hijarian/wayback-for-firefox

Migrate to WebExtensions

Opened this issue · 6 comments

hijarian commented

It's necessary for Electrolysis support, see #12

grahamperrin commented

Please, what are your more recent thoughts on this?

Is there any particular API that you need?

Might I do anything to help you?

For now, I'm most interested in the e10s aspect.

Open in Wayback Machine is generally amongst my favourite legacy extensions and more specifically, one of a handful that I really miss when experimenting with e10s.

hijarian commented

@grahamperrin Right now I know only that this extension will not work after Electrolysis will roll out in FF release in November. I have zero experience so far with the WebExtensions API. Don't know what specifically breaks compatibility with Electrolysis environment.

I expect that I'll need to rewrite the whole extension to solve this, as Mozilla shifted quite far from the methods I used to build this extension back then.

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yfdyh000 commented

There are many WebExtensions for this purpose, any deficiencies for them?

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grahamperrin commented

Thanks 👍 – eight results.

Three early observations.

Wayback Machine Helper navigates away from the current page and simply gives me the Wayback Machine home page when I aim to find the newest capture of #15. It's explicitly experimental, so we can't complain.

Save To The Wayback Machine: very promising.

Last but not least: washing machine, which is my favourite because it makes me cackle like an loony; and takes me way back to the 1970s when, as a child, I spent hours on end sitting on a concrete step meditatively watching a Philco Ford washing machine in our outhouse. Round, and round … and stop. And round the other way, and again … and stop. Boil washes were the best. Naturally I had no concept of electricity costing money, and when the UK enjoyed its weekly power cuts the family would sit at the back window staring happily at the sky, and so on. Lightning-filled evenings were the most memorable.

Less flippantly: what I love about the @hijarian extension is – if I'm not mistaken – its ability to sometimes default to the most recent good capture of a page, where more recent captures are relatively worthless.

With that in mind, it might take a few weeks for me to properly assess the WebExtensions-ready alternatives.

Thanks again, folks …

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hijarian commented

@yfdyh000 @grahamperrin I must say that Wayback Machine does almost exactly what I wanted to do.

@grahamperrin The script uses API endpoint provided by Wayback Machine to get the latest snapshot. If it sends us the latest useful snapshot instead of just the latest one, it's archive.org's achievement, not mine.

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grahamperrin commented

Thanks for the insight.

I'll continue using Wayback Machine, which responds to 404 errors (confirmed), alongside Save To The Wayback Machine, which (unless I'm missing something) has no 404 capability.

Save To … is not an ideal name for the extension; the first thing that it does, without requiring a second click, is tell whether the page is already saved.