Comments on: Killing Binary XPCOM in Add-ons. Is JavaScript Fit?

By: Thomas Ludwig

Thomas Ludwig — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 18:04:42 +0000

@Daniel Glazman, tommy: Until Giorgio finds the time to change the style, Stylish is your friend. Create a new user sytle like that one:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("hackademix.net") {

* {
color: black !important;
background: none !important;
background-color: ghostwhite !important
}

a:link { color: mediumblue !important }
a:visited { color: purple !important }
a:hover, a:active { color: red !important }

}

By: a

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 17:32:59 +0000

Actually I think I got it. You may delete this message.

Someone from MAN browsed with my LAN proxy and this ABE thing.

By: a

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 17:12:03 +0000

Hello everyone.

A week ago this line started to appear in my httpd log several times a day:
[2011-08-07 13:11:05] 192.168.0.1 - - + 200 1293 "GET / HTTP/1.1" "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (ABE, http://noscript.net/abe/wan)"

192.168.0.1 is my router (ASUS RT-N16), this IP shows when someone from our LAN goes to its MAN or WAN port, which gets port forwarded to me.
If it knew any domain name, it would get 8KB page, not 1293, so it does not.

I am not around at the time it happens, so I went to the URL it gave, to ask what it can be and if I should worry at all.

By: tommy

tommy — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 06:47:42 +0000

@ Daniel Glazman, Giorgio:

"the stylesheet (colors, background, font weight and font size) of this page makes it _extremely_ difficult to read"

"I’ve been dreaming of a restyling of all the sites of mine for a long time, I really wish I could find the time :)"

No problem! View > Page Style > No Style. Been doing it for a long time. Try it - incredibly easy to read! ;-D … however, the recaptchas are driving me blind, seemingly always the second of the two words. There must be *some* better way that a human can read more easily, but a bot can’t… :(

Maybe someday, someone will invent a "text-only" web page.. oh, wait, they had that in the 1990s ;)

By: Björn

Björn — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 09:53:41 +0000

Isn’t the deprecation also necessary because of e10s?

By: Giorgio

Giorgio — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:00:54 +0000

@Daniel Glazman:
1) I’ve been dreaming of a restyling of all the sites of mine for a long time, I really wish I could find the time :)

2) With JS getting faster and faster, I’m not sure I buy into the performance argument. At any rate, the use case of adding capabilities on top of the platform seems one which can be served, at least in theory, by a (better, more polished and less buggy) js-ctypes. At any rate, I was trying to point out that a de-facto deprecation of 3rd party binary XPCOM is absolutely premature at this moment, albeit with arguments different than yours.

By: Daniel Glazman

Daniel Glazman — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 06:29:46 +0000

Two things: first, the stylesheet (colors, background, font weight and font size) of this page makes it _extremely_ difficult to read for people having contrast issues…

Second, I think you don’t understand why binary XPCOM components built through the mozilla build system are needed: the browser IS A BROWSER. For a tool like mine, it lacks APIs that _could_ be here but are considered as bloat from a browser’s perspective. These APIs are hard to implement in JS for performance reasons (have to browse the entire style set of a document, lots of tree traversal, etc) or because they need stuff that are not exposed to JS. Such binary-based components should not be needed, I agree; but because Fx is only a browser and does not want to be bloated with all what’s needed by an editor, a video player or editor, an iTunes clone and more, they are stille _absolutely_ needed.