An enhancement request I submitted to Bugzilla 15 years ago was just closed
bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.mozilla.org
> "legacy" extensions are gone
While I agree that housekeeping large backlogs is commendable, this bug was if anything fixed by "accident", and is no more a fix in the traditional sense than closing a bug for an EOL operating system because the issue described no longer exists.
The situation that no other "safe" method of accessing the filesystem was not even considered by the bug's author, but it does address the issue.
Closing issues after a while if the reporting user fails to follow up on a request for additional information can be useful. But more often than not these stalebots kick in because the maintainer(s) never chimed in. Don't use a bot that can't distinguish between those two cases unless your only aim is to wage war on your users and sweep everything inconvenient under the rug.
What good would that do? Seems to me that up or downvoting a HN comment won't have any effect on TN usage of Stalebot
I think this is a major flaw in how permissions are implemented in Firefox (and Flatpak and other pieces of modern technology).
Software commonly "declares" what permissions it wants, but the user doesn't have to opt-in to grant these permission. They're granted by default, and there's usually no way to deny it.
I think iOS has a good approach here, where an application asks for camera permission and there's two buttons: Grant or Deny. The prompt also comes when camera access is actually required, not at software installation time.
Less relevant now, as fewer sites show files inline.
I wonder how they knew how right they were.
"The onload event is not fired with the symbols are loaded in a svg"
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1254159
The last messages were:
"Well, the standard documentation (w3c) says there is "onload" event, then Firefox does not comply the SVG standard...because the performance is important....it is sounds good." Miguel
"I know what the standard says, that's why I set this bug to WONTFIX rather than INVALID" Robert Longson [:longsonr]
It was about SRV records (RFC 2052, RFC 2782) that could have been used with HTTP(S) too, but no browser supported it.
2019 the IETF released the first draft for HTTPS records https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-https...
2021 Firefox 92 supports HTTPS records https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/92.0/releasenotes/
Only 22 years.
Anyway, how is Mozilla to work for? I always thought it must be great, but recently reading about the firings and project cancellations it doesn't seem so rosy anymore.
> That's a good idea. We can look into it, but I suspect that doing it right will require either crippling Chickenfoot substantially, or doing substantial rewiring of Firefox itself.
The direction Firefox decided to go was mostly "crippling substantially" of extensions, and not enough "rewiring of Firefox itself".
Implement the WebMIDI API - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897
But my bug was not closed, they just asked if it is still a relevant issue...
> Firefox Mac feature implemented 21 years after report
> Top reply to the bug report is from Mike Pinkerton and reads: "i can't argue, but it's a time thing."
https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/msl1ra/firefox_mac_f...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122752
Incredible really how things have moved on since this issue.
Priority on fixing bugs is some combination of their severity, the number of users affected, and the difficulty/disruption involved in fixing it. The age is not relevant.
I SO much appreciate that simple offhand comment.
Not, it's been three days, lets use a bot to remove the bug or close what might be a very useful thread for others that get hit by it (and that can comment of a bug is still extant).
Though I could see the point in a "dormant" tag, or something that let's other users know that the dev is probably not thinking about the bug now.
And I appreciate that Mozilla is still going through them on occasion to see what is still relevant.
JWZ is not known for his subtlety.
If anything the link is very solid evidence that Mozilla don't do that either since this issue remained open even after it got done.
If globally improving the product is the goal, deprioritizing (or leaving alone) old issues is probably more reasonable. “We’ve lived with it for this long; how critical could it really be?” In this case, the risk of never being fixed is a feature, not a bug.
See also Lindy Effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Thanks a lot.
It was a painful transition but very much needed. Now extensions don't clash with one another. The browser code can be modified more freely without impacting extensions and it is possible to implement features such as sandboxing.
Firefox's user base was a third of all internet users a little over 10 years ago. Now it's as little as 5%.
The "the users are wrong" attitude might not have been the main cause of the decline but it has been a real factor, IMO.
> Same with the more recent change ragrding tabs. I am using firefox for a very long time now, and I just don't see that firefox is massively going downhill so far, like many people seem to suggest. Of course I am bummed out that certain features could not be retained (such as installable PWAs on desktop). But these are just the realities of the fact that it is hard to compete with google.
In Firefox's heyday when they were a scrappy underdog they took on King Kong on its home turf (the Windows desktop) and won (or at least took a huge chunk of market share). The idea that what has now become a big rich company that makes nearly half a billion dollars a year from their browser somehow doesn't have the resources to make that browser competitive is hard to believe.
What about Opera? Did FF decline quality wise against that? Or Safari? No, of course not. FF didn't decline, it now has a real formidable competitor.
Firefox got popular when they listened to users and made a product people wanted.
They did this despite fierce competition from a huge monopolistic company with quite a locked in and anticompetitive platform.
And today they make something crazy like a half billion dollars a year from firefox, they have enough resources to make a competitive browser.
Also, they still make a competetive browser, as I laid out. Just the fact that some of the competition has improved massively (but by no means all of it) doesn't change that.
Competition has improved but so has firefox. Why should the expectation be that they stood still while everybody else went ahead? And it absolutely has declined. You also did say that they don't have features you want and seemed to imply that was part of the realities of not having enough resources or struggling to compete with google. Just doesn't seem like the reason holds water.
They certainly listened to their users and potential users.
I appreciate that this improved the code base quality for Mozilla folks, but it was a significant step down in features for me. I even switched to Vivaldi (which has built-in Vim keybindings) for a while because of this.
[1]: There are some partial replacements, but they all fail if you try commands on a still-loading page, and they don't work at all on any browser page like New Tab or Settings. So even a simple hotkey for "go to left tab", or "close current tab", fails constantly. I didn't stick around to find out what else is broken.
Why? You can't read the source of this addon and evaluate whether or not it should have this access? This should be a permission that you can grant to an addon, we're not children that must at every juncture be managed so they don't burn their fingers.
I actually use a vim-style plugin in Firefox and this seems obvious to me, how do you think the majority of users feel?
qutebrowser on the other hand seems to have limited support for addons and the builtin features are good, but not on par with what addons can give you (https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/28).
But I really do love Tridactyl, even if only for the link hinting. I really suggest that you give it a few weeks. Remember, learning VIM took you longer than a few weeks.
I used to rely on TabMixPlus to have multiple rows of tabs even the ability to mouse-wheel scroll them so get access to more rows and other things like lock them with a MMB press.
I often have so many tabs open that now I'm not able to read the title and am forced to drag them off to create a new window in order to get a new row of tabs.
There was also an extension where I could split the main pane into multiple tiles in order to view multiple pages at the same time.
I'm not saying that it was a bad move to move to the new extension model, but I think that an API should exist which allows developers to modify the UI in a secure way.
We've never recovered from there. Addon functionality is strictly worse, and nothing that was gained is something I feel is a net positive in my life. It's nice that the engineers feel better, but as a user it was absolutely a bad choice that was never recovered from. Honestly, for folks creating a product this attitude is unacceptable.
Security and convenience are often at odds. Imagine how much "better" things would be if we didn't have any security requirements.
Actually, the existing system is still alive and kicking, since the internal components of firefox, above a C++'ish core, are (more or less) like traditional extensions. It's just that you're not allowed to load your own anymore. In Thunderbird they've created a loophole of sorts, so we can still load normal extensions.
> It was a painful transition but very much needed.
On the contrary, it was the opposite of what was needed.
> Now extensions don't clash with one another.
1. Many important extensions simply aren't allowed to run now.
2. They don't interact, so in particular they don't clash.
> The browser code can be modified more freely without impacting extensions
1. It still impacts the internal extensions.
2. Since webextensions can do very little, they're not impacted by much.