Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

[tuxic@posteo.de]

On 04/02 05:41, Martin Vaeth wrote:
> Bill Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au> wrote:
> > I use the palemoon overlay.
> 
> There is also the octopus overlay.
> Anyway, both can only react to upstream.
> 
> > builds fine with gcc-6.4
> 
> Yes, but it has random crashes which do not occur with gcc-5,
> and as somebody familiar with the code posted somewhere,
> the reasons are quite some assumptions in assembler code
> which should not have been made. (I simply repeated these
> claims without checking them.)
> 
> Upstream knows about it and therefore officially does not
> support building with gcc-6. Since firefox upstream has fixed
> all these things ages ago, and palemoon is not able to identify
> or pull the corresponding patches this shows IMHO that it
> has already diverged to a degree that it cannot be reasonably
> maintained with the resources they have, and I doubt that
> security issues are closed (or worse: recognized) timely:
> In contrast to crashes (even Heisenbug crashes), security
> issues cannot be "detected" if there is no expert regularly
> checking the code very carfully.
> 
> The decision to stick with legacy extension api completely
> excludes that there is some convergence of the fork in the
> future.
> 
> Also the refusal to implement webextension apis (which is
> consequent, since it is hardly possible to maintain 2
> more and more diverging apis) has the side effect that
> only obsolete versions of the actively maintained extensions
> like noscript and ublock-origin can be used. In the moment,
> the legacy version of noscript is still maintained, but only
> because of the tor browser. I suppose eventually this will change.
> 
> I also do not know much about waterfox, but if one goal ist
> to keep legacy extensions, I am afraid it will go the palemoon
> way, too:
> It seems currently that mozilla, google, and apple are the only
> oranganizations with enough resources to maintain full browsers,
> and any forks of their browsers which diverge more than a patchset
> of essentially fixed size are doomed to fail for this very reason.
> 
> 


...and if after all that (at least) firefox gets so bulky and has such
a hugh memory footprint that (on a multitasking OS) no other
reasonable "powerful" application will multitask with it (or your
machine goes swapping) and if mozilla itsself walks down an at least
questionable way...then...
What?

In the moment I cannot use firefox - regardless how
advanced/secure/modern/or what it is. It does not fit into
my working environment - it is to huge.

Cheers
Meino