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Mozilla and Microsoft are rebuilding their browsers’ foundations
- protomyth 9y agoI'm pretty sure having plugins no longer working going forward is quite noticeable.
- NiLSPACE 9y agoAdd-ons will still work, but only the new WebExtensions. In Firefox 57 XUL extensions will stop working so Mozilla can finally start doing work on the internals of Firefox. Plugins like Java applets and Silverlight stopped working in Firefox 52 (not the ESR)
- protomyth 9y agoYes, new stuff will work, but not the stuff we have been using for years (which for a time will be much more capable than the WebExtensions add-ons). That would be noticeable, unlike what the title suggests.
- moron4hire 9y agoOnly to the few people who use those extensions. Most user's don't use any extensions at all.
- tux1968 9y agoWhat are you basing that on? A quick google suggests that at one point 85% of users used extensions.. and as of last year it was still 60% https://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/06/surprise-40-of-firefox-users-dont-use-add-ons/ https://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/06/surprise-40-of-firefox-use...
- gpm 9y agoAnd how many of those 60% just use ublock or something similar, which will continue working, and no other extensions?
- tux1968 9y agoThat really wasn't the point of my post. The claim made by the parent post was that "Most user's don't use any extensions at all."
- gpm 9y agoMy apologies, I didn't mean to come across as disagreeing with what you said, but just to put it in better context for the larger discussion of how noticeable disabling non-web extensions will be to the average user.
- carussell 9y agoYou're moving the goalposts.
- hashhar 9y agoInstead of crying about it, WE can add suggested APIs to be included in the WebExtensions extension Firefox is using. They recently added the Sidebar API which allows a form for vertical tabs but nobody has implemented trees yet.
- jplayer01 9y agoThey've shown themselves to be quite reluctant to accommodate the needs of vim extension authors (such as Vimperator). They can get bent.
- Etzos 9y agoAs someone who hasn't followed the actual specifics here, do you happen to have any links to those discussions/issues or other places these things happened? I'd really like to see their reasoning.
- semi-extrinsic 9y agoTheres also been quite heated discussions (and hostility from Mozilla devs, to be frank) around the Zotero plugin, see e.g. Dan Stillman's 2015 blog post and email-list-threads linked there. https://danstillman.com/2015/11/23/firefox-extension-scanning-is-security-theater?firefox-against-censorship https://danstillman.com/2015/11/23/firefox-extension-scannin... Edit: for those who don't want to dig, a random quote: "Shortly before we left AMO [Firefox's integrated addon channel], an AMO editor publicly told someone asking a technical question about Zotero that Zotero was “evil”, adding, “They submit a new version every week, with thousands of lines of changes, nearly always additions. Every time I review it I hope they’ll go bankrupt”" It seems (from many signals) very much like Mozilla would prefer it if most Firefox addons were tiny 200 line hobby projects that got updated once a blue moon.
- callahad 9y agoMany AMO Editors are volunteers, and all are human. We've significantly adjusted the AMO review guidelines and processes to avoid that sort of mishap in the future, as acknowledged at the end of that post. We're working hard on further changes to the process to reduce the stress and delays associated with manual review, including moving the review process to a post-publication check, instead of a pre-publication requirement. The heavy-handed review process was necessary with the old model of add-ons which had unrestricted access to the browser and to the host system. The new, permissions-based WebExtension model is dramatically easier to audit.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI wonder if they are driving people away by disabling things that worked for years. At work I have to use Java and Silverlight. In addition our IT department doesn't seem to be able to keep their certificates up to date. With chrome and Firefox being so strict they are almost unusable so I am using IE. In theory this should pressure suppliers to get rid of Java and our IT department should have better certificates but in practice I don't see this happening.
- simion314 9y agoI discovered now you need to have your extensions sign by Mozilla, we had such an extension that worked only with our product, you needed an account and we did not had many users, but now the extension will not work(you can make it work only on dev version of Firefox) until we get it signed by Mozilla.
- callahad 9y agoYou can automatically sign your add-on by calling `jpm sign` (SDK add-ons), `web-ext sign` (WebExtensions), or by manually hitting our API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Distribution#Signing_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Distribution#Sig...
- apostacy 9y agoRequiring signing of web extensions is still ludicrous. It makes sense for Google to do it. It makes zero sense for Mozilla to do it. Google wants to make money by developing a platform. Mozilla (should) want to make technology that empowers people. Mozilla does not have to provide technical support. Mozilla isn't making money off of it. I think that the only reason they did it was because Google did it. Should emacs or Autocad require signing of extensions? Why not? Because it would go directly against the grain of what those tools are for. And users should be smart enough to handle their own security. I would like someone to justify Firefox extension signing, while also explaining why nobody cares if other software has signed extensions.
- anilgulecha 9y agoThat's the cool thing about open standards. As long as individual pieces are to spec, it's completely ok to rewrite modules and components from the ground: People rely on the standard, and not the app.
- ibotty 9y agoIntra-browser-communication does not often follow a spec though. Of course, replacing a parser (for video formats, or css) is easier because of standards, but how to composite parts of an html site? That's not covered by standards.
- kibwen 9y agoIs there an argument that it should be?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ksk 9y agoTrue, but the W3C so far has done a horrible job at defining standards, which partly explains why no two browsers can render identically.
- kibwen 9y agoMost of the rendering differences I've seen date back to the era before anyone cared about standards. Can you give an example of a modern feature (i.e. not tables) that different browsers render differently due to ambiguities in the spec?
- sametmax 9y agoUI for the HTML rich elements such as the spinner. Punnycode encoded email addresses in email fields. Numerical keyboard on number fields. The whole mess with WebRTC. Video elements codecs. History API in early mobile browsers. The various APIs for storing data locally in the browser (particularly regarding blocking and size limit). Data expiration. This one is so messed up it makes me angry. Spawning a background task. And those are just the ones that popped in my head in a few minutes.
- red023 9y agoCan someone explain to me in a few words what exactly from servo is already in Firefox and how quantum is related to servo exactly? Some CSS processing is already in Firefox I think. But the main thing of servo is the rendering right? That seems to be pretty far away from ready.
- NiLSPACE 9y agoFrom Servo Stylo, the style system and WebRender, the renderer are used in Quantum. Stylo is more parallel which will bring a big performance improvement, especially on multi-core and mobile devices while WebRender uses the GPU to render websites which will also bring a huge performance improvement to mobile devices and computers with an (integrated) GPU.
- red023 9y agoWell yes I know that servo is about to make use of multi core but looking at its issues its far from ready for displaying websites correctly. So I am confused about this still as you have not really addressed what parts of servo are in fact in Firefox right now and what parts are not. I am not sure how "Rendering" is defined the way I understand it, its the part where servo has a looong was to go until its ready.
- NiLSPACE 9y agoIf you have the time there is a nice talk about WebRender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk Here is another great talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an5abNFba4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an5abNFba4Q At ~25:30 he'll also talk a bit about Quantum. In a nutshell WebRender is used to send a web page to the GPU which will paint all divs, borders, shadows, images etc. Currently WebRender is the only component I'm aware of that is inside Firefox Nightly. It's still behind a config though.
- wlesieutre 9y agoIIRC the first part to be used in Firefox is the URL parser: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1151899 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1151899
- kibwen 9y agoWhat's this about a new Firefox UI? I'm on nightly (55) and it's still Australis for me.
- NiLSPACE 9y agoIt won't be here until at least Firefox 57.
- kyoji 9y agoI believe its referring to the compact theme(s) that have been a part of nightly (and developer edition) for a long time.
- dblohm7 9y agoNope, they're referring to a new UI called Photon.
- userSumo 9y agothere are new themes available in 53 when you go to add-ons > appearance.
- Prego 9y agoI think we all noticed Edge and how great it is.
- Kenji 9y agoI love how everywhere on the internet, the Edge DOM upgrade is portrayed as something great and novel when really it's computer science 101, making a proper tree structure - something that should have been done at least a decade ago, and has probably been done back then by all major browsers except IE.
- Strom 9y agoDon't be ridiculous, Chrome didn't even exist a decade ago.
- Kenji 9y agoI didn't say Chrome existed back then, you pedant.
- Strom 9y agoYou implied it, especially by talking about all major browsers except IE. There weren't multiple major borwsers besides IE a decade ago, there was only firefox with 20% market share.
- Kenji 9y agoYou probably missed the back then just before the part you quoted. So, the all major browsers is modified by the indication of time I had given two words before it. I feel like two pedants meeting each other is like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
- mwfunk 9y agoPedantry is Computer Science 101, it's literally just saying the words that describe the thing that you're trying to communicate (not unlike programming languages). It's trivially easy! :)
- dblohm7 9y agoA reminder that Quantum is the name of the project, not the engine. The result of Quantum is still Gecko.
- psyc 9y agoFrom the ground up, hey? Are they going to include an actual proper modern execution environment, or even one that would have been proper in the 1970's?