living inside the browser chrome does not get the same assurances. Right now extensions live somewhere between these two worlds, and we've had over a decade of experience with them so I think it's time to carve out their own space, with dependable APIs that are more stable than the internal browser APIs, but faster-moving and more privileged than the web.
cooleng 11y ago
Mozilla begin to abuse their power
ionised 11y ago
Man, if my favourite extensions no longer work properly then I don't know what I'll do. I think I might have to go full Stallman and wget + email html-only web pages to myself.
mbrownnyc 11y ago
Am I the only one who can't read an article when the text is aligned on the left size of a window like that?
Parafernalia 11y ago
I've started searching for an alternative download accelerator. So far, the best option seems to be the Citrio browser. It's downloading capabilities are on par with dTa: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/articles/citrio-a-chrome-like-browser-with-a-built-in-download-manager http://www.tutorialspoint.com/articles/citrio-a-chrome-like-...

257 points by deltaprotocol 11y ago

brillenfux 11y ago

At this point, would it make sense to fork Firefox?

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
There's already GNU IceCat. Pale Moon is quite popular among Windows power users, I've read.
- jd3 11y ago
  Ridiculous. I've never heard of power users using Pale moon. it seems like the current `hot fad' in comparison to products like SeaMonkey, which power users have always used since the de-coupling of the Mozilla Suite (netscape suite) in 2005. my personal thoughts on pale moon can be found here[0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3ay037/pale_moon_to_switch_from_gecko_to_goanna/csh6ond https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3ay037/pale_moon_t...
  - steve-howard 11y ago
    I still use Firefox, but I looked at the status of some of the forks after today's news. It seems that Pale Moon, at the very least, is a true fork, but I don't have a whole lot of confidence that it would be right for me. In particular, it seems that they take a _very_ old-school approach to media on the Web [1], they really only bother with XUL addon compatibility [2], and an attitude that they should only open-source what is legally required of them [3]. There's nothing wrong with these views, but they don't work well for me. I just want my browser to work, with the extensions I like, and until now the way to go about that has been to stick with regular Firefox. Looks like that might not work for very long either. [1] "Media support is a regularly-discussed topic for Pale Moon users, [...] This is, however, not a goal of Pale Moon because of the inherent shift of focus from document content to media content." https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml [2] "If you still like to develop JetPack add-ons for Pale Moon, you will likely have to make a completely separate extension specific for Pale Moon targeting." Ibid. [3] "There is no requirement or even reason why I should be forced to also release helper applications that are in no way tied to browser operation as Open Source as well." http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7818 http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7818
smalley 11y ago
I think that's what the Pale Moon (https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/) folks were doing some time ago. I'm pretty sure they support most of the original firefox extensions without the signing etc.
- cmcnally 11y ago
  I have been using Pale Moon x64 as my daily browser for years now. I have run into a few issues with extension compatibility, (ex: Greasemonkey has issues with versions newer than 1.15.1) but support is generally pretty good. I see it as a viable alternative to Firefox, but it could benefit from a little more mainstream support.
- cauterized 11y ago
  Too bad there's no Mac version.
  - richardboegli 11y ago
    Pale Moon for Mac OSX 24.7.1 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=41 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=41 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099556
ionforce 11y ago
Would such a thing even be sustainable? Forks are free. Good, maintained, used forks are another.

johansch 11y ago

They should spearhead the work on pushing the spec people (and in extension the actual developer teams) at the browser companies to support what is needed to implement DownThemAll in Chrome/Opera/Safari/New Firefox. I have the feeling there isn't that much that is lacking today (sparse file writing support?). This is clearly a use case that users want. (DownThemAll is the sole reason I have Firefox installed. Would love to have it work in e.g. Chrome.)

timdafweak 11y ago

Not just DTA, but FireGestures, Easy DragToGo, and all the amazing extensions that made me stick by Firefox even though most of my colleagues left for Chrome. It is a sad day.

Nadya 11y ago
It's a sad day for me because I use FireGestures entirely for their wheel gesture "[Popup] List all tabs" that allows me to scroll between my tabs from anywhere on the page. It's a strange feature that I've only been able to find in FireGestures (and wish I could find as a stand-alone extension). I use DTA! with AntiContainer quite frequently. Palemoon doesn't (properly) support Tab Groups, so I refuse to use it. The add-on is broken and doesn't restore tabs if the browser crashes. I feel like my only option is to disable FF updates and hope I never get bit by a security issue. As GNU IceCat doesn't work on my machine. Or learn how to compile from source and maintain my own personal fork... (And before anyone suggests it, using Aurora/Web Dev version is not an option for me. I've already been there, tried that.)

tunap 11y ago

This is what happens when humans achieve success. Rather than maintain the course they are obligated to exploit to the nth in order to squeeze every gram of return from an idea(product) until they can get no more. Then, they will get creative and pull out every hook & crook to squeeze some more. Thanks Mozilla, for everything up until your mass-collection, feature- bloat, entrapment blitz you've set out upon. Perhaps DTA will make their plug-in compatible with PaleMtoon now. Chances are the forks will come out on top & Moz can go f-up Thunderbird & Seamonkey for awhil as their top-heavy pyramid topples. edit:admittedly a pipe dream, markets ruled by duops and oligops never lose the top players, they just cannibalize each othet and bloat.

AustinScript 11y ago
I don't understand what is being exploited?
- tunap 11y ago
  The end-user, of course. "Surreptitious spying is all the rage. Everybody is doing it."

s_dev 11y ago

Shame, I used to use it back in college. Like most colleges there was a proxy so torrenting without ssh tunnelling was difficult and I didn't have a server to tunnel in to anyway. Most people just bought RapidShare (also gone) and downthemall saved mind numbing ctrl+c/v for .rar files along with being able to pause and resume downloads which few others have seemed to grasp as well as they did.

dangoor 11y ago

As people have been saying in the thread that links to the announcement, it is not at all clear that extensions that today can do things in Firefox that are not possible in Chrome will be unable to do those things in the future. The mechanism for things like changing tab management and such would surely change, but that doesn't mean there won't be one.

smacktoward 11y ago
It also doesn't mean there will be one. Uncertainty about the future of an API is bad, it always causes developers who build on that API to panic and assume the worst.
- brighteyes 11y ago
  Uncertainty is bad, but it's unavoidable in this case, for two reasons: * They need feedback from addon makers in order to design the new API. * Mozilla does all its work in the open anyhow. There is no way to avoid an announcement about an intention to change the API, before stating the API in full. Yes, it caused uncertainty, and that's a downside, but open development is generally worth it.
  - vanderZwan 11y ago
    With that in mind it's both expected and perfectly fine if addon developers are up in arms about this change, as long as it doesn't stop Mozilla from designing a new API in the open while listening to the developers. Hostile feedback is still feedback.
  - mook 11y ago
    > There is no way to avoid an announcement about an intention to change the API, before stating the API in full. Yes, it caused uncertainty, and that's a downside, but open development is generally worth it. It's quite possible to announce that they're starting to implement the new API, wait a year or two until it's capable enough, _then_ start talking about deprecating the existing one. Just like it was possible to finish implementing extension signing (or at least to the extent that people can automate signing) before deciding on a time frame to enforce it, or to get the automatic SSL certificate issuer (Let's Encrypt) working before talking about deprecating non-SSL HTTP traffic. Basically, don't put the cart before the horse, let people implement transition plans. Wanting to have better things is fine; scaring people without having actionable mitigation strategies isn't so nice.

beloch 11y ago

From the Firefox announcement: Re: Why they are removing XUL: "XPCOM and XUL are two of the most fundamental technologies to Firefox. The ability to write much of the browser in JavaScript has been a huge advantage for Mozilla. It also makes Firefox far more customizable than other browsers. However, the add-on model that arose naturally from these technologies is extremely permissive. Add-ons have complete access to Firefox’s internal implementation. This lack of modularity leads to many problems. A permissive add-on model means that we have limited flexibility in changing the foundations of Firefox. ... "The tight coupling between the browser and its add-ons also creates shorter-term problems for Firefox development. It’s not uncommon for Firefox development to be delayed because of broken add-ons. In the most extreme cases, changes to the formatting of a method in Firefox can trigger problems caused by add-ons that modify our code via regular expressions. Add-ons can also cause Firefox to crash when they use APIs in unexpected ways. Re: When XUL is being ripped out Consequently, we have decided to deprecate add-ons that depend on XUL, XPCOM, and XBL. We don’t have a specific timeline for deprecation, but most likely it will take place within 12 to 18 months from now. " Re: The gap in capability "A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons cannot possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they currently exist. Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox extensions as possible." ------------------------------- It's overly optimistic to assume add-on developers will have new versions ready in just a year if the API they're expected to rewrite everything in isn't even ready yet. I can understand why Mozilla is making this move, but it's being rushed. If WebExtension were ready today then this announcement would be more reasonable, but it's not even close! Hopefully Mozilla is just trying to scare their add-on developers into action, so they'll speak up and tell Mozilla exactly what they need from WebExtension. Starting over in a new API means a lot of existing add-ons will probably die anyways, but hopefully the important ones will make the move if Mozilla gives them enough time and support.

cwyers 11y ago
> add-ons that modify our code via regular expressions That's... actually kinda terrifying.

carlosrg 11y ago

I don't know if it's very smart to limit one of the most distinctive features of Firefox, the powerful add-ons available. Erodes the differences between Firefox and other browsers. If Firefox is going to be just another Chrome, people will just use Chrome.

AstroJetson 11y ago
I agree, if they are all going to look alike, work alike and the base is now Chrome, then might as well use Chrome. But frankly if I wanted to use Chrome then I'd be using Chrome now. I've stopped the version madness here, I have some plugins that I love that preclude me from going forward. I'd rather see the team go "Hey we have 2.3 million person years of backlogged bugs, we are going to fix them before we make a fundamental change to the browser. Security is an issue, but with my work machine I'm not hitting sites that would put me at risk.
- mccr8 11y ago
  Visiting only trusted sites is a niche use case for web browsers.
- cwyers 11y ago
  > Security is an issue, but with my work machine I'm not hitting sites that would put me at risk. How can you possibly know this for certain?
- geofft 11y ago
  > Security is an issue, but with my work machine I'm not hitting sites that would put me at risk. What add-ons do you use on this extremely restricted set of internal-only websites?
eloisant 11y ago
The truth is Firefox already lost most of its market share to Chrome, so "powerful add-on" doesn't seem to be a strong enough selling point to retain users. It is, however, a big liability. In terms of security but also stability and performances. The way extensions work in Firefox is a bit crazy, it's like opening your belly and say "here, change whatever you want". It's the equivalent of a desktop OS where any installed application runs in kernel land where they can slow down everything, crash everything, make the browser unusable... Not only a bad written extensions can have disastrous consequences, it's impossible for the Firefox team to keep backward compatibility because they have no idea what XUL file the extensions developers are overlaying or what core JS object they've monkey-patched.

tptacek 11y ago

There is no piece of software in the world harder to secure than a browser. There's almost no other piece of software where compromises have higher stakes. Further, the verdict is probably in on whether browsers should use multi-process sandboxes, and how careful they need to be about privilege-escalated Javascript, which is an enormous loophole for runtime security measures like ASLR and DEP. Firefox's multi-process model is apparently called Electrolysis. Electrolysis apparently breaks XUL extensions. If that's the short term cost of getting Firefox to the same level of security that Chrome is at, it seems more than worth it. If this were an encrypted messaging application like TextSecure making an extension-breaking announcement for security, we'd have no trouble understanding the stakes. What some people seem to have a hard time accepting is that their browser is their most important encrypted messaging application.

tn123 11y ago
>Electrolysis apparently breaks XUL extensions. This is wrong. It absolutely does not break XUL extensions per-se. Add-ons will require some (moderate for most add-ons) changes when accessing out-of-process web content. A lot of add-ons may not even require changes at all, because they either do not access web content directly in the first place, or the Cross-Process-Wrappers and shims mozilla already implemented will be enough (changes might be still wise to get away from a blocking wrapper-API to the async frame script API, but that matters only for perceived performance of the browser, not for security) DownThemAll! for example does already support e10s in the Nightly builds since quite some time, NoScript supported e10s in the past, Greasemonkey spend 9 months to add e10s support (Anthony tells in a comment to the original blog post). GM is admittedly an add-on that required a lot of changes to make it work, but it does work now apparently. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_multiprocess_Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_mul...
- tptacek 11y ago
  I'm prepared to be wrong, as I am not an expert on XUL, Electrolysis, or the Firefox runtime. I can however interpret what Mozilla says is the reasoning behind breaking XUL extensions, which is: XUL extensions, among other things, get in the way of getting Electrolysis working. That's linked from this blog post. If things have to break in the short term for Mozilla to modernize Firefox's runtime hardening, well, that breakage seems worth it. Just based on the knowledge of what security flaws in Firefox get used for in the real world. --- (few min later) As an aside: if this is the definition of "XUL extensions can be made to work with e10s": The lack of an synchronous API in the chrome side is intentional: because the chrome process runs the Firefox UI, any responsiveness problems affect the whole browser. By making the chrome process block on the content process, CPOWs break this principle and allow an unresponsive content process to make the whole browser unresponsive. ... I can kind of see where they're coming from, even w/o considering security.

fuzzythinker 11y ago

Off topic. The url reads like down-the-mall in all lower case. s/Can be a pivot if no backoff from Mozilla/s

Karunamon 11y ago

Something I just thought of... if these changes are presumably meant to keep malware addons out of the browser, then it's necessarily operating in an infected environment. (I.e. something already had the ability to do things in the context of the user without that user's permission, and we're just preventing it from doing this one thing via restricting what the user can do) In what way does this meaningfully secure the browser from malware, with that in mind? If I've got code running in the user's account, I don't need to hook into the browser engine to direct the user at popup ads, phishing sites, harvest their keystrokes, or do any number of other evil things. Hooking into the browser is one of the least interesting things that evil me could be doing. I've got access to the browser's memory, the TCP stream, the ability to launch whatever programs the user does, and am probably traveling along with a payload to allow for privilege escalation. So, WTF?

mschuster91 11y ago
The problem these days is established extensions that get legitimately sold or their access data hacked, and malware rolled out to the users. Or extensions which actually do their job, but after a delay, e.g. a month, deploy the malware payload. Enforcing someone from Mozilla to take a look at the actual APIs used in the extension is a pretty reasonable way to prevent a lot of this. Also, disallowing local installs of unsigned stuff is usually a good practice - lots of "download managers" is bundled with "premium" "extensions" turning out to be toolbars collecting and shipping off your data, replacing your ads etc.
- mook 11y ago
  > The problem these days is established extensions that get legitimately sold or their access data hacked, and malware rolled out to the users. Published extensions on addons.mozilla.org (i.e. the built-in extension distribution channel) already go through a review for every update. Someone from Mozilla _already_ has to take a look. Of course, the addon review queue is currently ~ 10 weeks (according to their blog, from Aug 12). Relative to the 6 week Firefox release cycle, it's like saying if Apple enforced application signing for OSX where you need to submit your app, wait a year and a half, then get a signed version back.

tacone 11y ago

Don't be so pessimistic. 18 months are a lot of time, Mozilla folks are smart and often listen to their users, there's the browser.html experiment going on, etc. I have a gut feeling that in a way or another, things will roughly be the same for extensions developers.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Also, Mozilla are going to have their developers work with add-on developers to help port them.

blinkingled 11y ago

Speaking of Download managers - Chrome still doesn't have a decent one and I for one will miss DownThemAll if it goes away - it is definitely a useful piece of software. Wonder what the new signing and addon development policies will do to FF market share - there won't be any reason not to just use Chrome anymore. I get the security part but the reason I use FF is because it is less memory hungry and has these extensions that either are not on Chrome or work poorly on it.

chillacy 11y ago
I used to use DTA on Firefox but switched a few years ago to native ones. I ended up writing one http://maxelapp.com/ http://maxelapp.com/ which works for Macs. It can intercept downloads from Chrome with a chrome extension

eiji 11y ago

I'm maintaining two Add-Ons with around 20k active users. I agree with his predictions, but I also find it hard to give to much attention to voices like the one expressed here. It's hard for me to tell how much of this is genuine concern, or just how many donations or how much income he will loose because of this. I never see numbers from these Add-Ons. The one in question here has 1,300,000 daily active users. Sure, if I make $1500 per month on an Add-On, I would be very upset if things change. Then I'd rather see the XUL/XPCOM stuff around for another 15 years.

tn123 11y ago
Thanks for implying I'm in it for the money without even knowing me. Nice ad hominem you got there. Let's just say that the donations do not nearly cover the time I spend developing add-ons, helping other add-on developers out with their questions, volunteering on AMO, writing patches for core Firefox and so on.
- eiji 11y ago
  I'm sorry if I offended you. All I'm saying is you could be in a position of conflict of interest. Unfortunately, your user base would never mobilize on your behalf, because they don't understand the technical details behind the comprehensive Firefox extension system that would be deprecated. That's a problem. The user don't understand what they are about to loose, but the big name developers with millions of users have a vested interest in the status quo. I don't have a solution for that. There are a lot of Add-On developers out there for which this is a business. Firefox extensions can generate an income. At least you make no secret about it. The euro coins are right next to the article. I mean that in a good way.
- eiji 11y ago
  I'm sorry if I offended you. All I'm saying is you could be in a position of conflict of interest. Unfortunately, your user base would never mobilize on your behalf, because they don't understand the technical details behind the comprehensive Firefox extension system that would be deprecated. That's a problem. The user don't understand what they are about to loose, but the big name developers with millions of users have a vested interest in the status quo. I don't have a solution for that. There are a lot of Add-On developers out there for which this is a business. Firefox extensions can generate an income. At least you make no secret about it. The euro coins are right next to the article. I mean that in a good way.

geofft 11y ago

From a technical point of view, what is DownThemAll? It seems like it looks at the structure of the current web page, identifies all links, and then downloads them (in some cases using range requests, as with '90s-era download accelerators), with options for pausing and resuming downloads and renaming them in certain ways. What prevents this from being done using a Chrome extension to look at the page structure and render some UI, plus a bit of native code using the native messaging API to actually store the files on disk? https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/nativeMessaging https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/nativeMessaging "Developer frustration" is a more-than-valid reason, but I'm trying to understand if this is a claim that no software like DownThemAll can possibly be written without Mozilla introducing purpose-built extension APIs.

Tobu 11y ago
Yup, it's basically a spider. The Anticontainer plug-in enhances it to fetch images that are a few steps away from the original page. Looks like it just needs unrestricted XHR, which greasemonkey and every other chrome extension already require. Maybe off-screen rendering, which could look like this: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions/proposed-changes/apis-under-development/offscreen-tabs https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensi...
- alexolog 11y ago
  > The Anticontainer plug-in enhances it to fetch images that are a few steps away from the original page You should look at Imagehost Grabber, which is best described as Anticontainer on steroids, http://imagehost-grabber.eu/index.php http://imagehost-grabber.eu/index.php
aaron695 11y ago
The main reason people install it I thought is because 1. It allows downloads to start and stop. No more 90% of that iso then having to start again. 2. It opens up 4 thingies on the file and downloads simultaneously. So 4 times quicker if the website is restricting bandwidth per connection.

hyperion2010 11y ago

This seems like a classic case if thinking people use your software for the core features you develop. I hate to break it to you but people don't use windows for the control panel. Firefox and other browsers have become development platforms and many of their "users" don't use their platform for its 'control panel,' they use it for some useful tool built on top of it. To use a linux kernel term, this breaks userspace (might be a sign that browsers have some serious OS envy). This is particularly bad because if many of your users use your platform for a tool that only works on an old, unsupported version (think XP), you actually make the security situation WORSE since those users don't care about security, they care about the tools they need to get their jobs done. They are still going to use those tools and you have just left them hanging out to dry from a security perspective. Talk about passing the buck.

pcwalton 11y ago
> To use a linux kernel term, this breaks userspace (might be a sign that browsers have some serious OS envy). No, the equivalent of breaking userspace would be breaking the Web platform. This is more like breaking the in-kernel API for .ko modules—and the official Linux policy on this is [1]. Firefox has always been much less inclined to break its internal XPCOM APIs than the Linux kernel has been to break its internal in-kernel APIs. [1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
- tux3 11y ago
  The comparison only goes so far since extensions can't get "mainlined" into Firefox (well, except for that Pocket thing apparently). Mozilla can just replace their API without worrying about updating every extensions their changes broke. That's someone else's problem.
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  The way you keep comparing firefox extensions to kernel modules seems really disingenuous, the paralels are weak at best.
- 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nathanb 11y ago

I think some of this might be Firefox OS mentality creeping into the browser. I have used Firefox since right after it stopped being called Firebird (0.8 - 0.9 days). I loved it because it seemed to be built around an aesthetic of tinkering. Coming from Konqueror, which is like the tape deck in your mom's minivan, Firefox was like a fancy hi-fi sound system. You get decent sound with the defaults, but if you really know what you're doing you can produce jaw-dropping results. In grad school, I did some research work examining and improving a Firefox extension. I had toyed with extension writing before, but the power that extensions had over the DOM on one end and the whole browser experience on the other end was amazing. Now, I think Mozilla developers have gotten the Firefox OS mentality and are treating the browser core like a kernel. Sure, you can do anything you want in user mode, but the kernel is inviolable. I understand that Firefox is a Big Boy browser now. People are using it the world over; using it in corporate settings; trusting it to keep their personal information safe. That has got to put a lot of pressure on the Mozilla devs to make sure the browser is locked down as tight as can be. I can install the Developer Edition. I can still tinker. I can customize my own experience to my heart's content. But as an extension author myself, I sympathize mightily with the developers of DownThemAll. I want to make others' browsing experiences better too, and lately I feel like Mozilla have been working against me rather than with me on this. Firefox is actually a really good browser. They've made some pretty questionable decisions of late, but I do think their tech is as good as any browser tech out there today. But I liked Firefox not because I like their browser but because I could make it my browser, and Mozilla keep making it harder to do that. That makes me sad.

scrollinondubs 11y ago

Mozilla is dead. Long live Mozilla Extended Support Release! https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

hadrien01 11y ago
Here's hoping the old extension system deprecation comes after the release of ESR 45, so we can have support for old extensions until March 2017!

jfb 11y ago

People still use download managers? I honestly had no idea.

chillacy 11y ago
DTA was pretty good for its download acceleration abilities. That's still useful, especially for content hosted far away.
- jfb 11y ago
  Yeah, I don't doubt it. I've been spoiled by living close to the data I want to download. I imagine that people at the far end of attenuated links would have a very different experience.

seany 11y ago

This is very disappointing. Extensions are basically the only reason I'm still using firefox. Tree style tabs and greasemonkey I use everyday :(

justin_ 11y ago

I'll be pretty upset if the addons that let you modify the Firefox UI via XUL have to go away. Tree-style tabs[1] for example is one of the major extensions keeping me with FF. There's really no alternative for Chrome since they can't completely change the tab UI like Firefox can. Check out the screenshots! [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

thristian 11y ago
Tree Style Tabs is one of my favourite browser extensions of all time, but it's alreody pretty broken on Firefox 42, and apparently it depends quite a bit on reaching into the browser's UI code and rewritiing chunks of it. I will be very sad if it breaks completely, but not very surprised.
- efng 11y ago
  when I lose Tree Style Tabs, I will be deeply saddened and how I browse will be greatly changed.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
As is mentioned on the WebExtensions page, they want to add APIs enabling things like that.
hussong 11y ago
Wouldn't something like Tabs Outliner in Chrome be a suitable replacement? What would be the UX issues there for people switching over? Docking? Tabs styling?

tomc1985 11y ago

This, along with all the other simplifications in tech lately, along with everyone's inexplicable obsession with tablets/phablets/phones, signals the end of the power user era

aidenn0 11y ago

"The new APIs would only allow for a severely limited in functionality, severely stripped down DownThemAll! at best." This is speculation. The new APIs aren't finished yet, and the announcement they linked to specifically addresses this concern, stating that the new APIs as implemented today don't allow for a lot of existing addons functionality, and specifically states their intention to work with addon developers to ensure that the functionality can be added.

akavel 11y ago

As to NoScript: - from a linked Mozilla blog post: > [...] A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons cannot possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they currently exist. Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox extensions as possible. [...] (https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...) - then, from a link posted at the end of the Mozilla blog post (in an "Update" section): > [...] One concern people have is that their favorite add-on is no longer going to be supported, especially add-ons for power users. Some of the ones being mentioned are: > [...] NoScript, [...] > We’re working with Giorgio Maone, the developer of NoScript, to design the APIs he needs to implement NoScript as a WebExtension. [...] (https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/ https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-o...)

Excavator 11y ago
Giorgio's post on the matter: https://hackademix.net/2015/08/22/webextensions-api-noscript/ https://hackademix.net/2015/08/22/webextensions-api-noscript...

Havoc 11y ago

How DTA is this dominant at all is a bit of a mystery to me. It allows me to download sequentially names files in rudimentary batches yes but thats not exactly mindblowing tech.

Nadya 11y ago
This is a large reason why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage But what you listed also isn't all it provides. Imagine being 99% done with a 35.6GB download. If Firefox crashes, you get to start that download from the beginning. As if you hadn't downloaded any part of it at all. DTA would recover and you'd download 1% of that 35.6GB instead of the entire 35.6GB. That's a large reason to use DTA over the built-in download manager by itself.
- douche 11y ago
  One would hope that anyone providing a 35GB download would provide a torrent or magnet-link download. Maybe I'm wrong, but is seeding the torrent any more expensive than the same bandwidth from a web/ftp server? And then, it's also possible to offload some of the bandwidth onto the swarm, assuming there's more than one concurrent download. It is a little amazing that the downloading functionality provided out-of-the-box in all the major browsers is such hot garbage still.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    So instead of a download manager I need a torrenting program? ;) That's just shifting the problem of "poor downloading" to a different tool. Many would prefer to not have to install another program and would prefer installing an add-on for a program they already have installed. I do agree with you about torrent/magnet link being provided. Though sometimes large .iso downloads don't come with a torrent/magnet link. E: Regardless of file size - even if the download is only 20mb - it's annoying to have to redownload the entire 20mb instead of starting where it left off. What if I'm having connection issues? What if the server is having connection issues? Starting at n% and slowly making progress is better than starting from 0% or having the download be impossible...

deleted 11y ago

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rcxdude 11y ago

For me, tree style tabs and the ability to have 100s of tabs open is the killer feature of firefox, and the reason I don't use any other browser. I will likely stop updating if these cease to work, and switch to any other browser which allows me to continue my workflow (or maybe start developing my own fork). I suspect that a substantial portion of firefox's remaining users are there not because of the core browser (which is now almost indistinguishable from chrome), but because of an extension which either no-one cares or no-one is able to port to another browser.

rhelmer 11y ago

First, see https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-on-changes/ https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/firefox-add-o... 1. these ideas are being announced far in advance of any actual changes 2. firefox devs (see link above) actively want to support current popular extensions, by adding to the Web Extension APIs In fact, you can participate in this discussion with Mozilla devs more directly: https://webextensions.uservoice.com/forums/315663-webextension-api-ideas https://webextensions.uservoice.com/forums/315663-webextensi... Nobody working on Firefox wants to take away your most useful extensions, become a "clone" of Chrome (or any other browser) or otherwise has ulterior motives. The goals is really about improving performance and security and making add-ons easier to write and port between browsers.

nathanb 11y ago
Unintended consequences are still consequences. Most extensions are developed by volunteers; many of the rest are, at best, subsidized as a second job through donations or ad affiliates. These volunteers don't always have the time to fight for the APIs they need. DownThemAll has been around for a long time. I'm sure its developers are as passionate and involved as you will find anywhere in the Firefox ecosystem. But for the past couple of years, and especially recently, it has felt like Mozilla are working against extension developers rather than for them. Each developer must decide individually when the sunk cost becomes too much. This move will probably be that point for a number of developers.
- rhelmer 11y ago
  Good points, and I'll respond to the "sunk cost" bit by adding that backwards compatibility is a double-edged sword. My favorite pet example of this is MS versus Apple - the former has historically cared deeply about being backwards compatible, while the latter has gone through several hardware and software architecture changes that have required total rewrites from third-party developers. The situation with Firefox is a little trickier, staying backwards-compatible for web content has always been an important goal, but anything living inside the browser chrome does not get the same assurances. Right now extensions live somewhere between these two worlds, and we've had over a decade of experience with them so I think it's time to carve out their own space, with dependable APIs that are more stable than the internal browser APIs, but faster-moving and more privileged than the web.

cooleng 11y ago

Mozilla begin to abuse their power

ionised 11y ago

Man, if my favourite extensions no longer work properly then I don't know what I'll do. I think I might have to go full Stallman and wget + email html-only web pages to myself.

mbrownnyc 11y ago

Am I the only one who can't read an article when the text is aligned on the left size of a window like that?

Parafernalia 11y ago

I've started searching for an alternative download accelerator. So far, the best option seems to be the Citrio browser. It's downloading capabilities are on par with dTa: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/articles/citrio-a-chrome-like-browser-with-a-built-in-download-manager http://www.tutorialspoint.com/articles/citrio-a-chrome-like-...