[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [gopher] A letter to Mozilla Foundation



emijrp <emijrp@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi;
>
> I have a proposal to the people on this mail list and the Gopher lovers. We
> can write together a letter explaining to Mozilla Foundation why do not
> remove Gopher support in Firefox 4.0 and later versions: it is a piece of
> internet history, nostalgia, etc. I don't know if all is lost, but we can
> try it. Then, each of us can send it to Mozilla Foundation. Sending a letter
> is cheap, and it is more effective than e-mail.

I'd say that ftp, gopher and http are protocols to make stuff available
and archives browsable. Although they're different, they're used for the
same thing: make something available on the Internet, through some sort
of hierarchy, and possibly interlinked (I think ftp is the only which
has no such thing like links (except filesystem internal links, of
course)).

One can always link URLs for (e.g.) ed2k on a HTML page, but one
generally links a resource made available the same way, through HTTP,
FTP or Gopher. Of course some people will restrict required protocols to
what most browsers support, but I think whatever protocol it is, it will
probably be one like these three.

That MoFo needs to do is define what Firefox is. Web browsers act the
same way a gopher browser would act: they fetch the resource and render
it. Although FTP is just a filesystem with "cd" and "ls", we can render
menus for it.

Does Mozilla want Firefox to be a browser which happens to be
web-centric but which supports other similar protocols, or do they want
it to be just a web browser?

What I think they shouldn't do is just drop it due to security
concerns. See, dropping extension support would avoid problems due to
evil add-ons. Dropping plugins would avoid the Adobe Flash programming
errors. And dropping javascript would solve lots of other problems. It
should be about what they want to support and have in their program.

Now, these are my two cents. And I didn't read all the comments on this
at the bugzilla to see if this was already said (sorry!).

-- 
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg

_______________________________________________
Gopher-Project mailing list
Gopher-Project@lists.alioth.debian.org
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/gopher-project




Reply to: