I think it's more that DTA was a victim of FF Quantum.
> We are therefore limited to the tools the WebExtensions model provides to us, which sadly makes it impossible to provide some of the advanced features of DownThemAll! Version 3.
I didn't even know they attempted a WebExtension rewrite and am not surprised that it wasn't able to do the things that made the old DTA worth using.
that's exactly the case. the rewrite took years, and it is only somewhat functional, but I don't blame the dev. pre-quantum version was a finished product, and then suddenly it had to be written from scratch again. I'm surprised he had bothered to do that at all, personally I'd never contribute anything to firefox again after that fucking stunt.
Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a simple tab strip api to let Tree Style Tabs work properly again, that kind of stuff, then go on to put Mozilla out of business as soon as the economy allows it?
I'm only halfway joking here, and only about putting Mozilla out of business.
No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want Tree Style Tabs?
Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project.
By the way, Nils from DownThemAll is a great guy. He wrote a scathing blog post at the time Mozilla announced dropping support for "legacy" extensions. Wish I could find it.
> casually dismissed "a few hundred thousand" users whose lives were impacted as a non-issue.
I did not intend that. My intention is this: "the cost of maintaining a browser with up-to-date standards and security is enormous". A few hundred thousand users who are unlikely to pay anything for such a browser is just financially not viable.
Just to put into perspective, maintaining a full browser (with its own engine etc) costs at minimum $300M/year (judging by the size of Chrome/Firefox/Safari's teams). That means that 300k users would need to pay more than $80 a MONTH to make that sustainable. That's insane.
> No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want Tree Style Tabs?
No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users that have left during the last decade because of being annoyed or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox doesn't offer any experienced direct advantage anymore while Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced direct advantage: that Google web properties are optimized, not sabotaged on it.
> Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project.
Here I should have been more precise: I mean to start with a soft fork. Start by building from ordinary Firefox with just small patches to fix the worst offenders like the tab strip API and restoring the UI.
> No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users that have left during the last decade because of being annoyed or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox doesn't offer any experienced direct advantage anymore while Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced direct advantage: that Google web properties are optimized, not sabotaged on it.
Me too.
Leadership at Mozilla is interested more in social justice, diversity, and equity issues than engineering issues. Don't look for this to come from today's Mozilla.
There is lately a push for privacy issues at Mozilla, which is nice to see.
> Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a simple tab strip api
Why bother with the overhead of a fork? Perhaps a team of volunteers could put together a good enough proposal to be accepted by the WebExtensions team.
I used to work at Mozilla and periodically checked the status of the "add API to hide the tab bar" bug.
I don't think anybody was directly opposed, but there were a lot of hidden edge cases that needed to be dealt with.
Even though full-time devs might not have time allocated to doing this themselves, they are open to accepting solutions as long as the contributions are thorough and follow up on their concerns.
Unfortunately IMHO most submissions these days are more like "this looks simple to me, just do it!" instead of a genuine engagement. To some people, that looks like opposition.
Yeah, I don't see how the maintainers can patch security vulns or add support for newer web features (e.g. CSS variables) when the upstream fork is no longer maintained. They would have to write the fixes themselves, which just does not scale for a project that has 1 or 2 developers working on it part-time.
I think we're at a point where there are enough sites out there that we can avoid a good portion of them (i.e. ones written without progressive enhancement in mind) and still be happy.
For example, I am quite happy with visiting only sites which do not require JavaScript, do not use cookie banners, paywalls, and registration prompts.
For my purposes of browsing Teddit, HN, and my own websites, there are more than 20 beautiful, usable, friendly browsers I can think of just off the top of my head.
For everything else, I just close the tab and move on. Past experience leads me to believe I'm not missing much, because sites which break these requirements usually have crap content too.
If I really need something, I can open Chromium (with UO and Vimium) for that particular site and then close it afterwards.
It feels to me like "my" Web has already passed the bottom of the valley, and is only improving with time.
Only a couple years ago there was no Teddit or Nitter, and now they are here.
I'm finding more and more usable sites almost every day, and I'm missing anything less and less frequently.
A couple years ago, I was mostly down-voted for pleading for noJS support here on HN, and now it's the opposite.
I'm feeling optimistic. The biggest thorn in my side right now is SSL/HSTS, which is a very fast treadmill. I'm praying for an easy-to-use and transparent SSL-stripping proxy I can use in the near future, which will make things even better on machines I control.
I'm curious how far they even tried to replicate the old feature-set. Firefox out-of-box has awful limitations, but they offer also ways to circumvent them with integration of external helpers. There are several WebExtension who offer additional features with helper-scripts. A downloadmanager seems to be the perfect example for walking this road.
For a downloader, that might be a bit of a bad sign. As pages like youtube change, downloader software code needs to change to keep up. See youtube-dl as an example.
This software only provides a means to batch and automate things you'd have to manually download through "save link as". It's not chasing a moving target like youtube-dl.
It's quite useful where you have 50 PDFs on a school page and you'd like to download them all without manually clicking save link as on each one of them. I have fond memories of DTA from my bachelor studies.
I (Nils) am the maintainer, and I would more characterize it as slumbering, not entirely abandoned or dead. I keep meaning to fix bugs and make new releases, but as we all know the last two years have been a bit crazy ;) I know, that's a lame excuse, and I already planned to do better now that things in the world finally seem to settle down a little, even before seeing this little reminder pop up on HN.
To prevent all downloading, not just automatic. When they remove a video, they don't want you to have an archived copy to prove the content ever existed, or to watch it without their permission.
Actually, youtube-dl is dead at the moment for reasons of private life of the maintainer. So people now use a fork called yt-dlp. Which is ironic, because most people moved when google started to use a new harsh speed-limitation.
Thanks for that. I don’t watch many YouTube videos but when I do, I usually use youtube-dl as provided by the Debian Testing package. I wasn’t aware of the yt-dlp project¹ and I’d been wondering why the video downloads were so slow over the past few weeks.
