News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Firefox 64 Released. Parent comment

Re:Firefox 64 Released by Paul-ish on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @02:34PM (#18658115)
The addon was abandoned by its author because Mozilla was making major changes to the addon API at the time. Extensions used to have carte blanche to change the browser, which was a security risk, not to mention it made threading/parallelizing the browser hard. The new extension API removed a lot of that freedom. After the API change, it wasn't possible (and might still not be) to develop a useful tab groups addon with the new API, so the author ceased development.

I can't imagine Mozilla crippling the addon API to the point where it can't grab data off an RSS feed and display it.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by zeveb on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @06:41PM (#18660064)
> Extensions used to have carte blanche to change the browser, which was a security risk …

I don't buy that. It's my browser running on my computer, it's my choice whose code I choose to run on it.

If, say, emacs or vi had this kind of handholding, neither one would be much more than a text editor.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by reubenmorais on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @08:43PM (#18660678)
Emacs and vi are used by programmers. Browsers are used by nearly every single person on the Internet. The threat model is completely different.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by piyush_soni on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @01:53AM (#18661879)
Time for a developers only Browser! Anyone wants to grab that? :)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by bovine3dom on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @06:39AM (#18663040)
Qutebrowser and next browser are both quite programmer-focused. They are WebKit based, however.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by The-Compiler on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @07:07AM (#18663194)
qutebrowser uses QtWebEngine, which is based on Chromium/Blink - I wouldn't call that WebKit anymore ;-)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by bovine3dom on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @07:14AM (#18663232)
I was probably wrong about next too, then. Still, they both hail from the Steve Jobs school of blurry fonts, which is all any sane person tries to avoid in a web browser ; )
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by Ar-Curunir on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @09:10PM (#18660804)
Emacs or vi don't handle potentially malicious third-party code...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by archgoon on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @11:07PM (#18661320)
Sure they do. That's what extensions are.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox 64 Released by acdha on Wednesday December 12, 2018 @09:40AM (#18664247)
That’s like saying everyone is at risk of bear attacks because a few people in rural areas do get attacked. Yes, extensions exist but when was the last time someone clicked on a link in an email and installed an emacs extension? That happens daily to thousands of web users because the population is so many orders of magnitude greater.
[ Parent | on HN ]