|
|
|
|
|
|
by michaelmrose
2742 days ago
|
|
|
It's pretty clear that people desire it as an extension because a good and functional extension exists whereas first party support in a browser does not. There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points. An extension exists NOW that people enjoy using. Building THIS into firefox isn't a replacement for a robust extension interface unless you suppose that first party developers can think or implement all the good ideas that will ever come about. People in truth give zero damns if its easier to implement or more elegantly done any more than they care if their tv is beautifully engineered because their priorities aren't yours. They care about functionality. Right now firefox seems to be lighter and even post quantum have better extensions. Throwing either of those out will cause it to cede more marketshare to chrome. |
|
|
Er, no. What I think is that becoming a "first-party developer"—when you already know as much about the internals of Firefox as is required to maintain an extension such as TST—isn't that hard. Firefox is a FOSS project, with internals that are well-maintained and well-documented, and the UI layer is abstracted out to make working with it easier for frontend engineers (which is why, unlike any other browser, you constantly see versions of Firefox with new "experimental UIs.")
> There are certainly good arguments for it being easier for it to be built in vs as an extension if you were building from scratch right this moment but such an argument misses multiple points.
I mean, that was my argument, yes. And I don't see how it misses the point, because I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a Firefox user, nor am I coming at this from the perspective of one of the existing TST maintainers. I have no dog in the fight of Firefox's extension system, because—at the earliest point I'd even start using Firefox—it'd already be a “fact of life” that it only has WebExtensions. I'd just have to take it as a given that you can't do what TST does (did) as an extension, and ask the question afresh: how do you implement something like TST?
And the answer is: natively, in the browser chrome, and thankfully so, because that's what TST should have done in the first place and it'll make many parts of the implementation a lot easier. (See my sibling reply.)
Though, also, never mind Firefox. I'm also coming at this from the perspective of a developer who would want to implement TST-like functionality for any FOSS browser. For example, TST-like functionality for Chromium.
The fact that TST already exists for "old Firefox" doesn't really matter. That's a different web-browser than the one we've got now, and no current browser lets you do what TST did at the extension level. I don't care about ideological arguments about whether they should let you; I care about the practical facts of how to go about having TST functionality in the present/future of the browser landscape.