9 ms·

> It is absolutely worth supporting powerusers. Not just worth it, that's who their userbase actually is ! Powerusers, privacy freaks and their immediate soci

> It is absolutely worth supporting powerusers. Not just worth it, that's who their userbase actually is ! Powerusers, privacy freaks and their immediate social circle that they managed to strong-arm into using Firefox. That's their remaining 3% of market share and Mozilla remains absolutely oblivious to it. "Let's add whitespace everywhere. Let's remove RSS support, let's change the UI and also let's add as much useless junk nobody asked for". Don't. And their CEO must go. The fish rots from the head.

torstenvl 5y ago
FTP support too.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  Which power user is using in browser ftp support? The three people I know who use ftp for something have and always had a dedicated client for it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    Literally everyone? Not even just power users, but literally everyone. I don't understand your position. Are you claiming that no web pages link to download files on FTP servers? Or are you saying that the right thing to do in that situation is to refuse to download the file? Because both of those positions are self-evidently wrong.
    - cweagans 5y ago
      Very few webpages link to FTP content. The right thing to do is to outsource that bit of functionality to an FTP client. Continuing to support a protocol that has largely been superseded and is very rarely used is self-evidently wrong.
      - torstenvl 5y ago
        Sorry. No. A web page links to a file, you activate the link, the link is valid, and the web browser... chokes? That is objectively a bug.
        cweagans 5y ago
        If it were still in widespread use, I might agree with you.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        torstenvl 5y ago
        It is. Thanks. But even if it weren't, the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug.
        bscphil 5y ago
        > the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug I agree with you with respect to ftp, but I have to disagree with this. A site might link to a file with a gopher:// url or gemeni:// (these are real protocols) and the browser would of course spit out an error. That's not a bug, because that's expected behavior. No one, at present, expects a web browser to be able to access these protocols, despite the fact that both protocols are designed to access something corresponding roughly to "web pages". The reason dropping ftp support is a bug is that there are a ton of real sites that link to ftp pages, and they do so because there is a history of ftp browsing support in web browsers and it was reasonably anticipated by these page authors that viewers would not have trouble accessing files made available in this way.
        bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        I've been online since 1995. I haven't seen an FTP link for a looong time.
  - pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
    Not hard to land in a tab with Firefox complaining that it doesn't know of an FTP handler. Google Scholar returns results to papers hosted on FTP all the time. On the other hand, as annoying as this is, this is the one time that maintenance overhead actually makes sense to justify removal (out of all the times Mozilla has invoked that excuse), given how nonstandard FTP is and how kludgy the implementation has to be.

torstenvl 5y ago

FTP support too.

scrollaway 5y ago
Which power user is using in browser ftp support? The three people I know who use ftp for something have and always had a dedicated client for it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- torstenvl 5y ago
  Literally everyone? Not even just power users, but literally everyone. I don't understand your position. Are you claiming that no web pages link to download files on FTP servers? Or are you saying that the right thing to do in that situation is to refuse to download the file? Because both of those positions are self-evidently wrong.
  - cweagans 5y ago
    Very few webpages link to FTP content. The right thing to do is to outsource that bit of functionality to an FTP client. Continuing to support a protocol that has largely been superseded and is very rarely used is self-evidently wrong.
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      Sorry. No. A web page links to a file, you activate the link, the link is valid, and the web browser... chokes? That is objectively a bug.
      - cweagans 5y ago
        If it were still in widespread use, I might agree with you.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        torstenvl 5y ago
        It is. Thanks. But even if it weren't, the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug.
        bscphil 5y ago
        > the fact that a smaller number of people would run into the bug doesn't magically make it not-a-bug I agree with you with respect to ftp, but I have to disagree with this. A site might link to a file with a gopher:// url or gemeni:// (these are real protocols) and the browser would of course spit out an error. That's not a bug, because that's expected behavior. No one, at present, expects a web browser to be able to access these protocols, despite the fact that both protocols are designed to access something corresponding roughly to "web pages". The reason dropping ftp support is a bug is that there are a ton of real sites that link to ftp pages, and they do so because there is a history of ftp browsing support in web browsers and it was reasonably anticipated by these page authors that viewers would not have trouble accessing files made available in this way.
        bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        I've been online since 1995. I haven't seen an FTP link for a looong time.
- pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
  Not hard to land in a tab with Firefox complaining that it doesn't know of an FTP handler. Google Scholar returns results to papers hosted on FTP all the time. On the other hand, as annoying as this is, this is the one time that maintenance overhead actually makes sense to justify removal (out of all the times Mozilla has invoked that excuse), given how nonstandard FTP is and how kludgy the implementation has to be.