GoFaster initiative - Firefox Hello

Add-ons
#1

Hi.

I read about moving Pocket integration away from Firefox to distributed add-on. We wrote about on Mozilla.cz and few users mentioned, they hope Firefox Hello will follow the same way (which was mentioned a LOT of times when Hello came into Firefox too).

What I would like to know, if there are any plans, arguments for/against or at least discussions about moving Hello away from Firefox to a distributed add-on? If it uses WebExtensions API, it would be nice to see it as a good reference for developers and also can be good start to port it to other browsers too.

Michal

#2

I don’t see why Hello should be moved to Addons. If you don’t use just don’t place it on your toolbar. I think by default it’s already hidden and you have to go to “Customize” to add it.

Most complaints about Pocket were around the fact that it’s a 3rd party proprietary service. That’s not the case with Hello, so I don’t see who these two things relate.

#3

I think the deal is, that we like to remove any unnecessary code for Firefox to run.

Such as mozFetchAsStream, it was a ~20 lines I think, but they wanted to remove it. It makes sense, its not needed for Firefox to run, and it reduces the lines of code in Firefox by 20 lines.

So if 20 lines can be removed, it is believable that the hundreds (thousands?) of lines for hello and pocket can be moved to an addon. This would be consistent with the mozFetchAsStream case above.

If we want, we can still leave the button there, and on click it will download and install the addon for hello and pocket, this method is more in line with the mozFetchAsStream method as well.

#4

I don’t get the argument about removing X lines of code, is that going to make Firefox better, how? Another thing would be that we don’t want to maintain that code (which should be loaded is not used btw).

In Hello case, AFAIK it just uses WebRTC, and Hello is a nice UI using a backend server to connect peers.

#5

I’m not sure @nukeador what the benefit is. I just thought it was consistent with their mozFetchAsStream style: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1206030

I was just suggesting trying to match it, for the sake of this topic, and it made sense. As in my code I also try keep code minimum without sacrificing perf. I don’t care either way is fine by me.

#6

Hello in not as 3rd party as Pocket is, but still it’s a service not directly related to browsing itself - that’s why Firefox became popular in Czech Republic as it was lightweight and every more complex feature can be added by add-ons, but does not burden the browser itself, if you do not need it.

Anyway I read https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster more carefully and found “Implement Hello UI as an add-on, and ship it via go-faster”, so in fact it is in plan.