[off-topic]

dice wrote:

My apologies for that off handed remark, i didn't realise ocd was a form of mental illness.

All humans suffer from the "metal illnesses" of greed, hated and delusion.  IMO, there is no need to tiptoe around that. It is irrelevant that deluded Western "therapists" just have to assign a name and acronym for every quirk on the gamut when they themselves are equally "defective", each in their own way.  The naming only excuses certain behavior. Would be nice if we could own and remove our own defects rather than pointing the finger elsewhere. Sadly, self-examination is not a popular activity in the West and thick skins are in increasingly short supply these days . . .

Their is a good George Carlin video about this.

Soft Language

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY

Ah the english language! Maybe i should have just said obsessive, maybe my brain is too hard wired into the matrix!

All humans suffer from the "metal illnesses" of greed, hated and delusion.  IMO, there is no need to tiptoe around that. It is irrelevant that deluded Western "therapists" just have to assign a name and acronym for every quirk on the gamut when they themselves are equally "defective", each in their own way.  The naming only excuses certain behavior. Would be nice if we could own and remove our own defects rather than pointing the finger elsewhere. Sadly, self-examination is not a popular activity in the West and thick skins are in increasingly short supply these days . . .

dice wrote:

im quite happy with plain text messaging, although many are not and need pretty printing to alleviate some form of ocd.

Or, just maybe, some people really care about solid text formatting (for usability's sake), which you simply cannot do with plain text. And just because you prefer the primitive way of doing something, that doesn't automatically make it more reasonable. And it certainly doesn't mean that people who don't prefer it are mentally ill.

My apologies for that off handed remark, i didn't realise ocd was a form of mental illness.

Im getting confused with meanings here also, what i mistakenly meant in my previous post by pretty printed is bloated websites and pdf's like forms, newsletters and such that are sometimes so bloated it takes a while for them to load and navigate, so just getting back to the js that is creeping up inside pdf's as a way of messaging like newsletters, notices, official documents and all sorts of ways that pdf's get used nowadays. I do care about text formatting for readability and usability, sometimes it gets taken too far in my opinion.

So of course it doesn't automatically make my opinion of it more reasonable to just use plain text messaging and my opinion is not going to change peoples minds, so again apologies if it seems that I inferred that.

im quite happy with plain text messaging, although many are not and need pretty printing to alleviate some form of ocd.

Or, just maybe, some people really care about solid text formatting (for usability's sake), which you simply cannot do with plain text. And just because you prefer the primitive way of doing something, that doesn't automatically make it more reasonable. And it certainly doesn't mean that people who don't prefer it are mentally ill.

The good thing is that the gemini protocol and its markup format doesn't allow script (as far as I know) so you will always be able to read the text on a gemini page. If Firefox/Chromium together with the HTML5/Javascript world continues to become a de-facto blob world, because the JavaScript is getting too complex to study its code, the gemini protocol with a wide variety of browsers will continue the goal of the internet: Make information available to everyone.

Nope!

From Gemini's master's page:

$ printf 'gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/\r\n' \
    | ncat --ssl gemini.circumlunar.space 1965 \
    | head

20 text/gemini
# Project Gemini

## Overview

Gemini is a new internet protocol which:

* Is heavier than gopher
* Is lighter than the web
* Will not replace either

And I bet he's right with the last line.

Please let's continue to dream of safe Browsers instead.

exactly., they are trying to do far too much stuff imo. Years ago browsers did not have embedded pdf viewers, you needed outside software for this, namely adobe, but not anymore due to foss. Mupdf, ftw! Smart folks create website without javascript sorcery, but it seems it is the ever present cancer killing most websites these  days.

JavaScript (or more geneal: dynamic content on web pages) has its benefits. You don't want to reload the whole page when you clicked a delete icon in a list to remove on entry out of it. But today there are websites that don't even load text when JavaScript is turned off. So your browser makes a request to load an empty HTML document, then some JavaScript and then the JavaScript makes AJAX requests to load the content. What a waste of energy and time!

The good thing is that the gemini protocol and its markup format doesn't allow script (as far as I know) so you will always be able to read the text on a gemini page. If Firefox/Chromium together with the HTML5/Javascript world continues to become a de-facto blob world, because the JavaScript is getting too complex to study its code, the gemini protocol with a wide variety of browsers will continue the goal of the internet: Make information available to everyone.

Some want a whole OS in the browser, others want it to do only HTML and code everything in it.
Wait!
Isn't the HTML-only browser an OS in HTML then?

Convergence of features means convergence of attack surface.

I think both strategies will converge in functionality, and that way the attack surface will converge too.  If you "emulate" your favourite external applications in "active" HTML1337-extensions, they will be able to do the same harm as your external "PDF-browser (with JS)" sure can do too.  I'm not looking at browser sandboxes now, because you could do the same with chroots, jails, containers, VMs in your real(?) OS too.

You download a PDF with JS internals, a LibreOffice spreadsheet/document with active parts or even an Emacs/Org/Babel text with executable Babel blocks inside and you may have an unwanted surprise soon.

The problem isn't the embedded PDF viewer with JS, the problem is allowing possibly dangerous functionality by default.

# local variables:
# visual-line-mode: t
# org-babel-noweb-wrap-start: "«««"
# org-babel-noweb-wrap-end: "»»»"
# org-confirm-babel-evaluate: nil
# end:

Sure that's (config vars at end-of-file, only one of these lines is a danger) neat with your private texts, where you know which text contains which active parts, but in this example Emacs will ask at loading time.  It you put the same setting in your Emacs startup, it won't. Will you always read that config vars list Emacs wants you to confirm or just semi-automagically type the spell to allow continuing?

While clicking on foreign stuff you typically won't have the knowledge which stuff contains harmful contents and which doesn't.  But will a question "Allow activating feature XYZZY for this text?   [yes] [no] [always]" really help?  How many individual "[yes]" clicks will it cost until René Average will click "[always]"?

Why have a walled garden, while letting everyone or everything inside?

But now for something completely different?

Smart folks still live in caves and fire is their newest achievement.

Or: It isn't that simple.

If we would declare (TeX's) DVI files with links inside as default format for the web, sure lots of users would call for helpers to get active parts too.  The development would repeat with just a different base format. There is some deeper problem/demand involved.  Maybe Sasha Average looks at computer screens as new TVs?
They have to be wriggly and make sounds?

There is a demand for these features, and so we need to find ways to present them in a safe way, or at least, as not everyone is coding, should find ways to demand them being implemented in a safe way, and the right to make providers of unsafe stuff accountable for their damage.

We need the data cattle uprise...

I'd prefer a world where I don't need to wall and lock my house and garden.

...but that may stay a dream.

Anyway, back on-topic, it seems that the justification by Mozilla's apologists for embedding JavaScript in PDFs is that "almost every webpage have JavaScript anyway, so why bother about security?"

But they are looking on the wrong direction. If you need dynamic content, you should use HTML for that, because that's designed for the web (unlike PDFs). PDF is already a PITA in terms of security in the past, why reintroduce that nightmare? When Adobe, which is native, does it, it's not okay, but when browsers do it, which never was meant to render PDFs, it's okay all of a sudden? I don't understand.

exactly., they are trying to do far too much stuff imo. Years ago browsers did not have embedded pdf viewers, you needed outside software for this, namely adobe, but not anymore due to foss. Mupdf, ftw! Smart folks create website without javascript sorcery, but it seems it is the ever present cancer killing most websites these  days.

But they are looking on the wrong direction. If you need dynamic content, you should use HTML for that, because that's designed for the web (unlike PDFs). PDF is already a PITA in terms of security in the past, why reintroduce that nightmare? When Adobe, which is native, does it, it's not okay, but when browsers do it, which never was meant to render PDFs, it's okay all of a sudden? I don't understand.

Hit shappens!

I'm still surprised some people are crying like babies over this. How many times did Firefox "break" these legacy extensions in the past? Why do you think some of those extensions had so many updates? You can't expect frozen extensions to continue to work forever in an actively developed browser. What's so hard to understand about that? I mean, people seem more upset over this than Firefox totally abandoning this type of extension in favor of webextensions. It makes absolutely no sense to me. I also get the impression that a high majority of people bitchin' over this don't even use Pale Moon (they just have a weird hatred of it).

This thread is not about browser extensions or the need to update them from time to time. It's more about Firefox (and Chromium) removing features like FTP that are still useful for some people while introducing other questionable "features" like Pocket, new UI and hiding useful configuration entries.