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

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

[Dale]

Howdy,

I been holding off on upgrading Firefox.  Basically, it breaks addons
that I just can't go without.  Tab groups and some other tab utilities
are among them.  I recently updated temporarily to see just what was
going to be broken and what I could do to adjust.  It seems some have
alternatives but some don't. 

For others who are in the same situation, what are you doing?  Are you
staying with a older version until things can be updated on the addon
end or are you upgrading Firefox and living with all the pieces that are
broken?  Another option, are you switching to some other browser?  If
so, which one??

If you are upgrading and finding solutions, have you found a replacement
for Tab Utilities, Tab Groups Manager and any others, since that may
help others on this list. 

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Adam Carter]

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On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 9:28 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:

> Howdy,
>
> I been holding off on upgrading Firefox.  Basically, it breaks addons
> that I just can't go without.  Tab groups and some other tab utilities
> are among them.  I recently updated temporarily to see just what was
> going to be broken and what I could do to adjust.  It seems some have
> alternatives but some don't.
>

The firefox ebuilds are out of date at the moment (
https://bugs.gentoo.org/650472 ) so its probably not worth upgrading until
that issue is fixed, unless you use the mozilla overlay.

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

[Dale]

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Adam Carter wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 9:28 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
> <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Howdy,
>
>     I been holding off on upgrading Firefox.  Basically, it breaks addons
>     that I just can't go without.  Tab groups and some other tab utilities
>     are among them.  I recently updated temporarily to see just what was
>     going to be broken and what I could do to adjust.  It seems some have
>     alternatives but some don't.
>
>
> The firefox ebuilds are out of date at the moment (
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/650472 ) so its probably not worth upgrading
> until that issue is fixed, unless you use the mozilla overlay.
>

My biggest problem is that addons are broken on anything 57 and above. 
At least that seems to be the version that stops old addons from
working.  Would the latest release have a way for the old addons to
work?  If not, then it doesn't matter if it is 58, 59 or 60. 

Basically, I'm trying to figure out if others are doing like I am and
keeping a older version of Firefox installed because of the addons no
longer working.  If someone has been able to find comparable addons to
the ones that no longer work on the newer Firefox versions, I'd like to
know that as well.  Right now, I'm sticking with older versions of
Firefox.  I don't like the security problems that may cause but it is
what it is. 

Since I posted the message above, I've looked into Palemoon, Vivaldi,
Opera and dug around to see what else I can try.  So far, none of them
can do what pre 57 versions of Firefox can with the addons I use. 

Just trying to get ideas and info on this mess. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[tuxic]

On 03/30 09:23, Dale wrote:
> Adam Carter wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 9:28 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
> > <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     Howdy,
> >
> >     I been holding off on upgrading Firefox.  Basically, it breaks addons
> >     that I just can't go without.  Tab groups and some other tab utilities
> >     are among them.  I recently updated temporarily to see just what was
> >     going to be broken and what I could do to adjust.  It seems some have
> >     alternatives but some don't.
> >
> >
> > The firefox ebuilds are out of date at the moment (
> > https://bugs.gentoo.org/650472 ) so its probably not worth upgrading
> > until that issue is fixed, unless you use the mozilla overlay.
> >
> 
> My biggest problem is that addons are broken on anything 57 and above. 
> At least that seems to be the version that stops old addons from
> working.  Would the latest release have a way for the old addons to
> work?  If not, then it doesn't matter if it is 58, 59 or 60. 
> 
> Basically, I'm trying to figure out if others are doing like I am and
> keeping a older version of Firefox installed because of the addons no
> longer working.  If someone has been able to find comparable addons to
> the ones that no longer work on the newer Firefox versions, I'd like to
> know that as well.  Right now, I'm sticking with older versions of
> Firefox.  I don't like the security problems that may cause but it is
> what it is. 
> 
> Since I posted the message above, I've looked into Palemoon, Vivaldi,
> Opera and dug around to see what else I can try.  So far, none of them
> can do what pre 57 versions of Firefox can with the addons I use. 
> 
> Just trying to get ideas and info on this mess. 
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-) 

Hi,
 
 I switched to waterfox for privacy reasons and it supports the older
 plugin system.
 No need to stay to older version (keeping older bugs, which may
 affect seurity) ...

 Waterfox is opensourced and it has a smaller memory footprint.

 https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/

 No advertising intended...I am only an user.

 Cheers!
 Meino

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

[Dale]

tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> On 03/30 09:23, Dale wrote:
>> Adam Carter wrote:
>>> On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 9:28 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
>>> <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Howdy,
>>>
>>>     I been holding off on upgrading Firefox.  Basically, it breaks addons
>>>     that I just can't go without.  Tab groups and some other tab utilities
>>>     are among them.  I recently updated temporarily to see just what was
>>>     going to be broken and what I could do to adjust.  It seems some have
>>>     alternatives but some don't.
>>>
>>>
>>> The firefox ebuilds are out of date at the moment (
>>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/650472 ) so its probably not worth upgrading
>>> until that issue is fixed, unless you use the mozilla overlay.
>>>
>> My biggest problem is that addons are broken on anything 57 and above. 
>> At least that seems to be the version that stops old addons from
>> working.  Would the latest release have a way for the old addons to
>> work?  If not, then it doesn't matter if it is 58, 59 or 60. 
>>
>> Basically, I'm trying to figure out if others are doing like I am and
>> keeping a older version of Firefox installed because of the addons no
>> longer working.  If someone has been able to find comparable addons to
>> the ones that no longer work on the newer Firefox versions, I'd like to
>> know that as well.  Right now, I'm sticking with older versions of
>> Firefox.  I don't like the security problems that may cause but it is
>> what it is. 
>>
>> Since I posted the message above, I've looked into Palemoon, Vivaldi,
>> Opera and dug around to see what else I can try.  So far, none of them
>> can do what pre 57 versions of Firefox can with the addons I use. 
>>
>> Just trying to get ideas and info on this mess. 
>>
>> Dale
>>
>> :-)  :-) 
> Hi,
>  
>  I switched to waterfox for privacy reasons and it supports the older
>  plugin system.
>  No need to stay to older version (keeping older bugs, which may
>  affect seurity) ...
>
>  Waterfox is opensourced and it has a smaller memory footprint.
>
>  https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/
>
>  No advertising intended...I am only an user.
>
>  Cheers!
>  Meino
>

I ran up on a site where that was talked about.  It's not in the tree
tho.  How did you install it?  Is it just download and run it from
command line or a manual addition to the menu system?  Is there a
overlay with it in it?  While I like Firefox, the memory hog that it
sometimes is, I'm not opposed to switching to something else. 

Thanks for the info. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[tuxic]

On 03/30 09:45, Dale wrote:
> tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> > On 03/30 09:23, Dale wrote:
> >> Adam Carter wrote:
> >>> On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 9:28 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
> >>> <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>     Howdy,
> >>>
> >>>     I been holding off on upgrading Firefox.  Basically, it breaks addons
> >>>     that I just can't go without.  Tab groups and some other tab utilities
> >>>     are among them.  I recently updated temporarily to see just what was
> >>>     going to be broken and what I could do to adjust.  It seems some have
> >>>     alternatives but some don't.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> The firefox ebuilds are out of date at the moment (
> >>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/650472 ) so its probably not worth upgrading
> >>> until that issue is fixed, unless you use the mozilla overlay.
> >>>
> >> My biggest problem is that addons are broken on anything 57 and above. 
> >> At least that seems to be the version that stops old addons from
> >> working.  Would the latest release have a way for the old addons to
> >> work?  If not, then it doesn't matter if it is 58, 59 or 60. 
> >>
> >> Basically, I'm trying to figure out if others are doing like I am and
> >> keeping a older version of Firefox installed because of the addons no
> >> longer working.  If someone has been able to find comparable addons to
> >> the ones that no longer work on the newer Firefox versions, I'd like to
> >> know that as well.  Right now, I'm sticking with older versions of
> >> Firefox.  I don't like the security problems that may cause but it is
> >> what it is. 
> >>
> >> Since I posted the message above, I've looked into Palemoon, Vivaldi,
> >> Opera and dug around to see what else I can try.  So far, none of them
> >> can do what pre 57 versions of Firefox can with the addons I use. 
> >>
> >> Just trying to get ideas and info on this mess. 
> >>
> >> Dale
> >>
> >> :-)  :-) 
> > Hi,
> >  
> >  I switched to waterfox for privacy reasons and it supports the older
> >  plugin system.
> >  No need to stay to older version (keeping older bugs, which may
> >  affect seurity) ...
> >
> >  Waterfox is opensourced and it has a smaller memory footprint.
> >
> >  https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/
> >
> >  No advertising intended...I am only an user.
> >
> >  Cheers!
> >  Meino
> >
> 
> I ran up on a site where that was talked about.  It's not in the tree
> tho.  How did you install it?  Is it just download and run it from
> command line or a manual addition to the menu system?  Is there a
> overlay with it in it?  While I like Firefox, the memory hog that it
> sometimes is, I'm not opposed to switching to something else. 
> 
> Thanks for the info. 
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-) 
> 

Hi Dale,

I downloaded the archive, unpacked it in a separate directory, moved
that to /usr/local/., made a symlink from /usr/local/bin/waterfox to
the executable in that directory and: DONE :)

Ok...I did an entry inti menu.xml of my openbox...manually ;)

Since waterfox is contained in a single directory, gentoo will not be
"polluted" and the removal/upgrade of waterfox is easy.

It is not the original genuine sacred of Gentoo, though. ;)

Cheers!
Meino

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

[Dale]

tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> On 03/30 09:45, Dale wrote:
>> tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>  
>>>  I switched to waterfox for privacy reasons and it supports the older
>>>  plugin system.
>>>  No need to stay to older version (keeping older bugs, which may
>>>  affect seurity) ...
>>>
>>>  Waterfox is opensourced and it has a smaller memory footprint.
>>>
>>>  https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/
>>>
>>>  No advertising intended...I am only an user.
>>>
>>>  Cheers!
>>>  Meino
>>>
>> I ran up on a site where that was talked about.  It's not in the tree
>> tho.  How did you install it?  Is it just download and run it from
>> command line or a manual addition to the menu system?  Is there a
>> overlay with it in it?  While I like Firefox, the memory hog that it
>> sometimes is, I'm not opposed to switching to something else. 
>>
>> Thanks for the info. 
>>
>> Dale
>>
>> :-)  :-) 
>>
> Hi Dale,
>
> I downloaded the archive, unpacked it in a separate directory, moved
> that to /usr/local/., made a symlink from /usr/local/bin/waterfox to
> the executable in that directory and: DONE :)
>
> Ok...I did an entry inti menu.xml of my openbox...manually ;)
>
> Since waterfox is contained in a single directory, gentoo will not be
> "polluted" and the removal/upgrade of waterfox is easy.
>
> It is not the original genuine sacred of Gentoo, though. ;)
>
> Cheers!
> Meino
>

Cool.  I was peeking into overlays and was having no luck at all.  I
thought I found it twice but it seems they were removed or something. 
There was other stuff in the overlays but not Waterfox. 

I'll go download it and give it a whirl.  Heck, if it isn't so much of a
memory hog, that will be a bonus.  LOL 

Thanks much. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

P. S. May reply again if it works really well, for the benefit of others
who may want to give it a try.  ;-) 

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

[tuxic]

On 03/31 05:05, tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> On 03/30 09:45, Dale wrote:
> > tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> > > On 03/30 09:23, Dale wrote:
> > >> Adam Carter wrote:
> > >>> On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 9:28 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
> > >>> <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>>     Howdy,
> > >>>
> > >>>     I been holding off on upgrading Firefox.  Basically, it breaks addons
> > >>>     that I just can't go without.  Tab groups and some other tab utilities
> > >>>     are among them.  I recently updated temporarily to see just what was
> > >>>     going to be broken and what I could do to adjust.  It seems some have
> > >>>     alternatives but some don't.
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>> The firefox ebuilds are out of date at the moment (
> > >>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/650472 ) so its probably not worth upgrading
> > >>> until that issue is fixed, unless you use the mozilla overlay.
> > >>>
> > >> My biggest problem is that addons are broken on anything 57 and above. 
> > >> At least that seems to be the version that stops old addons from
> > >> working.  Would the latest release have a way for the old addons to
> > >> work?  If not, then it doesn't matter if it is 58, 59 or 60. 
> > >>
> > >> Basically, I'm trying to figure out if others are doing like I am and
> > >> keeping a older version of Firefox installed because of the addons no
> > >> longer working.  If someone has been able to find comparable addons to
> > >> the ones that no longer work on the newer Firefox versions, I'd like to
> > >> know that as well.  Right now, I'm sticking with older versions of
> > >> Firefox.  I don't like the security problems that may cause but it is
> > >> what it is. 
> > >>
> > >> Since I posted the message above, I've looked into Palemoon, Vivaldi,
> > >> Opera and dug around to see what else I can try.  So far, none of them
> > >> can do what pre 57 versions of Firefox can with the addons I use. 
> > >>
> > >> Just trying to get ideas and info on this mess. 
> > >>
> > >> Dale
> > >>
> > >> :-)  :-) 
> > > Hi,
> > >  
> > >  I switched to waterfox for privacy reasons and it supports the older
> > >  plugin system.
> > >  No need to stay to older version (keeping older bugs, which may
> > >  affect seurity) ...
> > >
> > >  Waterfox is opensourced and it has a smaller memory footprint.
> > >
> > >  https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/
> > >
> > >  No advertising intended...I am only an user.
> > >
> > >  Cheers!
> > >  Meino
> > >
> > 
> > I ran up on a site where that was talked about.  It's not in the tree
> > tho.  How did you install it?  Is it just download and run it from
> > command line or a manual addition to the menu system?  Is there a
> > overlay with it in it?  While I like Firefox, the memory hog that it
> > sometimes is, I'm not opposed to switching to something else. 
> > 
> > Thanks for the info. 
> > 
> > Dale
> > 
> > :-)  :-) 
> > 
> 
> Hi Dale,
> 
> I downloaded the archive, unpacked it in a separate directory, moved
> that to /usr/local/., made a symlink from /usr/local/bin/waterfox to
> the executable in that directory and: DONE :)
> 
> Ok...I did an entry inti menu.xml of my openbox...manually ;)
> 
> Since waterfox is contained in a single directory, gentoo will not be
> "polluted" and the removal/upgrade of waterfox is easy.
> 
> It is not the original genuine sacred of Gentoo, though. ;)
> 
> Cheers!
> Meino
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

(here is version of my post with less typos.... ;) )

Hi Dale,

I downloaded the archive, unpacked it in a separate directory, moved
that to /usr/local/., made a symlink for /usr/local/bin/waterfox of
the executable in that directory and: DONE :)

Ok...I did an entry into menu.xml of my openbox...manually ;)

Since waterfox is contained in a single directory, gentoo will not be
"polluted" and the removal/upgrade of waterfox is easy.

It is not the original genuine sacred way of Gentoo, though. ;)

Cheers!
Meino

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

[tuxic]

On 03/30 10:36, Dale wrote:
> tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> > On 03/30 09:45, Dale wrote:
> >> tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi,
> >>>  
> >>>  I switched to waterfox for privacy reasons and it supports the older
> >>>  plugin system.
> >>>  No need to stay to older version (keeping older bugs, which may
> >>>  affect seurity) ...
> >>>
> >>>  Waterfox is opensourced and it has a smaller memory footprint.
> >>>
> >>>  https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/
> >>>
> >>>  No advertising intended...I am only an user.
> >>>
> >>>  Cheers!
> >>>  Meino
> >>>
> >> I ran up on a site where that was talked about.  It's not in the tree
> >> tho.  How did you install it?  Is it just download and run it from
> >> command line or a manual addition to the menu system?  Is there a
> >> overlay with it in it?  While I like Firefox, the memory hog that it
> >> sometimes is, I'm not opposed to switching to something else. 
> >>
> >> Thanks for the info. 
> >>
> >> Dale
> >>
> >> :-)  :-) 
> >>
> > Hi Dale,
> >
> > I downloaded the archive, unpacked it in a separate directory, moved
> > that to /usr/local/., made a symlink from /usr/local/bin/waterfox to
> > the executable in that directory and: DONE :)
> >
> > Ok...I did an entry inti menu.xml of my openbox...manually ;)
> >
> > Since waterfox is contained in a single directory, gentoo will not be
> > "polluted" and the removal/upgrade of waterfox is easy.
> >
> > It is not the original genuine sacred of Gentoo, though. ;)
> >
> > Cheers!
> > Meino
> >
> 
> Cool.  I was peeking into overlays and was having no luck at all.  I
> thought I found it twice but it seems they were removed or something. 
> There was other stuff in the overlays but not Waterfox. 
> 
> I'll go download it and give it a whirl.  Heck, if it isn't so much of a
> memory hog, that will be a bonus.  LOL 
> 
> Thanks much. 
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-) 
> 
> P. S. May reply again if it works really well, for the benefit of others
> who may want to give it a try.  ;-) 
> 

Hi Dale,


to wetten your appetite...;)
Here is an exerpt of the wikepedia page for waterfox:

Waterfox differs from Firefox in a number of ways by:
    Disabling Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
    Disabling Web Runtime
    Removing Adobe DRM
    Removing Pocket
    Removing Telemetry
    Removing data collection
    Removing startup profiling
    Allowing running of all 64-bit NPAPI plugins
    Allowing running of unsigned extensions
    Removing of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
    Addition of Duplicate Tab option
    Addition of locale selector in about:preferences > General
    Defaulting to Ecosia as the search engine instead of Google or Yahoo![7]
    Cookie prompt from version 56.0 (beta)[8]

(see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox)

Cheers
Meino

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

[Martin Vaeth]

Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I been holding off on upgrading Firefox. Basically, it breaks addons
> that I just can't go without. Tab groups and some other tab utilities
> are among them.

Basically the situation is the following:

>=firefox-57 support so-called WebExtensions which intentionally
are less powerful (hence safer) than legacy extensions.
For security and compatibility reasons, it will *never* be the case
anymore that WebExtensions are able to change browser behaviour.

Exceptions are only certain well-defined APIs which will presumably
not change dramatically in future versions.
For instance, there is a tab API, but essentially it is limited
to basic things like searching/activating/closing/opening tabs etc:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Working_with_the_Tabs_API
So no WebExtension will ever be able to offer tab functionality which
goes beyond that.

Essentially, there is no other choice than to live with it:

Stable firefox-52 and maybe some firefox forks (palemoon, waterfox,
tox-browser) support legacy extensions for a while. However, if they
support them for a longer period and do not have similar resources
than mozilla, I would not trust them anymore, because it means that
they diverged from upstream too much to fix all security issues by
pulling. (Not to speak about security issues existing in the
legacy extension code which will never be fixed by upstream, anyway).

As usual, there is the balance
  "convenience" (old plugins) <-> "security".
In the beginning (say, until firefox-52 is no longer supported
upstream), there is a certain choice. But after that staying on the
"convenience" side is not sane anymore.

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

[Arve Barsnes]

On 31 March 2018 at 10:18, Martin Vaeth <martin@mvath.de> wrote:
> Exceptions are only certain well-defined APIs which will presumably
> not change dramatically in future versions.
> For instance, there is a tab API, but essentially it is limited
> to basic things like searching/activating/closing/opening tabs etc:
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Working_with_the_Tabs_API
> So no WebExtension will ever be able to offer tab functionality which
> goes beyond that.

Take a look at their bugzilla for bugs tracking a lot of new
functionality in the extension APIs that will come in future releases.
Especially around tabs, as many popular extensions did stuff with
tabs.

Personally I upgraded despite losing some stuff, but I think most of
it will return in some form at some point.

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

[tuxic]

On 03/31 12:17, Arve Barsnes wrote:
> On 31 March 2018 at 10:18, Martin Vaeth <martin@mvath.de> wrote:
> > Exceptions are only certain well-defined APIs which will presumably
> > not change dramatically in future versions.
> > For instance, there is a tab API, but essentially it is limited
> > to basic things like searching/activating/closing/opening tabs etc:
> > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Working_with_the_Tabs_API
> > So no WebExtension will ever be able to offer tab functionality which
> > goes beyond that.
> 
> Take a look at their bugzilla for bugs tracking a lot of new
> functionality in the extension APIs that will come in future releases.
> Especially around tabs, as many popular extensions did stuff with
> tabs.
> 
> Personally I upgraded despite losing some stuff, but I think most of
> it will return in some form at some point.
> 

Firefox is eaten my RAM (8GB) . An application, which does not co-operate
with other applications due to its memory footprint does not co-operate
with other application due to its memory footprint regardless how
advance it is.

There two reasons for which I have switched to waterfox: Privacy and
memory.

About:config and search for "telemetry"

Or check how many URLS are configured under about:config.
Why need the browser need to know them in beforehand?

Cheers
Meino

Re: [gentoo-user] Firefox with tab-grouping

[Philip Webb]

180330 Dale wrote:
> Basically, I'm trying to figure out if others are doing like I am
> and keeping a older version of Firefox installed
> because of the addons no longer working.

Definitely, that's what I've been doing.  I'm using 52.6.0 .

> My biggest problem is that addons are broken on anything 57 and above. 
> At least that seems to be the version that stops old addons from working.

I use tab groups all the time & losing them wb like losing a leg.
History : FF introduced them a long time ago, then dropped them later ;
soon afterwards, someone wrote an add-on which restored them,
using the previous code, which FF had published ;
then FF seemed to re-introduce them, but with a different format,
which is what I'm happily using at present : it doesn't look like an add-on.

> I've looked into Palemoon, Vivaldi, Opera
> and dug around to see what else I can try.  So far, none of them
> can do what pre 57 versions of Firefox can with the addons I use. 

I've installed Vivaldi, but it doesn't seem to do tab-grouping.

So has anyone found a way to do tab-grouping with FF >= 57 ?
Does any other browser -- Waterfox ? -- provide them in any form ?

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca

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

[Martin Vaeth]

tuxic@posteo.de <tuxic@posteo.de> wrote:
>
> There two reasons for which I have switched to waterfox: Privacy and
> memory.
>
> About:config and search for "telemetry"

Telemetry can be switched off.

> Or check how many URLS are configured under about:config.

It is in "about:config", so they can be switched off.
However, for some it is wise not to: There is a balance
between security and privacy - e.g. ask a public server
for known malware sites at obvious cost of privacy.
You might want to have a look at the customization from e.g.
https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js

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

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-03-31 08:18, Martin Vaeth wrote:

> As usual, there is the balance
>   "convenience" (old plugins) <-> "security".
> In the beginning (say, until firefox-52 is no longer supported
> upstream), there is a certain choice. But after that staying on the
> "convenience" side is not sane anymore.

There are probably few people more familiar with this tradeoff than
myself :P.  But the browser case is a bit different, because the
"convenience" features (in my case, at least) themselves have to do with
security.  Using the latest official Mozilla browser means trusting
their built-in defenses are as good as my current plugin based ones.
And I have doubts about that.

This is a tangent from the thread topic, but there is another
inconvenience of modern FF that keeps me from re-adopting it: font
rendering.  You will pry my beautiful thin DejaVu Sans from my dead
body, and give my dead body blurry webfonts in return.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Firefox with tab-grouping

[Dale]

Philip Webb wrote:
> 180330 Dale wrote:
>
>> I've looked into Palemoon, Vivaldi, Opera
>> and dug around to see what else I can try.  So far, none of them
>> can do what pre 57 versions of Firefox can with the addons I use. 
> I've installed Vivaldi, but it doesn't seem to do tab-grouping.
>
> So has anyone found a way to do tab-grouping with FF >= 57 ?
> Does any other browser -- Waterfox ? -- provide them in any form ?
>

I downloaded Waterfox.  It works fine itself however, the addon for Tab
Utilities is broken.  It fails to start.  That didn't help me with my
problem since I need that and Tab Groups as well.  I also tried the Tree
Tab addon but it doesn't work with version below 57.  If you don't need
Tab Utilities, Waterfox should work for you just fine. 

On my install, I downloaded it from the website, extracted to
/home/dale/waterfox and ran it from command line.  If everything had
worked fine, I was going to move to a more proper place, create a menu
entry etc etc etc.  It seems everything Waterfox needs is in the tarball
itself. 

You may want to give Waterfox a try since it is easy to do.  It just may
work fine for you.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Martin Vaeth]

Ian Zimmerman <itz@very.loosely.org> wrote:
> On 2018-03-31 08:18, Martin Vaeth wrote:
>
>> As usual, there is the balance
>>   "convenience" (old plugins) <-> "security".
>> In the beginning (say, until firefox-52 is no longer supported
>> upstream), there is a certain choice. But after that staying on the
>> "convenience" side is not sane anymore.
>
> There are probably few people more familiar with this tradeoff than
> myself :P.  But the browser case is a bit different, because the
> "convenience" features (in my case, at least) themselves have to do with
> security.  Using the latest official Mozilla browser means trusting
> their built-in defenses are as good as my current plugin based ones.
> And I have doubts about that.

If you speak about defenses like noscript, there are safer variants
available. I guess the usage of the already mentioned user.js
(of course adapted to your needs) together with current Webextensions
noscript, ublock-origin, and https-everywhere (maybe for privacy
also coupled with decentraleyes, duckduckgo{-privacy-esesntials},
canvasblocker, skip-redirect) does protect you more than using
old versions of these packages.
Not to speak about freshly found security holes.

> This is a tangent from the thread topic, but there is another
> inconvenience of modern FF that keeps me from re-adopting it: font
> rendering.

I do not have experience with this, but there is also a lot
customizable in user.js (i.e. about:config). I guess you have
to switch off (or on) some hardware acceleration. There is also
a rich "themes" API which might contain relevant options.
However, as mentioned, I have no experience with all this.

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

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-04-01 09:15, Martin Vaeth wrote:

> If you speak about defenses like noscript, there are safer variants
> available. I guess the usage of the already mentioned user.js (of
> course adapted to your needs) together with current Webextensions
> noscript, ublock-origin, and https-everywhere (maybe for privacy also
> coupled with decentraleyes, duckduckgo{-privacy-esesntials},
> canvasblocker, skip-redirect) does protect you more than using old
> versions of these packages.

I'll look at these things.  Didn't know ublock was available as a webext.

> Not to speak about freshly found security holes.

I have been looking at them since I adopted palemoon mid-yesteryear.  It
seems to me almost all are in new code added to FF after the fork, and
moreover in code handling new web "features" which I never use.

> > This is a tangent from the thread topic, but there is another
> > inconvenience of modern FF that keeps me from re-adopting it: font
> > rendering.
> 
> I do not have experience with this, but there is also a lot
> customizable in user.js (i.e. about:config). I guess you have
> to switch off (or on) some hardware acceleration. There is also
> a rich "themes" API which might contain relevant options.

Of course I'm no expert either (if I were, I would invest the effort to
make it work for me), but IMO this is not in FF proper but in the
bundled version of freetype - which cannot be unbundled via USE.  So
it's all about this:

https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-hinting.html

and the reasons I can make it work with palemoon:

1. palemoon doesn't bundle freetype

2. I froze my freetype at 2.7.1, the last version where it can still be
disabled

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

[Taiidan]

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I am sticking with ice-cat aka firefox 52 stable long term support but I
do not know what I shall do when the long terms term is up.....maybe
switch to waterfox and hope their dev team is skilled enough to make a
quality product (of course anyone with the skills should assist)

Mozilla is really bad these days they have became almost like microsoft
making changes that no one wants and stealthily forcing
advertising/tracking on people - there really needs to be a professional
fork similar to the devuan/debian split over the evil SystemD. (How come
almost every distro adapted it suddenly overnight? entirely not
suspicious at all)

Damn everything good these days is declared "legacy" and thrown away,
soon a modern laptop won't have any ports at all and will be entirely
wireless like the macbook wheel parody.

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

[Martin Vaeth]

Ian Zimmerman <itz@very.loosely.org> wrote:
> On 2018-04-01 09:15, Martin Vaeth wrote:
>
>> noscript, ublock-origin, and https-everywhere (maybe for privacy also
>> coupled with decentraleyes, duckduckgo{-privacy-esesntials},
>> canvasblocker, skip-redirect)

I had forgottten to mention: These WebExtensions (and some more)
can be installed system-wide with portage using the mv overlay. ;)

> Didn't know ublock was available as a webext.

This was one of the first extensions which had been rewritten.
It is even available for chromium. This (partial) browser independence
is another advantage of WebExtensions.

However, noscript uses some more advanced APIs which were
introduced more recently (and so far only in firefox but not chromium).
I do not know the details, but if I understood correctly, ublock-origin
can come "too late" in certain cases which could be fixed only by these
new APIs: This was the reason, that the WebExtension variant of noscript
had been delayed until firefox-57 came out. I have no idea whether current
versions of ublock-origin were able to fix these issues.

I have a bit experience with WebExtensions in general and must say I like
the concept: It gives enough power to program such protection extensions
and simultaneously makes it impossible to do malevolent things, unless
the extension requests corresponding permissions.
Legacy extensions, in contrast, could easily misuse their power and
break things (possibly even unintentional in case one of the frequent
API changes was happening).
Thus, the restriction of APIs indeed has a certain positive effect.

> I have been looking at them since I adopted palemoon mid-yesteryear.

An alarm sign for me was that palemoon was eventually dropped for
android after being practically unmaintained (i.e. with known open
security holes) for months/years. A similar alarm sign concerning
linux is that they were not able to pull the fixes for the assembler
code which relied on undocumented behaviour of <=gcc-5, even months
after gcc-7 was out. Even if these problems are not marked as
"security" issues, they can easily be some.

All in all, despite first I considered palemoon as a good idea,
I have removed it since some months for these security considerations.

> seems to me almost all are in new code added to FF after the fork, and
> moreover in code handling new web "features" which I never use.

Experience shows that it is not possible to "hide":
Sooner or later a website you do have to use for some reason
will require such a feature. Eventually the number of these
websites increases. And then you are at a dead end.
Nowadays, it has already "practically" become impossible to
use exclusively lynx or (e)links; in a while it will be impossible
to use a browser which does not support certain new "features".

> bundled version of freetype

I cannot comment much on this, but palemoon had a lot of bugs
if you unbundle libraries. In any case, this is more an ebuild
thing than an upstream thing: Unfortunately, unbundling is
supported by neither upstream.

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

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-04-01 16:29, Martin Vaeth wrote:

> An alarm sign for me was that palemoon was eventually dropped for
> android after being practically unmaintained (i.e. with known open
> security holes) for months/years. A similar alarm sign concerning
> linux is that they were not able to pull the fixes for the assembler
> code which relied on undocumented behaviour of <=gcc-5, even months
> after gcc-7 was out. Even if these problems are not marked as
> "security" issues, they can easily be some.

WTH is even assembly code _doing_ in a browser??  That is insane.

now that I know this is the reason why palemoon needs gcc 4, I will
definitely look into it more closely.

> Experience shows that it is not possible to "hide":
> Sooner or later a website you do have to use for some reason
> will require such a feature. Eventually the number of these
> websites increases. And then you are at a dead end.
> Nowadays, it has already "practically" become impossible to
> use exclusively lynx or (e)links; in a while it will be impossible
> to use a browser which does not support certain new "features".

You know the economist Keynes quote about "the long run".  Applies quite
well here.

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

[Dale]

Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-04-01 16:29, Martin Vaeth wrote:
>
>> An alarm sign for me was that palemoon was eventually dropped for
>> android after being practically unmaintained (i.e. with known open
>> security holes) for months/years. A similar alarm sign concerning
>> linux is that they were not able to pull the fixes for the assembler
>> code which relied on undocumented behaviour of <=gcc-5, even months
>> after gcc-7 was out. Even if these problems are not marked as
>> "security" issues, they can easily be some.
> WTH is even assembly code _doing_ in a browser??  That is insane.
>
> now that I know this is the reason why palemoon needs gcc 4, I will
> definitely look into it more closely.
>
>


Just for giggles, I tried to re-emerge palemoon.  This is part of the
output I got.


>>> Running pre-merge checks for www-client/palemoon-27.8.3
 * Checking for at least 7 GiB disk space at
"/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/temp"
...                                                                                  
[ ok ]
 * Checking compiler profile...
 * Building Pale Moon with a compiler other than a supported gcc version
 * may result in an unstable build.
 * You can use gcc-config to change your compiler profile, just remember
 * to change it back afterwards.
 * You need to have the appropriate versions of gcc installed for them
 * to be shown in gcc-config.
 * Alternatively, you can set the PALEMOON_ENABLE_UNSUPPORTED_COMPILERS
 * environment variable to 1 either by exporting it from the current shell
 * or by adding it to your make.conf file.
 * Be aware though that building Pale Moon with an unsupported compiler
 * means that the official support channels may refuse to offer any
 * kind of help in case the build fails or the browser behaves incorrectly.
 * Supported GCC versions: 4.7, 4.9
 * Selected GCC version: 6.4
 * ERROR: www-client/palemoon-27.8.3::palemoon failed (pretend phase):
 *   (no error message)
 *
 * Call stack:
 *           ebuild.sh, line 124:  Called pkg_pretend
 *           ebuild.sh, line 357:  Called palemoon-4_pkg_pretend
 *   palemoon-4.eclass, line  22:  Called die
 * The specific snippet of code:
 *                      die
 *
 * If you need support, post the output of `emerge --info
'=www-client/palemoon-27.8.3::palemoon'`,
 * the complete build log and the output of `emerge -pqv
'=www-client/palemoon-27.8.3::palemoon'`.
 * The complete build log is located at
'/var/log/portage/www-client:palemoon-27.8.3:20180401-230351.log'.
 * For convenience, a symlink to the build log is located at
'/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/temp/build.log'.
 * The ebuild environment file is located at
'/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/temp/die.env'.
 * Working directory: '/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/homedir'
 * S: '/var/tmp/portage/www-client/palemoon-27.8.3/work/palemoon-27.8.3'



That is from the overlay palemoon and the latest version of it.  So, it
still depends on a old version of gcc which considering the age of it,
is sort of odd.  Why has that not been updated?  Is it updatable or is
it going to require some serious time consuming effort to do so and
there are not enough people to do it?  The overlay I might add, has the
latest version of Palemoon according to the website.  It's not the
overlay that is running behind, it's palemoon itself. 

I admit, I wish things didn't have to update so often at times BUT for
some things, it just has to be that way.  I don't worry about security
issues with something like Kwrite or Okular but I do worry about it with
things like web browsers that I use to make purchases or check on
financial websites such as banks etc.  I want those to be secure as
possible even if it means updating each week. 

This is interesting.  Others who use palemoon may at least want to be
aware of it. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Michael King]

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I've been using Palemoon, built with gcc/6.40-r1, for about a month now with only two crashes that I can think of. Otherwise it has been doing everything I need in a browser and I'm very happy with it. I still keep Firefox around, but rarely fire it up anymore.

I am curious, however, what the Palemoon devs will do once support for gcc/6.4.0 is dropped, as it straight-up won't let me build Palemoon with anything newer. I guess a person could just use the pre-built binaries from the "palemoon" overlay, but I've been building it from source from the "octopus" overlay.

On 04/01/2018 05:26 PM, Ian Zimmerman wrote:

On 2018-04-01 16:29, Martin Vaeth wrote:



An alarm sign for me was that palemoon was eventually dropped for
android after being practically unmaintained (i.e. with known open
security holes) for months/years. A similar alarm sign concerning
linux is that they were not able to pull the fixes for the assembler
code which relied on undocumented behaviour of <=gcc-5, even months
after gcc-7 was out. Even if these problems are not marked as
"security" issues, they can easily be some.



WTH is even assembly code _doing_ in a browser??  That is insane.

now that I know this is the reason why palemoon needs gcc 4, I will
definitely look into it more closely.



Experience shows that it is not possible to "hide":
Sooner or later a website you do have to use for some reason
will require such a feature. Eventually the number of these
websites increases. And then you are at a dead end.
Nowadays, it has already "practically" become impossible to
use exclusively lynx or (e)links; in a while it will be impossible
to use a browser which does not support certain new "features".



You know the economist Keynes quote about "the long run".  Applies quite
well here.




[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2412 bytes --]

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

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-04-01 18:22, Dale wrote:

> Just for giggles, I tried to re-emerge palemoon. This is part of the
> output I got.
> 

> * Supported GCC versions: 4.7, 4.9
> * Selected GCC version: 6.4

I no longer use the overlay; I have my own private ebuild series.  I
tried to remove the old gcc dependency, but as Martin says it doesn't
work; the build just crashes at a later point.

Luckily gcc is slotted so I can keep the old version around just for
this purpose.

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

[Bill Kenworthy]

On 02/04/18 08:28, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-04-01 18:22, Dale wrote:
>
>> Just for giggles, I tried to re-emerge palemoon. This is part of the
>> output I got.
>>
>> * Supported GCC versions: 4.7, 4.9
>> * Selected GCC version: 6.4
> I no longer use the overlay; I have my own private ebuild series.  I
> tried to remove the old gcc dependency, but as Martin says it doesn't
> work; the build just crashes at a later point.
>
> Luckily gcc is slotted so I can keep the old version around just for
> this purpose.
>
I use the palemoon overlay.

builds fine with gcc-6.4 etc:

PALEMOON_ENABLE_UNSUPPORTED_COMPILERS=1 emerge palemoon

and

rattus ~ # equery l palemoon
 * Searching for palemoon ...
[I-O] [  ] www-client/palemoon-27.8.2:0
rattus ~ #



BillK

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

[Martin Vaeth]

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.

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

[tuxic]

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

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

[Martin Vaeth]

tuxic@posteo.de <tuxic@posteo.de> wrote:
> On 04/02 05:41, Martin Vaeth wrote:
>> 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?

It's the way it is whether you like it or not.

> 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.

The memory footprint of the main system with firefox is here
about 1GB. So if you have another memory hungry application running
(like emerging gcc in the background) you will need at least 2GB.
I guess 2GB RAM is about the limit to have a usable system, nowadays.
Working with 2GB and a dual core is possible with current gentoo
and firefox without too many restrictions, but of course it is much
more fun with 8GB and i3, which is probably about the smallest
desktop machine which you get nowadays (if you buy a new one).

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

[tuxic]

On 04/02 08:23, Martin Vaeth wrote:
> tuxic@posteo.de <tuxic@posteo.de> wrote:
> > On 04/02 05:41, Martin Vaeth wrote:
> >> 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?
> 
> It's the way it is whether you like it or not.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> The memory footprint of the main system with firefox is here
> about 1GB. So if you have another memory hungry application running
> (like emerging gcc in the background) you will need at least 2GB.
> I guess 2GB RAM is about the limit to have a usable system, nowadays.
> Working with 2GB and a dual core is possible with current gentoo
> and firefox without too many restrictions, but of course it is much
> more fun with 8GB and i3, which is probably about the smallest
> desktop machine which you get nowadays (if you buy a new one).
> 
> 

I found an interesting thread here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7zfopp/howto_geek_recommends_against_using_waterfox_pale/

Cheers
Meino

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

[Dale]

tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> 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
>

I have to agree.  I use different Firefox profiles for different
things.  One reason, I can be logged into same website but as different
users at the same time.  Another reason, when one profile becomes a
memory hog, I can restart it but not disturb the others.  Another
reason, I can customize each profile based on what I do with it.  I
notice in the last year or so that Firefox regularly uses over 1GB of
ram in most all of my profiles.  Sometimes it can approach 2GBs.  I've
tried going to about:memory and clicking the free up memory button but
it does little good.  It may free up some but generally not enough to
matter.  Closing and restarting Firefox does work tho.  I have one
profile that I use for things such as financial sites and ordering
online.  I use addons like noscript, adblock and such which sort of
helps prevent tracking and such.  I also use the https addon with it as
well. 

I sort of wish Firefox would shrink back down on its size and let us
install addons for features we want and be able to do that for each
profile.  For example, I have one profile that I use to download videos
with.  It has download helper installed on it but I don't install it on
the other profiles.  On one profile, I have a screenshot tool
installed.  I use it to document some admin/mod stuff I do on a
website.  I don't need a screenshot tool on other profiles tho.
Basically, it would be nice if more things were that way because we can
chose what features we want for each profile based on what we do with
it.  Even USE flags won't work with this because if it is done with USE
flags, it applies to all profiles.  Even if a person only has one
profile, they just install what features they want instead of a whole
bunch of stuff that may never be used or even wanted.

While I like progress on some things, others, I wish progress had more
options.  Sometimes, I don't want a bloated monster of a program.  If
anything, I may want to add things that improve security but has no
other "features" included.  Then on others, I may not care much about
security but want features.  Having a bare program and the ability to
add features, that allows everyone to have what they want.  They can
pick a huge bloated program or a bare metal barely gets the job done
program. 

Just thinking out loud.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Walter Dnes]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 05:41:03AM +0000, Martin Vaeth wrote

  I don't speak officially for Pale Moon.  See
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7818 for the official
word about the manpower situation.  Mind you, the Pale Moon team may not
have the staffing level required to write a new compiler, maintain a
politically correct "community", integrate real-time-chat into the
browser, integrate "Pocket" into the browser, rewrite the GUI every so
often, yada, yada, yada.  BTW, Firefox's share of the mobile market is
0.53% as per netmarketshare.com

https://netmarketshare.com/?options={%22filter%22%3A{%22%24and%22%3A[{%22deviceType%22%3A{%22%24in%22%3A[%22Mobile%22]}}]}%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A{%22share%22%3A-1}%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-03%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-02%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%2C%22pageLength%22%3A10}

So why bother?

  As far as features are concerned, again go to the official website
http://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml

> The decision to stick with legacy extension api completely excludes
> that there is some convergence of the fork in the future.

  As an end-user, I think you're missing the whole point of Pale Moon.
If I really wanted a Chrome-like browser, I'd use Chrome in the first
place.  I, and a lot of other people, switched to Pale Moon precisely
because we *DO NOT WANT* what Firefox has become.  To quote an old
meme... I didn't leave Firefox... Firefox left me.

> 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.

  Wrong.  Pale Moon has its own XUL extension ecosystem at
https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/   Since they're written
specifically for Pale Moon, the compatability headaches of using Firefox
extensions do not exist.

Noscript equivalents...
* https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/noscript/
* https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/yesscript/

Adblockers...
* https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/abprime/
* https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/adblock-latitude/

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

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

[Dale]

tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
> On 03/30 10:36, Dale wrote:
>> tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
>>> On 03/30 09:45, Dale wrote:
>>>> tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>  
>>>>>  I switched to waterfox for privacy reasons and it supports the older
>>>>>  plugin system.
>>>>>  No need to stay to older version (keeping older bugs, which may
>>>>>  affect seurity) ...
>>>>>
>>>>>  Waterfox is opensourced and it has a smaller memory footprint.
>>>>>
>>>>>  https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/
>>>>>
>>>>>  No advertising intended...I am only an user.
>>>>>
>>>>>  Cheers!
>>>>>  Meino
>>>>>
>>>> I ran up on a site where that was talked about.  It's not in the tree
>>>> tho.  How did you install it?  Is it just download and run it from
>>>> command line or a manual addition to the menu system?  Is there a
>>>> overlay with it in it?  While I like Firefox, the memory hog that it
>>>> sometimes is, I'm not opposed to switching to something else. 
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the info. 
>>>>
>>>> Dale
>>>>
>>>> :-)  :-) 
>>>>
>>> Hi Dale,
>>>
>>> I downloaded the archive, unpacked it in a separate directory, moved
>>> that to /usr/local/., made a symlink from /usr/local/bin/waterfox to
>>> the executable in that directory and: DONE :)
>>>
>>> Ok...I did an entry inti menu.xml of my openbox...manually ;)
>>>
>>> Since waterfox is contained in a single directory, gentoo will not be
>>> "polluted" and the removal/upgrade of waterfox is easy.
>>>
>>> It is not the original genuine sacred of Gentoo, though. ;)
>>>
>>> Cheers!
>>> Meino
>>>
>> Cool.  I was peeking into overlays and was having no luck at all.  I
>> thought I found it twice but it seems they were removed or something. 
>> There was other stuff in the overlays but not Waterfox. 
>>
>> I'll go download it and give it a whirl.  Heck, if it isn't so much of a
>> memory hog, that will be a bonus.  LOL 
>>
>> Thanks much. 
>>
>> Dale
>>
>> :-)  :-) 
>>
>> P. S. May reply again if it works really well, for the benefit of others
>> who may want to give it a try.  ;-) 
>>
> Hi Dale,
>
>
> to wetten your appetite...;)
> Here is an exerpt of the wikepedia page for waterfox:
>
> Waterfox differs from Firefox in a number of ways by:
>     Disabling Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
>     Disabling Web Runtime
>     Removing Adobe DRM
>     Removing Pocket
>     Removing Telemetry
>     Removing data collection
>     Removing startup profiling
>     Allowing running of all 64-bit NPAPI plugins
>     Allowing running of unsigned extensions
>     Removing of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
>     Addition of Duplicate Tab option
>     Addition of locale selector in about:preferences > General
>     Defaulting to Ecosia as the search engine instead of Google or Yahoo![7]
>     Cookie prompt from version 56.0 (beta)[8]
>
> (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox)
>
> Cheers
> Meino
>

I played with it for a bit but I can't get the old or new tab utility
addon to work.  I tried the old one but it fails to start with some
error I can't recall.  The new tab utility addon only works with the
newer Firefox versions. 

It seems I can win no matter what I try.  :/

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Dale]

Dale wrote:
> tuxic@posteo.de wrote:
>>
>> Hi Dale,
>>
>>
>> to wetten your appetite...;)
>> Here is an exerpt of the wikepedia page for waterfox:
>>
>> Waterfox differs from Firefox in a number of ways by:
>>     Disabling Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
>>     Disabling Web Runtime
>>     Removing Adobe DRM
>>     Removing Pocket
>>     Removing Telemetry
>>     Removing data collection
>>     Removing startup profiling
>>     Allowing running of all 64-bit NPAPI plugins
>>     Allowing running of unsigned extensions
>>     Removing of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
>>     Addition of Duplicate Tab option
>>     Addition of locale selector in about:preferences > General
>>     Defaulting to Ecosia as the search engine instead of Google or Yahoo![7]
>>     Cookie prompt from version 56.0 (beta)[8]
>>
>> (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox)
>>
>> Cheers
>> Meino
>>
> I played with it for a bit but I can't get the old or new tab utility
> addon to work.  I tried the old one but it fails to start with some
> error I can't recall.  The new tab utility addon only works with the
> newer Firefox versions. 
>
> It seems I can win no matter what I try.  :/
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-) 
>


That last bit should read can NOT win.  Brain didn't quite make it all
the way to keyboard.  lol

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Bill Kenworthy]

On 02/04/18 13:41, 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

Pretty stable for me - ymmv.  What is annoying is sometimes complex
pages do not load properly (e.g., job application sites which seem to
have a lot of JavaScript running in the background.- possibly due to add
blocking while FF when it works is vanilla)


BillK

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

[Martin Vaeth]

Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
> Mind you, the Pale Moon team may not
> have the staffing level required to write a new compiler, maintain a
> politically correct "community", integrate real-time-chat into the
> browser, integrate "Pocket" into the browser, rewrite the GUI every so
> often, yada, yada, yada.

Why do you mention only some irrelevant points here, ignoring
the crucial ones (on top of them: security) which I was talking
about?
The only relevant thing of those you mention is "new compiler":
It is really security relevant to have bindings to current C++
libraries, especially if the other libraries use them.
(Reasons: bugfixes and unpredictable side effects.)

And if you mean rust: I expect that this will give (and probably
already gave) an enormous security boost to firefox.

>> The decision to stick with legacy extension api completely excludes
>> that there is some convergence of the fork in the future.
>
>   As an end-user, I think you're missing the whole point of Pale Moon.
> If I really wanted a Chrome-like browser, I'd use Chrome in the first
> place. I, and a lot of other people, switched to Pale Moon precisely
> because we *DO NOT WANT* what Firefox has become.  To quote an old
> meme... I didn't leave Firefox... Firefox left me.

Again, I was not talking about relatively irrelevant things like
user experience here. As I said, I also liked palemoon in the
beginning. It simply turned out an unrealistic project so that
I found myself forced to decide to not use it anymore due to
security considerations.

>> 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.
>
>   Wrong.

No, correct: Current noscript and ublock-origin cannot be used
and never will usable with palemoon again.

> Pale Moon has its own XUL extension ecosystem at
> https://addons.palemoon.org/extensions/

Sure, they have to. This doesn't mean that this is worth something:

> Noscript equivalents...
> * https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/noscript/

This is not  "equivalent" but the legacy noscript itself
which I had mentioned. As I said, _currently_ this is still
maintained (in the sense that most severe bugs are fixed)
because of the tor browser. Upstream's main activity is
clearly the web extension.

BTW, this is nothing new: For a long time one had to use
2-years old versions of noscript, because important new
APIs current noscript needed  had not been implemented yet.
Eventually the new API was pulled from firefox upstream, so
that currently at least the most recent (obsolete) version of
noscript can be used. In future, you cannot expect such a
thing to ever happen again.

> * https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/yesscript/

... and another legacy extension whose maintainance
apparently stopped 2 years ago.

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

[Martin Vaeth]

Bill Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au> wrote:
> On 02/04/18 13:41, 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
>
> Pretty stable for me - ymmv.

Yes. I also used to compile it with gcc-6. It segfaulted
only occassionally unless you visit "wrong" pages.
But it is not the user experience why I mentioned this but
the underlying problem these instabilities indicate.
(And BTW, with gcc-7 I never succeeded to compile; I had patched
some dozen problems, but eventually decided it is too much work.)

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

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-04-02 03:59, Dale wrote:

> That last bit should read can NOT win. Brain didn't quite make it all
> the way to keyboard. lol

I read it as beautifully subtle sarcasm, so it worked fine as it was.

BTW, your mails are full of strange space characters - I didn't
investigate if they're some Unicode spaces or the Windows codepage
variety.  Can you turn that off? 

;-)

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists
which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.

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

[Daniel Frey]

On 04/02/18 08:21, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-04-02 03:59, Dale wrote:
> 
>> That last bit should read can NOT win. Brain didn't quite make it all
>> the way to keyboard. lol
> 
> I read it as beautifully subtle sarcasm, so it worked fine as it was.
> 
> BTW, your mails are full of strange space characters - I didn't
> investigate if they're some Unicode spaces or the Windows codepage
> variety.  Can you turn that off? 
> 
> ;-)
> 

I don't see any extra spaces in Dale's message, you should also probably
check your local configuration.

Dan

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

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-04-02 08:26, Daniel Frey wrote:

> I don't see any extra spaces in Dale's message, you should also
> probably check your local configuration.

They render fine for me in mutt/neomutt, too.  I can only see the
strange spaces in my editor (emacs 24) when I start replying to him and
quote his material.  I already have elisp code to massage the quotes so
I'm not going to be insistent about it.

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists
which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.

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

[Martin Vaeth]

Daniel Frey <djqfrey@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/02/18 08:21, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>>
>> BTW, your mails are full of strange space characters
>
> I don't see any extra spaces in Dale's message

After every "." there is a non-breakable space inserted.
I guess this is an attempt of some editor to non-french-space
ASCII texts.

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

[Philip Webb]

180402 Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2018-04-02 08:26, Daniel Frey wrote:
>> I don't see any extra spaces in Dale's message, you should also
>> probably check your local configuration.
> They render fine for me in mutt/neomutt, too.

Same here.

> I can only see the strange spaces in my editor (emacs 24)
> when I start replying to him and quote his material.

No problem with Vim.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca

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

[Dale]

Martin Vaeth wrote:
> Daniel Frey <djqfrey@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 04/02/18 08:21, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>>> BTW, your mails are full of strange space characters
>> I don't see any extra spaces in Dale's message
> After every "." there is a non-breakable space inserted.
> I guess this is an attempt of some editor to non-french-space
> ASCII texts.
>
>
>

I wonder, after each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two
spaces, not one.  Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still
do.  I only put one after a comma tho.  Could that be triggering something?

I'm using Seamonkey which is set to send plain text to anything Gentoo
related.  Other than that, it's set the way it is.  I'm not sure if I
can change anything else on it. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Philip Webb]

180402 Dale wrote:
> After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
> Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> I only put one after a comma tho.

That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.

> Could that be triggering something ?
> I'm using Seamonkey set to send plain text to anything Gentoo related.

IIRC HTML defaults to collapse double spaces to single ;
word-processors do so too, if you don't tell them not to.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca

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

[Dale]

Philip Webb wrote:
> 180402 Dale wrote:
>> After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
>> Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
>> I only put one after a comma tho.
> That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.
>
>> Could that be triggering something ?
>> I'm using Seamonkey set to send plain text to anything Gentoo related.
> IIRC HTML defaults to collapse double spaces to single ;
> word-processors do so too, if you don't tell them not to.
>


When I get my copy back, it still contains two spaces after each
sentence.  It seems Seamonkey at least is working as it should in that
regard. 

I'm not sure what others are seeing or should be seeing tho, other than
what I sent of course.  ;-) 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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

[Peter Humphrey]

On Monday, 2 April 2018 21:50:30 BST Philip Webb wrote:
> 180402 Dale wrote:
> > After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
> > Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> > I only put one after a comma tho.
> 
> That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.

Correct? In what sense? I've only encountered the practice in American writers 
(and now Canadian?), so it seems to be a regional preference.

> > Could that be triggering something ?
> > I'm using Seamonkey set to send plain text to anything Gentoo related.
> 
> IIRC HTML defaults to collapse double spaces to single ;
> word-processors do so too, if you don't tell them not to.

KMail also has an option to collapse double spaces to one.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.

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

[Neil Bothwick]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 817 bytes --]

On Tue, 03 Apr 2018 09:28:40 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:

> > > After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces,
> > > not one. Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> > > I only put one after a comma tho.  
> > 
> > That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow
> > too.  
> 
> Correct? In what sense? I've only encountered the practice in American
> writers (and now Canadian?), so it seems to be a regional preference.

It was done in the UK too. It dates back to the days of typewriters with
monospaced text, to make sentence breaks clearer. It's an anachronism
nowadays, but a habit that is hard to break if you were brought up that
way.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

PC DOS Error #04: Out of disk space. Delete Windows? (Y)es (H)ell yes!

[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
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[gentoo-user] frenchspacing (was: Firefox and addons no longer supported question)

[Martin Vaeth]

Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk> wrote:
> On Monday, 2 April 2018 21:50:30 BST Philip Webb wrote:
>> 180402 Dale wrote:
>> > After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
>> > Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
>> > I only put one after a comma tho.
>>
>> That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.
>
> Correct? In what sense?

For non-English languages it is unusual, but according to Knuth,
it is tradition in professional English typesetting to increase
(though usually not double) the amount of space between sentences:
That's why some additional space is TeX default if you do not switch
the behaviour off with \frenchspacing (the latter being default in
many non-English languages).
For details concerning fixed-width typewriters, I know only the
tradition of my country which is \frenchspacing...
I guess the section about French/English spacing in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sentence_spacing
is rather exhaustive.

>> > Could that be triggering something ?
>> > I'm using Seamonkey set to send plain text to anything Gentoo related.
>>
>> IIRC HTML defaults to collapse double spaces to single [...]
>
> KMail also has an option to collapse double spaces to one.

Since it is "forbidden" to collapse nonbreakable space, I guess
that the seamonkey editor transforms additional spaces (maybe
only if occurring after punctation signs) to nonbreakable space
to make sure that it is not lost in display.
You need a special editor/mode (like emacs) to optically distinguish
breakable (\x20) and nonbreakable (\xa0 = \x20 | \x80) space.

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

[Marc Joliet]

Am Dienstag, 3. April 2018, 11:02:32 CEST schrieb Neil Bothwick:
> On Tue, 03 Apr 2018 09:28:40 +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > > > After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces,
> > > > not one. Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> > > > I only put one after a comma tho.
> > > 
> > > That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow
> > > too.
> > 
> > Correct? In what sense? I've only encountered the practice in American
> > writers (and now Canadian?), so it seems to be a regional preference.
> 
> It was done in the UK too. It dates back to the days of typewriters with
> monospaced text, to make sentence breaks clearer. It's an anachronism
> nowadays, but a habit that is hard to break if you were brought up that
> way.

There's also support for it in text editors, e.g., Vim has an option (append 
'J' to cpoptions) that makes it treat only punctuation followed by two spaces 
as a sentence delimiter, so that using '(' and ')' to move between sentences 
skips abbreviations, which I find very practical (and which is basically why I 
started following this convention in the first place).  Emacs behaves this way 
by default, but you can override it by setting 'sentence-end-double-space' to 
nil, according to the Emacs manual.

HTH
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup

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

[Walter Dnes]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 08:21:17AM -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote
> On 2018-04-02 03:59, Dale wrote:
> 
> > That last bit should read can NOT win. Brain didn't quite make it all
> > the way to keyboard. lol
> 
> I read it as beautifully subtle sarcasm, so it worked fine as it was.
> 
> BTW, your mails are full of strange space characters - I didn't
> investigate if they're some Unicode spaces or the Windows codepage
> variety.  Can you turn that off? 

  I checked with mc (Midnight Commander) using hex mode view.  In that
message from Dale, occurences of "{SPACE}{SPACE}" are encoded as hex
"A0 20".  I.e. the first of 2 spaces has the high bit set.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications

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

[Wol's lists]

On 02/04/18 21:50, Philip Webb wrote:
> 180402 Dale wrote:
>> After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
>> Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
>> I only put one after a comma tho.
> That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.
> 
I was taught to always start every paragraph with an indent. Which I 
believe is against "professional secretarial style".

Different horses, different courses. I believe the indent was dropped to 
save a keystroke, so why the double-space is there (requiring an extra 
keystroke) I don't know.

And why use secretarial style when you're typesetting? One is for 
letters, the other is typically for books ... that's the trouble with 
all this Artificial Stupidity - it blindly enforces rules that are 
irrelevant (or even wrong!!!) for the current scenario.

Cheers,
Wol

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

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2018-04-04 19:12, Wol's lists wrote:

> Different horses, different courses. I believe the indent was dropped
> to save a keystroke, so why the double-space is there (requiring an
> extra keystroke) I don't know.
> 
> And why use secretarial style when you're typesetting? One is for
> letters, the other is typically for books ... that's the trouble with
> all this Artificial Stupidity - it blindly enforces rules that are
> irrelevant (or even wrong!!!) for the current scenario.

I follow the double space rule when writing, and I find it helpful when
text I'm reading (in fixed-size font - which is of course how I read
email) is written that way.

I didn't know it was "secretarial" - that's definitely a major drawback!
;-)

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists
which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.

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

[Peter Humphrey]

On Wednesday, 4 April 2018 19:12:23 BST Wol's lists wrote:
> On 02/04/18 21:50, Philip Webb wrote:
> > 180402 Dale wrote:
> >> After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not one.
> >> Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> >> I only put one after a comma tho.
> > 
> > That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow too.
> 
> I was taught to always start every paragraph with an indent. Which I
> believe is against "professional secretarial style".

There seem to be two alternative styles: either indent the start of a 
paragraph, or leave a blank line before it. I learned at an early age that an 
indent marked a new para (not some empty space that usually just happened to 
be left at the end of the line before) - I remember arguing that point at 
primary school, some time in 1952 - 1954.

On the other hand, some "designer" has decided since then that spacing paras 
out presents a cleaner appearance to the page, regardless of legibility. And 
of course, appearances count more than substance. Bad ideas are just as 
infectious as good ones.

> Different horses, different courses. I believe the indent was dropped to
> save a keystroke, so why the double-space is there (requiring an extra
> keystroke) I don't know.

That's been explained already, as dating from the days of mechanical, 
monospaced typewriters. Well, it seems plausible to me anyway.

> And why use secretarial style when you're typesetting? One is for
> letters, the other is typically for books ... that's the trouble with
> all this Artificial Stupidity - it blindly enforces rules that are
> irrelevant (or even wrong!!!) for the current scenario.

Indeed, and that's more-or-less how I see the usual American insistence on a 
comma before the "and" before the last item in a list, even though it gets in 
the way and introduces ambiguity - the infamous Oxford comma.

But that's a whole new can of worms.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.

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

[Mick]

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On Thursday, 5 April 2018 09:57:54 BST Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Wednesday, 4 April 2018 19:12:23 BST Wol's lists wrote:
> > On 02/04/18 21:50, Philip Webb wrote:
> > > 180402 Dale wrote:
> > >> After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not
> > >> one.
> > >> Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
> > >> I only put one after a comma tho.
> > > 
> > > That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow
> > > too.
> > 
> > I was taught to always start every paragraph with an indent. Which I
> > believe is against "professional secretarial style".
> 
> There seem to be two alternative styles: either indent the start of a
> paragraph, or leave a blank line before it. I learned at an early age that
> an indent marked a new para (not some empty space that usually just
> happened to be left at the end of the line before) - I remember arguing
> that point at primary school, some time in 1952 - 1954.

I don't know the correct terminology, but if the title is centre-aligned the 
paragraphs' first line ought to have a single space indent.  When I was in 
primary school this was the prevailing style.

With the advent of word processors the titles as well as the paragraphs became 
left-aligned with no space at their start, but this may have been a 
typesetting style BC (Before Computers).  :-)

-- 
Regards,
Mick

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

[Wol's lists]

On 05/04/18 09:57, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> Indeed, and that's more-or-less how I see the usual American insistence on a
> comma before the "and" before the last item in a list, even though it gets in
> the way and introduces ambiguity - the infamous Oxford comma.
> 
> But that's a whole new can of worms.

I think we should table that ...

I was taught that a comma separates items in a list, an "and" joins 
them, and you do not mix the two! Indeed, when I did my English GCE 
(that dates it!) I believe the Examining Board Style Guide explicitly 
enforced that rule, and you lost marks for breaking it.

Personally, I do what feels right and I suspect the longer the list, the 
more likely I am to use a comma before the last and.

But again this comes down to another moan of mine - why is "The Queen's 
English" considered "correct", while let's say Yorkshire Dialect is 
considered "wrong", when said dialect is hundreds of years old but the 
Queen's English has probably only been around for about a century.

I'm all for standards, but the complaint should not be "it's wrong", but 
"it breaks the standard", and importantly you need to know *which* standard!

Cheers,
Wol

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

[Wol's lists]

On 05/04/18 12:23, Mick wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 09:57:54 BST Peter Humphrey wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 4 April 2018 19:12:23 BST Wol's lists wrote:
>>> On 02/04/18 21:50, Philip Webb wrote:
>>>> 180402 Dale wrote:
>>>>> After each period at the end of a sentence, I put in two spaces, not
>>>>> one.
>>>>> Something I was taught years ago somewhere and still do.
>>>>> I only put one after a comma tho.
>>>>
>>>> That is correct professional secretarial style, which I always follow
>>>> too.
>>>
>>> I was taught to always start every paragraph with an indent. Which I
>>> believe is against "professional secretarial style".
>>
>> There seem to be two alternative styles: either indent the start of a
>> paragraph, or leave a blank line before it. I learned at an early age that
>> an indent marked a new para (not some empty space that usually just
>> happened to be left at the end of the line before) - I remember arguing
>> that point at primary school, some time in 1952 - 1954.
> 
> I don't know the correct terminology, but if the title is centre-aligned the
> paragraphs' first line ought to have a single space indent.  When I was in
> primary school this was the prevailing style.

Don't you mean a single tab indent :-) This was the style I was supposed 
to write in (with a *fountain* pen, at *primary* school - probably at 
about year 5 or 6), and the indent was about the space of the word "and".
> 
> With the advent of word processors the titles as well as the paragraphs became
> left-aligned with no space at their start, but this may have been a
> typesetting style BC (Before Computers).  :-)
> 
When I started using a typewriter, the indent was always 5 spaces. And I 
kept that style when I moved to a word processor (despite being told off 
by the typists). When they typed up my letters I think I told them "it's 
my letter, do it my way" :-)

(I *hate* using the word "secretary" to refer to a typist - a proper 
Secretary has a legally-recognised, degree-class law qualification - my 
mum was one.)

Cheers,
Wol

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

[Peter Humphrey]

On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote:
> On 05/04/18 09:57, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > Indeed, and that's more-or-less how I see the usual American insistence on
> > a comma before the "and" before the last item in a list, even though it
> > gets in the way and introduces ambiguity - the infamous Oxford comma.
> > 
> > But that's a whole new can of worms.
> 
> I think we should table that ...

Do you mean shelve it? In this country, tabling something means putting it on 
the table - for discussion.

> I was taught that a comma separates items in a list, an "and" joins
> them, and you do not mix the two! Indeed, when I did my English GCE
> (that dates it!) I believe the Examining Board Style Guide explicitly
> enforced that rule, and you lost marks for breaking it.

Clearly a different GCE exam board from mine.

My view is that a comma stands in place of "and". Think of a child's earliest 
speaking days, in which it utters long, rambling sentences with "and" joining 
the parts. Later it learns about commas and uses those instead. So putting the 
two together as a matter of course is just repetitious and awkward.

> Personally, I do what feels right and I suspect the longer the list, the
> more likely I am to use a comma before the last and.

To me, the pair are needed only when a particular emphasis is wanted.

> But again this comes down to another moan of mine - why is "The Queen's
> English" considered "correct", while let's say Yorkshire Dialect is
> considered "wrong", when said dialect is hundreds of years old but the
> Queen's English has probably only been around for about a century.

Correctness is not a helpful concept in a living language, not least because 
it changes from decade to decade. Besides, are you confusing Queen's English 
with Received Pronunciation?

> I'm all for standards, but the complaint should not be "it's wrong", but
> "it breaks the standard", and importantly you need to know *which* standard!

I prefer "it's not idiomatic." Standards go with (in)correctness, which is a 
mathematical concept (only one answer is correct; all others are wrong); 
aptness or conventionality are both better.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.

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

[Mick]

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On Thursday, 5 April 2018 18:12:06 BST Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote:

> > But again this comes down to another moan of mine - why is "The Queen's
> > English" considered "correct", while let's say Yorkshire Dialect is
> > considered "wrong", when said dialect is hundreds of years old but the
> > Queen's English has probably only been around for about a century.
> 
> Correctness is not a helpful concept in a living language, not least because
> it changes from decade to decade. Besides, are you confusing Queen's
> English with Received Pronunciation?

Quite.  As far as accents goes my understanding is they are essentially one 
and the same and were shaped by the Hanoverian/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha German 
accents of the English Royals and their courtiers.  The way I see it, the 
Saxons won the pronunciation  war over the Vikings.  :-)

-- 
Regards,
Mick

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

[Wols Lists]

On 05/04/18 18:53, Mick wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 18:12:06 BST Peter Humphrey wrote:
>> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote:
> 
>>> But again this comes down to another moan of mine - why is "The Queen's
>>> English" considered "correct", while let's say Yorkshire Dialect is
>>> considered "wrong", when said dialect is hundreds of years old but the
>>> Queen's English has probably only been around for about a century.
>>
>> Correctness is not a helpful concept in a living language, not least because
>> it changes from decade to decade. Besides, are you confusing Queen's
>> English with Received Pronunciation?
> 
> Quite.  As far as accents goes my understanding is they are essentially one 
> and the same and were shaped by the Hanoverian/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha German 
> accents of the English Royals and their courtiers.  The way I see it, the 
> Saxons won the pronunciation  war over the Vikings.  :-)
> 
Not necessarily :-)

Because dialect is a lot more than pronunciation. It's also spelling,
and vocabulary.

To some extent I was thinking of what I believe is called "the great
fricative shift", and the frenchification of our spelling in the 17/18
hundreds.

(My daughter has moved to Yorkshire, so we have the occasional
head-scratch when she comes out with dialect words, although her accent
reverts almost instantly to South-London when we're around. Her
husband's family hail from further north so they can be hard to
understand. And my interest in Scottish and pre-Norman history has given
me an understanding of where English has come from, which has nothing to
do with where most people think it came from - the Saxons speak English,
the Angles speak Scots, and the Scots speak Gaelic ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

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

[Wols Lists]

On 05/04/18 18:12, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote:
>> > On 05/04/18 09:57, Peter Humphrey wrote:
>>> > > Indeed, and that's more-or-less how I see the usual American insistence on
>>> > > a comma before the "and" before the last item in a list, even though it
>>> > > gets in the way and introduces ambiguity - the infamous Oxford comma.
>>> > > 
>>> > > But that's a whole new can of worms.
>> > 
>> > I think we should table that ...
> Do you mean shelve it? In this country, tabling something means putting it on 
> the table - for discussion.
> 
Didn't you look at my email address :-) But yes I know the meaning
depends on nationality, which is exactly why I said it ... :-)

(Oh - and the meaning in both languages is actually a lot closer than
most people realise, as was explained to me somewhere ...)

Cheers,
Wol