Somehow I find myself playing Terraria again
Welp. I just pushed this the end-of-life site live to Test Pilot production. (Does that make it undead?) https://testpilot.firefox.com/
@nolan FWIW, Firefox migrating to web extensions with v57 was too soon for a very vocal group with torches and pitchforks that had been clamoring for years & years. It's been a very, very fraught transition.
@nolan Moving to the web extension model was necessary to extract the lovecraftian tentacles of add-ons that reached directly into Firefox's guts without benefit of API abstraction that also prevented moving to a multi-process model (among other things).
@nolan Controversial puts it a bit mildly. It was one of those moves where staring down a dwindling marketshare encourages great conservative mood.
@nolan Yeah, but that said, I kind of agree. It's just been a hard thing
@nolan (And I've mostly been just incidentally involved in that effort, but I've heard all the shouting from next door)
Hey look, I blogged again:
"A river, not an inbox"
https://typing.lmorchard.com/2019/01/23/a-river-not-an-inbox/
@zack Depends on what you mean by "ever" and "mainline" - there have been things like Spyglass, iCab, Lynx, ViolaWWW, iBrowse, Mosaic, OmniWeb
@zack Yeah, there used to be lots & lots of distinct browser engines, IIRC. The number shrank as the web got more complex and less of a thing a small team could build from scratch
@zack And fwiw, I've at some point another used each of those browsers as my daily driver over the last 20 years or so
@zack Well, also depends on what you mean by "average user" here - I'm talking back to 1995-2005 era where average users were way different.
iCab was pretty big on classic MacOS, IIRC. iBrowse on Amiga. Mosaic was all the rage on Sun stations when I was in college, ViolaWWW before that. OmniWeb was cool on the NeXT machines and a nice alternative to IE for Mac before Safari was a thing. Lynx was big for dialup terminal connections formerly used for Gopher.
Weirdly, I also remember when you could buy Netscape Navigator new-in-box at Babbage's and Electronics Boutique. Sometimes I'm vaguely tempted to hit up an eBay auction just to have it on the shelf...
I've also seen arguments in Reddit threads over the years where some folks argued that paying for a browser was an urban myth. Wish I could find that thread...
@mbrubeck Ah yeah, mine has a "refresh" button to update on demand and a time query drop down. These may be mistakes
Anybody remember / miss Cyberdog? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog