Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Browsers should be browsers, not a way to get a whole bunch of trojan horse software installed on your machine.

If I wanted voice search, file sharing and/or note taking I would find the appropriate piece of software for that task and install it separately.

All this does is increasing the attack surface of the browser in a ridiculous manner providing features that only very few will use. File-sharing? What could possibly go wrong?

And in the meantime Thunderbird, a stand-alone program that had a decent following got the axe in favor of more browser bloat.

I really no longer understand Mozilla's mission.

View on HN

The title is misleading. These are not part of Firefox. They are in the Test Pilot program, which is a way for Mozilla to gather feedback on what features they should include, how they should change them if they do include them and all in all is completely open-ended. They might also release these as extensions or somesuch. They are all coded as WebExtensions (except for that file-sharing thing, that's just a webpage), so that's very well a possibility.

Also, browsers already have code to record from your microphone, due to the WebRTC web standard, so it's not like this opens an entire new class of potential vulnerabilities.

>The title is misleading. These are not part of Firefox.

Doesn't matter. They shouldn't be part of Mozilla's output either...

> If I wanted voice search, file sharing and/or note taking I would find the appropriate piece of software for that task and install it separately.

The good thing is that these are all separate browser extensions, none of which are bundled by default. So that's exactly the case.

For now. And then because not enough people install them they will be bundled by default. This has happened over and over, for instance with sync, pocket and so on.

The whole idea behind test pilot stuff is to trial stuff intended for future inclusion in the main distribution, getting it force-fed to be able to claim a large installed base is the logical next step.

You say that, but I've heard nothing about Tab Center (the Test Pilot vertical-tab sidebar) being folded into newer versions of Firefox. Luckily, a community member forked the old code and ported it to be a WebExtension so it still works with Firefox Nightly, but it really needs to be built-in to the browser for maximum polish.

There is the perfectly functional tree style tab extension. That's another waste of resources.

Really, Mozilla resource allocation is a mystery to me.

They are trying to move away from the old extension API (because maintaining that ate up a crap ton of resources, so don't come up with that move being a waste of resources) and Tree-Style Tabs is not yet compatible with this new API.

The Vertical Tabs test pilot thing was them demonstrating that it could be done (including to themselves, they need to test these APIs) and giving the community something to work with, should no other tree tab extensions crop up before the deprecation of the old API.

>The Vertical Tabs test pilot thing was [...] to test these APIs

Except that Tab Center wasn't a way for them to test the new WebExt APIs, as it was still based on XUL. See here: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/whats-all-this-abo...

>maintaining [the old extension API] ate up a crap ton of resources, so don't come up with that move being a waste of resources

Arguably not a waste if that meant preserving the most powerful extension environment out there, and also one of the very few reasons for people to stay with Firefox.

Signed: a Firefox user

The old extensions were not compatible with e10s.

If the Firefox team wanted to improve speed/security/modularity, etc. they had to ditch the old extension model.

It sucks, but necessary.

>The old extensions were not compatible with e10s.

Addons based on older APIs could be made compatible with the newer multiprocess design (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_mul... ) and for a while Mozilla tried to persuade developers to update theirs (see https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/08/02/multi-process-fir... )

It was only not long after that when Mozilla's fresh direction decided to start pushing the WebExtensions bandwagon only while dropping everything else, in spite of the thousands of man-hours invested by the addon developers (many of which, you can understand, were not happy; see http://fasezero.com/lastnotice.html )

>they had to ditch the old extension model

To me, that's more like a political decision they made at an arbitrary point in time.

"Not compatible" is just another way of saying "we don't have the resources and/or the inclination to support your programs". Look at what Microsoft does to ensure backward compatibility. They simulate specific windows bugs for specific old games that were coded to expect the original bug in Win95. Just so users' programs keep working. It's a matter of priorities and resources. And I believe both are out of whack at Mozilla right now.

EXACTLY. This is just like that little IM Client 'ello' or whatever that came bundled in the last version. I used it for a few days and said exactly what you did as I uninstalled and went back to a different browser.

I wonder which browser you're using, because there are plenty that come rather close to your definition (e.g. Midori), but odds are really high that you're not using them - because nobody is.

Thing is, if Mozilla wants to stay relevant, it has to find out what users want and deliver that. These experiments are one way to do that.

Nobody uses them because they're broken and slow.

Lynx works and is fast.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com