dblohm7

(I worked at Mozilla for 9 years, including a couple in mobile engineering)

> no addons on mobile for more than a decade!

Huh? What are you talking about?

> for nothing other than google-told-them-not-to.

Google never dictated any product decisions.

Tailscale.

My spouse is an audiologist, and yes, she has told me (and of course her patients) this is very much a "use it or lose it" type of deal.

It's still used, but PulseEvent has been discouraged for a long time.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/...

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050105-00/?p=36...

One thing is definitely clear: Canada's federal government is sorely lacking in people who understand small business.

A business in my family was ineligible for COVID aid for the longest time because the business was too new to be paying people salaries. For some reason they decided the government drew an arbitrary line and said that businesses must have employees on salary to matter.

I can understand wanting to limit elegibility to legitimate endeavours, but it's not like the business was some kind of side-hustle being run out of the trunk of somebody's car.

Is it? California's population is roughly the same as all of Canada's.

I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. Modern browsers try to host their extensions in a special sandboxed subprocess. At the time I was there, the code in Gecko that hosts sandboxed child processes was completely unable to deal with that host process being terminated; ie Gecko could not recover from that. It has nothing to do with Android settings.

> It exists in stable FF but is cordoned off for some reason.

See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657971

Yeah, but shitting on devs for stuff they have nothing to do with is just a lousy thing to do.

It comes down to the high-level architecture of Gecko.

Gecko is not just a web engine; it is in many ways an entire application framework. Gecko inverts control such that it implements the entire main event loop of the application. Desktop Firefox is essentially one big privileged HTML+JS application that happens to embed a non-privileged browser iframe within it. about:config governs settings around everything in this framework.

Now let's look at Android: the modern architecture of Firefox for Android is that of a native Android app that embeds Gecko similarly to a WebView, albeit a much more powerful one (GeckoView)[1]. Many parts of GeckoView's implementation need to deal with reconciling the "Gecko as app framework that controls the universe" paradigm with the "Gecko as a lowly Android View rendering into a graphics surface" paradigm. about:config is still important, but it only affects the Gecko part, not the native app part.

For GeckoView to work correctly, many about:config settings must be set to very specific values -- the free-for-all that is about:config on desktop could actually break an instance of Firefox on Android. This is particularly fatal to an app when run on a non-rooted phone.

[1] https://geckoview.dev

> Why not just slap a "here there be dragons" warning on untested extensions and let users have at it?

We essentially had that as part of pre-release builds. Same with about:config.

The argument we'd then hear from people is, "but I want the stable channel with the 'here be dragons'" stuff. The reality is, though, that the "here be dragons" stuff probably affects stability more than running beta does anyway; people who shat on us for that wanted to have their cake and eat it too, and it just doesn't work that way.

That's assuming that you know that the extension is the cause. A bad extension doesn't always kill perf as soon as you install it.

That's part of it, for sure... at the time I was still there, Gecko's extension process did not have the capability of recovering from termination. But that just meant that we couldn't run them in a child process, not that we couldn't run them at all. Of course, then you have security considerations, which no doubt could have factored into the product decision.

I am, and thank you!

Former Firefox dev for both desktop and Android here: I can definitely confirm that being constantly shit on wore me down a lot.

(I used to work on this stuff)

It was more complicated than that. Yes, GeckoView needed a separate WebExtension implementation, but that work was pretty much at parity with Fennec (the previous Firefox for Android that supported more extensions) when I left in 2021.

It was a product management decision that held off on more complete WebExtension parity with desktop, as well as any artificial limits as to which extensions were supported in release.

It was the explosion of mobile browsing that did it.

Into that Quantum-bot exosuit thingy?

Some of the USDS people are even ex-Mozilla!

It had to be rewritten. Essentially there was no formal interface between the frontend and Gecko, and it had turned into a sluggish hairball of a monolith. We redesigned Gecko on Android to be embeddable (GeckoView[1]) and so a new frontend had to be written. That part was absolutely necessary.

The rest of the debate is just about the UX, really.

[1] https://geckoview.dev

As somebody who worked on the Gecko side on this, there absolutely was a need for a rewrite.

No

No unicode in Win98.

I might as well jump in on this, too...

You gotta be careful with this one in the context that it is being applied here (HTML). This risks becoming an ableist mantra because the practice might be disregarding accessibility concerns.

Also a great book

My spouse is an audiologist who specializes in Tinnitus. From what I have learned from her, there is no cure, only ways to treat it to make it more manageable.

Working with an audiologist who has been through the Tinnitus Care Provider program [1] is probably your best bet.

[1] https://myhome.ihsinfo.org/myhome/Find_Provider.aspx?Find_a_...

> Windows is full of these arbitrary constants, like the 32kiB paging chunk for instance.

I assume you’re referring to the 64KiB allocation granularity? That’s actually not at all arbitrary: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031008-00/?p=42...

Play stupid games (Canadian government bill C-18 [1]), win stupid prizes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_News_Act

IANAL but AIUI US antitrust law only applies when a monopoly is acquired/maintained via prohibited means. Having a monopoly position in itself is necessary but not sufficient to be considered illegal by US courts.