Firefox Will Run Chrome Extensions 152
An anonymous reader writes: Today Mozilla announced some big changes to its extension support. Their new addon API, WebExtensions, is mostly compatible with the extension model used by Chrome and Opera. In short, this means we'll soon see cross-platform browser extensions. They say, "For some time we've heard from add-on developers that our APIs could be better documented and easier to use. In addition, we've noticed that many Firefox add-on developers also maintain a Chrome, Safari, or Opera extension with similar functionality. We would like add-on development to be more like Web development: the same code should run in multiple browsers according to behavior set by standards, with comprehensive documentation available from multiple vendors."
Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Informative)
... Firefox will be Chrome. Anyone who cared about extensive browser customization will simply abandon their addons. Why keep recoding them on Mozilla's whim?
For anyone who still cares about this stuff, the time to jump is most certainly NOW. I don't even think SeaMonkey is good enough - Pale Moon [palemoon.org] is a totally clean break.
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It looks like they will be supporting the old addons (using XPCOM and XUL) with firefox for at least another year
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, a whole year. Sorry, where's the good news?
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The good news is that if after a full year the developers haven't ported to the new API you get to stop using unmaintained and likely privacy leaking and exploit ridden plugins in favour of something being actively maintained.
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You know how AdBlock only works on Chrome by hiding the ads rather than actually preventing them from being downloaded? You know why there's no Greasemonkey for Chrome, only a crippled Tampermonkey? Because the API way of doing business prevents these extensions from doing what they do. Mozilla is trying to kill off the most popular extensions because their advertising sponsors HATE them.
It's like every day the Mozilla team wakes up and thinks, "shit, we're not going to hell in this handbasket fast enough.
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If Mozilla should learn anything, it is not to piss off your secondary developers, aka add-on devs and anyone that uses the API in general.
They should write an interface between the old and new extensions instead of dropping support for hundreds, if not thousands of add-ons.
Only a small subset of extensions will not work 100% with such an interface since some do come with plugins as well, but I am pretty sure even Chrome allows plugins packaged with Add-ons if I remember correct.
Of course, as if that is goi
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If they never changed the API in the first place, people would bitch extensions were hard to write for.
When you have anything, especially software, with as many users as Firefox it is impossible to do (or not do) something that won't anger a non-zero number of users.
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla, for the love of god, stop breaking APIs, you morons.
That is the goal. The reason the 'API' kept breaking is because there wasn't an API at all: extensions were able to access the internal firefox code. Every time an internal function changed, it caused problems for extensions. Obviously that is bad, there needs to be a clear interface (like a wall) between the outside and the inside.
Firefox here is finally making a good interface. Their plan is to extend the Chrome API so it contains all the functionality needed for current Firefox add-ons.
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Mozilla can't win these days,
tbh I don't care about "winning", I care about good software.
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mozilla, for the love of god, stop breaking APIs, you morons.
That's actually the entire point of this move. The problem is that the current addon "API", such as it is, is literally every class in the entire freaking browser, which is an untenably huge and perpetually changing surface to maintain. The only way to keep the current API and stop breaking stuff constantly is to freeze all development on Firefox now and forever.
That's not really a viable approach.
The alternative is to come up with a more stable API surface, from the ground up, and provide a transition period for add-on developers to move from the large, unsupportable infrastructure to the stable one that won't be -- as you correctly observe -- constantly breaking.
Rather than developing a new API, the add-ons team decided to leverage the work that Chrome has already done in this space, which has the nice side effect of making life much easier for developers who want to write cross-browser add-ons.
One of the things that's getting lost in the noise here is that the portion of the API based on Chrome's current design is just the start. There will be additional API surface to enable some of the things that had been possible with the legacy wild-west-style Add-On approach. Since reading articles is not particularly trendy, I'll quote the relevant passage here:
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.
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And if I want to uninstall?
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Informative)
If you check out NoScript itself, you'll see that it's written using an XPCOM object. This update kills XPCOM, so, no, the new API will not allow NoScript. It can't block at the same level as NoScript, because Chrome offers no method to modify the DOM before the document finishes loading, which means scripts embedded in the document can't be blocked.
So, yes, this absolutely kills NoScript in future versions of Firefox.
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4, Informative)
Chrome does provide support for modifying the DOM before it finishes loading.
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That's not enough: you don't want to modify the DOM before it finishes loading, you want to modify the DOM as it's being built.
For NoScript to work, it has to actively remove <script> tags before they get a chance to run. At all.
Chrome allows you to embed JavaScript onto a page, at which point you can run JavaScript in the context of the page. This is sufficient to modify the DOM "before the document finishes loading" but not enough to allow you to prevent JavaScript on the page from running at all, w
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Except Mozilla already explicitly stated they were adding an API call specifically so that NoScript would be possible.
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Someone doesn't know how NoScript works! Yes, you can block third-party script requests using the network stuff. That's part of NoScript.
NoScript blocks JavaScript from running on pages at all. To do that, it has to be able to block something like: <script>alert("Hello!")</script>
Plus there are scripting surrogate things that replace existing third party scripts with stubs to block trackers. That also does not appear to be possible using the new extensions API.
Bottom line: NoScript absolutely is
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Is there still? In the early days of Chrome, there was no way to stop content from loading, so AdBlock only removed ads after they were displayed (they'd flash briefly on-screen). So back then, it wasn't very good. At some point (years ago) they added APIs to filter content before it loads, which basically solved that problem (although there was a transition period where AdBlock was a bit buggy as they worked the kinks out). Nowadays, it's been quite some time since I've used FireFox, but AdBlock seems to w
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4, Informative)
The old addons model isn't going away until the new model is as capable as the old model supports NoScript, the better-than-Chrome AdBlock, Tree Style Tabs, etc at least as well as the old model currently does. Although the new model is largely based on Chrome's extension API, we're not limited to that API; we're adding the features those extensions need even though Google didn't want to add them to Chrome.
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I'm not on the team, but I work at Mozilla and I've talked to Bill McCloskey about this.
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You are simply wrong. Proof: ad blocking extensions available in Chrome.
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Ad blocking does not mean the necessary implementation details are in place. Proof needs to be a careful reading of Chrome documentation, compared with Noscript functionality. It seems to me that you are simply wrong.
Less simply, if Mozilla plans to extend the API to allow noscript, I believe that the current API does not allow for it to work.
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4, Informative)
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On the first link
We plan to add our own APIs based on the needs of existing Firefox add-ons.
NoScript-type functionality. This would come in the form of extensions to webRequest and possibly contentSettings.
Sidebars. Opera already supports sidebar functionality; Chrome may soon. We would like to be able to implement Tree Style Tabs or Vertical Tabs by hiding the tab strip and showing a tab sidebar.
So I guess we will see if it's available be for they end support for XPCOM
Re: Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:2, Insightful)
I run Firefox because I can't run add-ons on chrome on my phone and tablet, which is where I do most of my browsing.
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4, Interesting)
FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.
It started as an effort to be lighter and faster than the old Mozilla suite. I actually like the mail client, occasionally use composer to put something together quickly and Chatzilla is fine IRC client as often as I still want to use IRC. I stayed on the SeaMonkey side of the house on my personal systems this entire time.
It was funny as hell to watch FF get bigger and more bloated than SeaMonkey, and its performance plummet. SeaMonkey's UI in the mean time only got faster with fixes and improvements and the browser just got better with all the gekko and js improvements that came downstream from the Firefox project. SeaMonkey was always the better browser for my particular needs, but after perhaps FF3 and later it was the better browser over Firefox for pretty much all the reason FF was selected over it in the first place. Completely lost sight of what they'd been trying to do.
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Insightful)
FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.
It doesn't spy on you.
Seriously, there was a time a few years back when many people (including me) switched away from Firefox because it had memory leaks, and didn't work very well. Now, it's a fine browser, and I don't understand why anyone would use Chrome over Firefox. Forget that spyware.
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Interesting)
Another nice thing about FF is that it has its own FIPS compliant data stores for passwords as well as its own separate keystore. Chrome and IE use the system's keys on Windows.
This is important, because if someone gets a bogus root CA into the Registry, Chrome and IE will happily honor it, while Firefox will stop and point it out.
FF also provides password protection for the keystore data. This way, if FF is left unattended (and a timeout is set), an intruder can't just walk away with a user's password stash.
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Storing your passwords in the browser is always a bad idea.
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In some cases, stuffing them in a browser is worth it. There are a lot of websites which demand an account to do much (pinterest). With these, there is little lost if they get compromised (other than someone trying to troll from the account), so might as well toss worthless account IDs like that in someplace that is relatively convenient, and has some security.
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I would think that the inconvience of having a password for pinterest is a good thing if it keeps people away from pinterest.
"There's more to see"? Block them (Score:2)
There are a lot of websites which demand an account to do much (pinterest).
Solution: Start putting -site:pinterest.com in your Google searches, and block the site in hosts.
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That has pros and cons as well. For example, i use firefox in our company so users can change their proxy settings when the main internet connection goes down. But when i need to deploy a certificate to 250 users with no tools whatsoever, having a different certstore sucks.
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That utility doesn't work if the passwords are encrypted with a master password as per their website. One will get an encrypted blob, but that's it. Maybe useful for backup, but not prying out what someone used for their latest vend a goat order.
I do agree with you with another point -- in Chrome, I can do a shift-esc, and kill a lot of memory hogs per tab. No real way to do that in FF. Chrome also has better VM structure, keeping plugins a safe distance from the OS.
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Informative)
in Chrome, I can do a shift-esc, and kill a lot of memory hogs per tab. No real way to do that in FF.
about:memory estimates how much memory each tab is using. Close the hogs and then click "Minimize memory usage".
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If what you say is true, I'd like to run some tests on some JS-heavy web app. When you close a tab, what "js-type entries" don't go away?
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Things started to go South since version 4.
FF 3.6 was the last version I used as my main browser.
When you think about it, it coincides with their switch to "rapid release process". Ridiculous decision imho.
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As to your claim that Firefox is NOT spyware: it collects telemetry in the exact same form as Chrome does (default on, can be disabled). Plus it serves you ads based on your browsing history now. Plus there's those closed-source third-party binaries that only God knows what they're doing. One has to be either insane or partisan to say
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It doesn't matter what browser you use if your ISP is spying on you. I just assume that nothing I do online is private, as I have assumed for the past 15 years.
(I didn't believe TOR was private either, until FBI agents told some prof to stop telling his students about it. So I guess it must work, at least some of the time.)
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Really? I guess you missed the Slashdot post about offering advertising tiles customised to suit users in the Firefox home screen then.
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It doesn't spy on you.
You mean like the new tab ads that collect data on any user clueless enough to leave them enabled? Or do you mean how they don't collect usage data and send it back to Mozilla by default? Perhaps you were thinking of how Firefox submits every site you visit to Google to check if it's "bad"?
I like firefox over any of the alternatives. (Score:4, Informative)
FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.
I use firefox as my primary browser and it continues to serve my needs better than any of the alternatives. It's available on linux unlike IE or Safari and for my needs at least it is less buggy than Chrome. Google can't seem to stop breaking things in Chrome and while they usually fix them it's annoying in the meantime. I see no meaningful speed or performance differences between the major browsers. Firefox seldom has site compatibility issues. While I won't argue that FF is without warts, it is to my mind the best available option at this time. That may change of course but I don't see anything better out there for my needs at present.
It started as an effort to be lighter and faster than the old Mozilla suite. I actually like the mail client...
At one time I did too. However it stagnated and I move on to other things. 12 years have passed since the project was started and the web has evolved substantially since then. Things have gotten more complex and so has the software to deal with them. This isn't 2002 and expecting the software to be the same is kind of silly.
Completely lost sight of what they'd been trying to do.
What they originally were trying to do is not as relevant today. Perhaps you want a stripped down browser with minimal frills. That's fine but most of the rest of us are concerned with other things. So long as it let's me view the bits of the web I want and gives me options to configure to my particular quirks without crashing or causing problems, I don't really care if it takes up extra space or has a few features I don't use.
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Firefox was not about being stripped down. The Mozilla Manifesto had many points to address, among them was the ability for individuals to shape their experience, adherence to open source, and community / participation based programming.
Yet we now have a browser that actively limits customisation, forcing changes on users, ignoring user requests, and at one stage even including proprietary closed source APIs natively in the browser.
Not being lighting fast is not the reason I think Mozilla has lost its way,
Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4)
But Chrome is just as bizarre though. Both have utterly insane rapid fire update schedules designed to put features that benefit developers or developers' whims and not that of the customers. If I ditch Firefox it most definitely will never be for Chrome.
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But I do welcome this news. I've only ever really "played" with extension development, but Firefox was always much harder to work with than Chrome, not least because a lot of the documentation seemed to be out of date. I seem to recall the Firefox extension tutorial/example thing used the status bar... t
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For now.
Consider that in the past Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer and many other browsers all used to support the same plugins (which were made according to the Netscape Plugin API). Quite a long time ago IE changed to its own plugin API (ActiveX *shudder*), and Chrome now uses the Pepper Plugin API. There's no reason all the other browsers couldn't eventually move over to PPAPI (or some other one, but PPAPI looks like the best at the moment) and it would be like the old days when plugins didn't n
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PPAPI is dying.
PPAPI has two main use-cases: supporting Flash and other browser plugins, and being the API for (P)NaCl applications --- C/C++ applications compiled to run on the Web, which have no more privileges than Web content.
"Browser plugins", i.e. native code that you can download and install in the browser, that runs content from the Web and has access to the same OS APIs at the same privilege level as the browser itself, are going away and not coming back. Flash is the last significant hold-out, but
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Thanks for that information :)
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I use both Firefox and Chrome. And Firefox is faster and lower on resources than Chrome today. If I were to jump anywhere, it would be away from Chrome and to Firefox only.
Great, I just switched BACK (Score:1)
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I switched as well but somehow FF is even worse performance than Chrome. Often idling with 10% CPU use and spiking up to 90% when visiting certain sites like Amazon.
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Amazon recently started doing something pathological where they restyle and relayout their search results page every 100ms. The particular restyling and relayout scenarios happened to be very well optimized in Chrome, but not Firefox, so less noticeable in Chrome (though still waking up and doing unnecessary work every 100ms). The optimizations are mostly implemented in Firefox nightly, and will be completely implemented very soon, but obviously it takes a little while for them all to reach the release chan
Commendable (Score:1, Insightful)
That's very commendable. But, the fact that they are choosing to follow someone else's standard(Chrome), rather than the other way around when they were the first to implement the add-on capability speaks volumes about their future.
I'm not so much saddened by Mozilla's decline. I'm devastated that the only viable replacement is Google Chrome.
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Pale Moon is a viable replacement.
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Mozilla has been copying everything Chrome does for years.
I've come to rue every time I upgrade FF because every time I do, some extension I've used for years no longer works or I can no longer trick FF into letting it work. I'm writing this in FF33 right now; my laptop is still on FF29.
The last good complete theme died with FF 3.5. Almost everything on the addons site is abandoned, and only the few most popular addons keep up with the relentless release cycle.
Mozilla has been damaging itself and its enti
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You are confused.
The problem of extensions breaking due to Firefox updates requires the solution of having a stable supported API for extensions to use. That is exactly what this announcement is about!
Mitchell Baker was never the CEO.
XUL was never great and almost everything good in XUL has been incorporated into Web standards supported across browsers (e.g. CSS flexbox).
What? (Score:2)
a reason? (Score:1)
There's got to be a good reason for this. Obviously, Firefox extensions are superior to Chrome's. They can modify the browser far more than Chrome extensions. Maybe it has to do with performance?
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There's got to be a good reason for this.
Because the extension API was kind of lousy.
Because the extension API was going to need big changes to deal with the new multi-process browser capability [mozilla.org] that Mozilla is implementing.
Because the extension API was never very stable to begin with.
Because the extension API wasn't really an API, it was basically allowed full access to whatever was in Firefox (which explains why it wasn't stable).
You are right that the Chrome API lacks functionality. The Mozilla plan is to extend the API, so that everythin
Old extensions (Score:4, Funny)
How about they upgrade it so it can run Firefox extensions?
So what's the point of Firefox anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
I advocate for Pale Moon and Chromium. They're both FLOSS. Firefox no longer is, because it has integrated third-party binaries (Netflix DRM, Pocket). Consequently, Firefox is now less secure (see http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... [slashdot.org] ). This is also to say nothing about the build-in advertisements that read your browsing history, and the awful performance chokes it suffers from.
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Interoperability means everybody will start developing extensions solely for Chrome, since it's less work to make one build for every browser. So what's the point of Firefox after that happens?
Pretty sure interoperability means the extensions made won't be solely for Chrome
Re:So what's the point of Firefox anymore? (Score:4, Informative)
The Pocket issues had no effect on Firefox users not actually using Pocket, i.e. you (I assume). Furthermore the Pocket integration code in Firefox is open source.
The Adobe DRM module is closed source but integrated in the best way possible given the DRM requirements. You can delete the module without breaking anything except DRM. If you don't, the module is very tightly sandboxed so it can do nothing but decode video and audio. It is thus much more privacy and security friendly than, say, Flash. (You have already removed Flash, right?) I'm glad you don't want to watch Netflix, but it turns out a lot of people do, and "can't watch Netflix!" is not a great feature.
The new Firefox extensions model will support extensions like Tree Style Tabs and better ad blocking than Chrome's API provides. We're not limiting ourselves to Chrome's API.
So this kills AdBlock and NoScript, right? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have only one question about this move:
Will AdBlock Plus and NoScript still work? Chrome's extension model simply doesn't give extensions the control necessary to implement something like NoScript, which is literally the only reason I still use Firefox. Otherwise, there's no point: Firefox is the slowest, least memory efficient browser out there. It regularly breaks several GB of memory after only a day's use. In fact, Firefox is already up to nearly 3GB of memory use, which is somewhat worrying for a 32-
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From TFA: ...
We plan to add our own APIs based on the needs of existing Firefox add-ons.
* NoScript-type functionality. This would come in the form of extensions to webRequest and possibly contentSettings.
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Adblock Plus is a huge hog, with ublock and privacy badger I'm now at only 880MB use with a bunch of shit open (though usually it's more 1.1GB to 1.5GB)
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Firefox is the slowest, least memory efficient browser out there. It regularly breaks several GB of memory after only a day's use. In fact, Firefox is already up to nearly 3GB of memory use, which is somewhat worrying for a 32-bit process. Looks like I'm going to have to quit and restart after this comment.
I've actually never witnessed this, but I hear it so often I'm beginning to believe the issue exists - but perhaps only for the Windows version. The few times I've had to use windows in the past few years has given me the experience that all browsers tend to be rather sluggish on it... oh well, that's what you get for using subOS. Oh, and I keep Firefox running for days, even weeks, and have generally around 100 tabs open at any time. There was a time when my average was closer to or even over 200 tabs, and
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If you're still using Adblock plus, you are doing it wrong. Have a look at uBlock origin.
Fucking morons (Score:4, Insightful)
The sole advantage of Firefox over Chrome these days is the fact that it's add-on SDK allows addons to modify just about any part of the browser. Chrome extensions are extremely limited in what they do. How will things like FileZilla work with this new API?
I'm convinced that either the Mozilla Foundation is run by complete mental midgets or plants by Google who are determined to sabotage the browser until the whole foundation shuts down.
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I'm convinced that either the Mozilla Foundation is run by complete mental midgets or plants by Google who are determined to sabotage the browser until the whole foundation shuts down.
Nah, it's not Google holding the reins. The default search for Firefox used to be Google, but it was switched to Yahoo, which is a front for Bing. So if anybody's hiding under a Trojan horse at Mozilla, it's Microsoft.
But that's unlikely. No, I think what happened is that around the time Brendan Eich was forced to resign due to some manufactured outrage, the board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction. Three weeks later they imp
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[T]he board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction.
The IRS has some pretty rigorously enforced guidelines about executive and employee compensation at 501(c)(3) nonprofits, like Mozilla. It's a complicated topic, but this gives a good introduction to the overall idea: https://www.councilofnonprofit... [councilofnonprofits.org]
The executive summary is that there's nothing anyone can do to make a nontrival personal profit off of anything Mozilla does. So you can sling mud all you want, but accusations that decisions at Mozilla are driven by some kind of profit motive are borne of plai
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[T]he board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction.
The IRS has some pretty rigorously enforced guidelines about executive and employee compensation at 501(c)(3) nonprofits, like Mozilla. It's a complicated topic, but this gives a good introduction to the overall idea: https://www.councilofnonprofit... [councilofnonprofits.org]
The executive summary is that there's nothing anyone can do to make a nontrival personal profit off of anything Mozilla does. So you can sling mud all you want, but accusations that decisions at Mozilla are driven by some kind of profit motive are borne of plain ignorance.
You're technically right that it's born of "ignorance" since I lack any inside information about the matter and I'm speculating. That being said, how naive does one have to be to believe that Mozilla integrated Pocket directly into Firefox (as opposed to ABP, NoScript, Force HTTPS, Privacy Badger, etc.) out of the goodness in the directors' hearts, and not to make a buck?
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You're technically right that it's born of "ignorance" since I lack any inside information about the matter and I'm speculating.
Sure, but even a lay understanding of the word "profit" and the negating prefix "non" should give you some hint about how non-profit organizations are legally required to operate.
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IANAL, but skimming over the link you provided, I can find some loopholes in any case. For instance, in the three-step process to determine appropriate compensation, #2 is: "[an] independent body should take a look at "comparable" salary and benefits data, such as data available from salary and benefit surveys, to learn what employers of a SIMILAR BUDG
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So basically you're making stuff up and posting it to the Internet. Thanks.
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And rules can be made to go away when you have enough money to hire lawyers and accountants that know all the loopholes and people to bribe.
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The direction browser is taking is simply in-explainable for any open source project on its own.
The King is dead...Long live the King.
Re:Fucking morons (Score:5, Informative)
The sole advantage of Firefox over Chrome these days is the fact that it's add-on SDK allows addons to modify just about any part of the browser. Chrome extensions are extremely limited in what they do.
They are planning on extending the add-on API so it still has most of the functionality of the current add-ons. It will be much more sophisticated than what Chrome allows now.
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So based on the recent experiences with Firefox the new API will look like Chrome's, run like Chrome's, and include several 3rd party closed source "features" that users actively campaigned against?
Mozilla has a lot of trust to regain before I will believe anything they say about their development goals. Oh I'm sure they'll try and do what they say, and I'm sure they'll screw it up along the way while their users shout "no" at them louder and longer than Darth Vader in the upcoming 4K remix of StarWars.
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Which is awesome, if Mozilla add the standardized interface to do whatever it is you need to do.
Which, for many things, they won't. Otherwise you wouldn't be writing the damn extension in the first place.
The plug-in feature I do want is... (Score:2)
When I launch a new incognito/private window, I want to let some plug-ins, especially Flashcontrol or Flashblock, run by default. There's nothing like launching a new window to get around someone's X-story paywall and getting blasted with their auto-play video.
Rants (Score:1)
Yeah, rants rants rants. No need to read, no need to understand or at least ask.
From TFA:
We plan to add our own APIs based on the needs of existing Firefox add-ons.
NoScript-type functionality. This would come in the form of extensions to webRequest and possibly contentSettings.
Sidebars. Opera already supports sidebar functionality; Chrome may soon. We would like to be able to implement Tree Style Tabs or Vertical Tabs by hiding the tab strip and show
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Uh, no. Mozilla tries to fix it by just breaking them once and then never letting anyone fix them*. Everyone not happy, and if that's a WTF to you then I don't know what to say.
*: At least for some subset (the interesting subset) of extensions. Some extensions will be fixable, as they'll merely require a complete rewrite rather then being impossible.
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The alternative is to introduce a stable API for extensions to code against if they want to, and make the API powerful enough that most extensions actually can be written with it. And then, for extensions that can't be done in the API, just accept that breakage might happen.
(And note that I said "might", not "will". Many extensions only touch the browser UI and not content pages, and won't be affected by e10s.)
As usual, Mozilla gets most of the way there and then fucks up right at the crucial point; in this
NoScript for chrome then? (Score:2)
Yay (Score:2)
This is great news. Firefox is my browser of choice, but having written extensions for both Firefox and Chrome I must say that Chrome is far easier to develop for.
I wasn't expecting this, but it makes sense - with Mozilla focusing on Electrolysis (their project to make Firefox multi-process) the existing API wouldn't work well because it wasn't designed with a multi-process browser in mind. I was expecting them to design a whole new API and then have to go through extensions breaking every few updates as th
I'd rather see Firefox... (Score:2)
And then it will start using the Chrome engine ... (Score:2)
Why not a new browser (Score:2)
At this point why dont they create a Firefox2 or a Firefox
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly my issue.
It's sitting at 10% CPU use and 2GB memory. And god forbid I go to a site with JS which can bog down the whole thing.