TenFourFox FPR26b1 available (after all, Mozilla's not dead yet)

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 26 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). There isn't a great deal in this release due to continued heavy workload at my regular job and summer heat here in excessively sunny Southern California making running the G5 and the Talos II at the same time pretty miserable, and I also had the better part of a week laid up ill to boot (note: not COVID-19). Still, this hopefully completes the work on DOM workers and the usual security updates, which will switch to 78ESR starting with FPR27. All going well, it will be released on August 25.

With much of the low-hanging fruit gone that a solo developer can reasonably do on their own, for FPR27 I would like to resurrect an old idea I had about a "permanent Reader mode" where once you enter Reader mode, clicking links keeps you in it until you explicitly exit. I think we should be leveraging Reader mode more as Readability improves because it substantially lowers the horsepower needed to usefully render a page, and we track current releases of Readability fairly closely. I'm also looking at the possibility of implementing a built-in interface to automatically run modifier scripts on particular domains or URLs, similar to Classilla's stelae idea but operating at the DOM level a la Greasemonkey like TenFourFox's AppleScript-JavaScript bridge does. The browser would then ship with a default set of modifier scripts and users could add their own. This might have some performance impact, however, so I have to think about how to do these checks quickly.

A few people have asked what the Mozilla layoffs mean for TenFourFox. Not much, frankly, because even though the layoffs affect the Mozilla security team there will still be security updates, and we'll continue to benefit as usual from backporting those to TenFourFox's modified Firefox 45 base (as well as downstream builders that use our backports for their own updates to Fx45). In particular I haven't heard the layoffs have changed anything for the Extended Support Releases of Firefox, from which our continued security patches derive, and we don't otherwise rely on Mozilla infrastructure for anything else; the rest is all local Floodgap resources for building and hosting, plus Tenderapp for user support, SourceForge for binaries and mirrors and Github for source code, wiki and issues.

But it could be a bigger deal for OpenPOWER systems like the Talos II next to the G5 if Mozilla starts to fade. I wrote on Talospace a good year and a half ago how critical Firefox is to unusual platforms, not least because of Google's general hostility to patches for systems they don't consider market relevant; I speak from personal experience on how accepting Mozilla is of Tier 3 patches as long as they don't screw up Tiers 1 and 2. Although the requirement of a Rust compiler is an issue for 32-bit PowerPC (and Tiger and Leopard specifically, since we don't have thread-local storage either), much of the browser still generally "just builds" even in the absence of architecture-specific features. Besides, there's the larger concern of dealing with a rapidly changing codebase controlled by a single entity more interested in the promulgation of its own properties and designing their browser to be those services' preferred client, which is true whether you're using mainline Chrome or any of the Chromium-based third-party browsers. That may make perfect business sense for them and for certain values of "good" it may even yield a good product, but it's in service of the wrong goal, and it's already harming the greater community by continuing to raise the barrier to entry for useful browser competition. We damned IE when Microsoft engaged in embrace, extend and extinguish; we should make the same judgment call when Google engages in the same behaviour. We have no spine for meaningful anti-trust actions in the United States anymore and this would be a good place to start.