grigory

Right, I think it's pretty close to parity! I vaguely recall seeing some odd API that wasn't supported in Fenix that was in Fennec, but they're pretty rare. Fairly sure you could access history in Fennec via a webextension, and I think that's not supported in Fenix.

I think what's generally missing in these discussions is that the whole project to bring extensions into Fenix was extremely user-driven - whatever people actually use in any significant volume on Fennec, Fenix supports. And the actual UX of installing extensions is just so much more streamlined and nicer in Fenix.

If you purely look at it from the "most value for most users" perspective, Fenix extensions are a great success. And, it's also a success in purely engineering terms - code that's not bringing a lot of value but yet creates an overall maintenance drag is omitted.

What may have been missing from it is the ideological bit - for a platform to be truly open - and to be a viable platform!, it can't have a restricted "whitelist". And I agree with this. But it's not clear that "mobile-browser-as-a-developer-platform" is a sustainable long-term pitch for an organization as small and as resource constrained as Mozilla.

So, there's a tension between these two perspectives. In purely "rational" terms, what's there is good, and there are a ton of other much more pressing issues to work on for the small teams - bugs, performance, missing functionality that can actually "move a needle", etc.

You can make an argument that in this case, the rational, data-driven engineers won. Which is the opposite of what HN seems to think of Mozilla! What's probably needed for full webextension support is a strong, perhaps not purely rational leader that will rally folks and actually push the teams to do the work that may be useless, or useful to a tiny percentage of the user base, in a belief that it'll produce a better future. Which may or may not pan out!

(Also a former Mozilla developer, worked Fennec and Fenix)

I think a more nuanced perspective here is that roughly 80% of the work was done, and the remaining 20% require significant effort and organizational energy.

Not all of the WebExtension API surface is currently supported; there's a long tail of infrequently used extensions that require non-trivial engineering effort and often cross-team coordination to implement. However, the actual usage of these APIs in Fennec was very, very low, so the actual bet and the organization sales pitch for this work must be on building a platform, and evidently that's not happening. You can argue that this type of platform work and extensibility is why people use Firefox for Android. You can also look back at the actual usage telemetry (current whitelist is basically what vast majority of people used) and wonder if that additional investment will move the needle.

There's also front-end/back-end engineering required to fully expand existing UIs into a proper "store" experience.

Personally, I think as a matter of principle Firefox for Android should be fully open in terms of what extensions it allows installing.

I believe that will eventually happen - it's where the prevailing winds are blowing inside the org, too! but it may take time for the stars to align, people to have energy to fight through the internal malaise, to pitch work that may not immediately help with any OKRs and is mostly about building community goodwill and sending a message, etc.

As always, it basically comes down to lack of strong leadership.

Senior at a lot of the larger companies I've interacted with is often a kind of a "terminal level", meaning that you're not expected to rise above it, and can comfortably spend most of your career at that level.

Staff, sr staff, principle and other monikers are usually about affecting change at the scale larger than your team, operating at larger scope, and growing people around you.

Jumping into a project with a truly world-class team is a very humbling experience, and certainly something to seek out in one's career!

When I explain various aspects of concurrency and multi-threaded programming to non-programmers, using analogy of people doing some tasks really helps.

I've picked this up from Feynman's lectures on computing - highly recommend them!

I use passpack to generate/store passwords, remember them in Firefox, and let Firefox Sync get them onto my different devices. Works pretty well!

My host of devices includes multiple laptops (Linux, OS X) and many different phones - both Android and iOS. Since Firefox runs everywhere, this works nicely. Firefox Sync has end-to-end encryption, but data stored at-rest on devices is guarded purely by physical access, which is fine for my use cases.

We also finally turned on "offline cache" support in Firefox For Android (for 50+ releases) - if you have a page in your cache, and you're attempting to load that page while offline, it should "just work". See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1232867

Can you expand on "Firefox completely broke security if Sync"? Do you have a specific incident in mind, or an architectural change, or..?

Having spent a few years in KW, I have a feeling it might be difficult to convince people to move there.

We're working on a fix, it should re-appear at some point soon (hopefully!).

Thinkpad W541 (i7, 32gb RAM, SSD), running Fedora, often connected to an external monitor, mouse and keyboard.

For travel, I use Thinkpad X1 Carbon (3rd gen), also running Fedora.

Nowadays I mostly work on native Android dev, so environment is primarily just AndroidStudio, vim, terminal (Guake) and what seems like hundreds of open tabs.

It used to be all Macbooks for many years though. I still have a 2012 tricked out Air and a 2013 rPro, which I need to sell off.

I'm pretty sure I've read exact same comments back when oink shut down. Very sad indeed.

Firefox's built-in reading mode was great in this particular case. That page is pretty unusable otherwise :/

> It might be a requirement for non-techies but no-one surely clicks the back button or drags the scroll bar, at least no power user does.

IIRC, back button is one of the most used UI elements of a browser.

I'd probably consider myself a power user (I work on browsers for a living), and I use and most of the features you've described. Especially scrollbars, they're a great "read progress" indicator.

On a side note, we so often forget how small is the bubble of the so-called "power users".

CommandWear, Vancouver, BC - looking for a full-time Software Engineer

http://www.commandwear.com/

We're building a next generation of real-time, situational awareness solutions. We integrate latest wearable tech (smartwatches, HUDs, body-worn video, sensors, etc) with robust networking solutions and mobile devices to deliver great software for first responders (EMS, police, fire) and other industries.

We're looking for a software engineer to join our growing team of 5 in downtown Vancouver. Depending on the skill set and interests, you will be working on building our web APIs, hybrid and native mobile software, writing code for wearables (Pebble, etc), building web real-time response applications (GIS, maps, sockets, etc), helping out with infrastructure, doing field trials and hands on user testing with our customers, and so on. Ideally we're looking for a generalist to help out on many different projects, but please do send me a message if something in particular seems very interesting to you.

- Backend/frontend: ruby, rails, postgresql, node, ember

- Mobile stack: hybrid apps on Angular with a large native component (Java and Objective-C)

- Wearables: Pebble, Samsung Gear series, Apple Watch soon, and other wearable/portable devices in various stages of development.

For more information contact me at grigory@commandwear.com

Curious to see this. At my "just failed" startup, our first product was a booking app targeted at tattoo studios. It was a hard niche to crack for a variety of reasons, and in retrospect we've moved on a little too soon without spending enough time exploring alternative applications.

Hard to remember exact details, but it was a bit "grey hat". Exploits of a foolish youth!

316666. Haven't used it in many years. Obtaining that number was fun, as well :)

Here are some of my absolute favourites:

- Spectacle, for easily tiling windows http://spectacleapp.com/

- TotalTerminal, for globally accessible, full-width, semitransparent, sliding out Terminal. http://totalterminal.binaryage.com/

Check out TotalTerminal as well. For me its global, full width visor + tabs became THE way to use the Terminal.

Lots of mountain biking and hiking. Heading out to local mountains tomorrow with SO to hit the trails and hike around a bit. I have a long list of books that I'd like to read, so I get to them in the evening usually.

If the weather is bad I play with things like Arduino and toy around with new languages.

Also, coffee shops with friends, sometimes dance clubs if a good DJ is in town.

I personally don't mind creating an account for a service I find valuable. Especially if it's going to be dealing with money. In that case, I would rather create a dedicated account than rely on some external party.

I think when you're talking about a payment integration system, having to create an account is not what will stop "sellers", as you call them, from signing up. It's probably different for end users though.

Looks good guys! Congratulations to founders on going live with the site!

I'd love to try this out, but a facebook login wall is preventing me from doing so. I personally don't have an account, but I can see others not wanting to connect their facebook accounts with their businesses.

No offense, but you sound like a broken western propaganda record. Having been born in USSR, I know a lot of highly educated people that grew up, went to universities, and built various careers in the USSR. While none think communism is perfect, or even worked in that particular case, it has a lot of merits and these people recognize them.

As Putin said, (paraphrased) "anyone who doesn't miss Soviet Union doesn't have a heart; anyone who wants to bring it back doesn't have a brain." I think this reflects well people's feelings towards the regime. It didn't work in the long run, but it wasn't all bad - far from it.

In my first year programming course, our prof spent 10-15 minutes at most talking about recursion. I was already familiar with it, but my classmates (mostly non-CS majors) had no problems understanding the concept. Since that experience I'm always slightly amused when I hear people saying that teaching basics of recursion is hard.

Perhaps it isn't taught properly? When you're just starting out with it, there really isn't much to teach though.

This is so awesome.

Having tried numerous audio players for OSX I just can't find something that I'm satisfied with. I guess I'll just start building my own now :)

This was my first thought after reading the title of this thread. Let your users fetch the data for you!

Oh, not at all! I get the idea, but the word just really stood out to me, and not in a good way. So I thought I'd mention it :)

One of the examples of what to enter into thinkery, "Who the fuck is JSON? #thought", is in poor taste and I'd recommend changing it to something else. Not that I personally find the word "fuck" offending, but it does feel unnecessary and out of place.

Thanks for the link and an explanation!