[freenet-dev] Firefox and Freenet

[Matthew Toseland]

On Thursday 06 March 2008 11:49, Matthew Toseland wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 March 2008 22:13, Colin Davis wrote:
> > As a ignorant user, I think that's as a general principal, Freenet 
> > should try to be as browser agnostic as possible..
> > 
> > 1) Firefox may not be the dominant browser down the line- Freenet 
> > shouldn't constantly chase the tale of different browsers.
> > 2) Most users don't use Firefox currently.  Most general web users still 
> > use IE or Safari, depending on what their PC shipped with.
> 
> Both IE and Safari have *MAJOR* problems with Freenet. Safari waits for all 
> the images to be loaded before even attempting to render the page; IE 
> autodetects HTML even when it is told that a page is plain text (which is a 
> major security breach as an attacker can then send unfiltered HTML including 
> webbugs and scripting). Therefore neither is appropriate for Freenet. I'd 
> seriously consider a browser plugin at this point, but it'd probably need to 
> be a full browser fork and there's no way we have the resources for one.
> 
> > 3) Freenet is a server process, and optimization shouldn't suffer unless 
> > absolutely necessary over a network.
> > 4) It's considered "impolite" to modify settings in programs that you 
> > didn't ship.  You don't want Freenet to get a reputation as a invading 
> > your system.
> 
> True enough, but the alternatives are:
> - Doing nothing. This sucks.
> - Telling the user to change the settings manually. But if they do, their 
> browser will be detectable (with a few false positives) as having been 
> modified to work better with Freenet.
> - Creating a Firefox profile for Freenet, and using that. This may result in 
> the user when they open a browser normally being asked to select a profile.

Actually there is one problem with this: when you load firefox without any 
arguments, it uses the previous profile. :(
> 
> > 5) I think there may be other ways to fix the problem.
> > 
> > One of the way to get around the persistent connection limit is to 
> > connect to Freenet on multiple hostnames, or DNS addresses.
> > For example, if Freenet is running on the local system, the URLS on the 
> > page could be given multiple ways.
> 
> Doesn't work on a LAN. On localhost, we could conceivably listen on 
127.0.0.1, 
> 127.0.0.2, 127.0.0.3 etc. Rewriting URLs as absolute links referring to 
> different hosts is posssible if we're on localhost (which we can tell from 
> the IP on the other end of the connection). So you have a point to some 
> degree. Although the whole purpose of having a higher global limit is to 
> leave some slack for other servers, and we'd break this, so if the user has 
> other browser windows open they may not work.
> > 
> > For example, if we had a page of activelinks, freenet could return them 
as:
> > 
> > http://127.0.0.1/CHK/foo1.png
> > http://127.0.0.1/CHK/foo2.png
> > http://localhost/CHK/foo3.png
> > http://localhost/CHK/foo3.png
> > http://192.168.1.15/CHK/foo5.png
> > http://0.0.0.0/CHK/foo5.png (Linux only)
> > 
> > By varying the URL, you increase the number of connections to the max 
> > per browser, rather than the max per server.
> > 
> > See: 
> > 
> 
http://www.ajaxperformance.com/2006/12/18/circumventing-browser-connection-limits-for-fun-and-profit/
> 
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