Firefox 52 released

Re:Firefox 52 released by JohnBooty on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:31PM (#13816295)

You're conflating sooooooooo many orthogonal things here.

    So, you're saying that I should lose the ability to log into my router, all so you can use the latest template bullshit that will be abandoned in a year.

The problem here isn't that browsers are getting better. The problem is that you paid for a router that evidently uses some broken and unsupported web interface. Not blaming you; that kind of thing's happened to me too. I'm guessing it either relies upon proprietary junk (Flash, Java) or nonstandard HTML/JS, or it does something terribly insecure that modern browsers don't allow.

Non-broken HTML from the dawn of the web onward works fine in modern browsers. Had your router manufacturer done something sensible in the first place, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

    And it's not even that a major feature will be deprecated specifically, it's the threat and uncertainty that the constant update cycle creates. [...] The direction the web has taken recently is horrible.

Actually I totally agree! I think the web is worse than it was 10 years ago.

But, this is due to bad site design, not the fact that browsers are more capable now. You could argue that today's more-capable browsers enable and encourage this crap, which is kind of true. But in the old days site owners did the same horrible crap; they just used Flash and Java and ActiveX to do it.

    And I'm convinced that this time will be looked back on with disgust.

I hope so, because that'll mean it's gotten better.

    I vividly remember everyone saying how Flash needed to be pushed on users, and how HTML was obsolete. And that unskippable flash intro pages were cutting edge UX. And playing sounds in the background was a great idea. And that all users were 800x600 resolution.

Right. And those were all terrible and/or proprietary ideas, all of them contrary to the ideas (originally) underpinning the web. Those ideas were rightfully tossed into the trash bin of history. Mostly.

But, I don't see what harmful assumptions and proprietary closed technology have to do with one of the jewels of the open-source software world (Firefox) continuing to improve itself while remaining open.

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Re:Firefox 52 released by apostacy on Wednesday March 08, 2017 @09:55AM (#13820610)

> The problem here isn't that browsers are getting better. The problem is that you paid for a router that evidently uses some broken and unsupported web interface. Not blaming you; that kind of thing's happened to me too. I'm guessing it either relies upon proprietary junk (Flash, Java) or nonstandard HTML/JS, or it does something terribly insecure that modern browsers don't allow.

If a router manufacturer used completely correct and standard SSL and Java implementations in the past, it would likely be inaccessible today. A reasonable assumption should be made that if you implement something correctly today, that it will be accessible by a web browser in the future.

I understand that these technologies have been found to be insecure. But some people still need them. And it is possible, and not even that hard, to run Applets securely. I do it. They can be sandboxed externally.

I'm actually thinking of putting my "distro" of Firefox on github, for running applets. Appletviewer is not enough.

These features are not removed for our benefit. They were removed under pressure from commercial entities. For example, Facebook pushed hard to kill flash with extreme prejudice two years ago [1]. If it had been up to them, everyone's Flash would have stopped working back then, and been very hard to re-enable. Facebook didn't do this out of concern for safety, they did it because it financially benefited them, and shrank their support window.

[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/07/14/0112229/facebooks-n...

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