------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the record of a short comment discussion I had with (someone who may, or may not, have been) Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's head of QA, on the subject of removing gopher support from Firefox. It was originally a blog post over on www.noneotheabove.com (before I allowed they site to die), and has been preserved here for posterity (assuming they would want anything to do with it at all). It was originally posted 30 August 2007. With the exception of changes to characters due to character encoding difficulties, and adjustments made to the layout to render the text more readable in txt format, no changes have been made. The words that appear here are exactly the same as they were back when they were first written. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seems a Gopher just can't get no love... ======================================== I wandered over to the floodgap gopherspace to see what was new, and noticed a directory comment that said "updated 21 August 2007". Checking the directory title, I was shocked to see "Keep Gopher support in Mozilla Core". Surely the Mozilla folks couldn't be thinking of taking gopher support out of Mozilla-based browsers, I thought. Such a thing would be preposterous. It'd put them on par with Internut Exploder. But following the link, my fears were confirmed: some no-brain hack (or group of no-brain hacks, I'm not sure which) wants to take gopher support out of Mozilla-based browsers. They've even got two bug reports dedicated to this effort: * Bug 388195-Remove gopher protocol support for Firefox * Bug 351748-Remove UI for Gopher proxy settings I must say that this is very disturbing. As it is, the only thing that really keeps me using Firefox over Konqueror is the fact that it has native gopher support (likewise for Camino on the Mac). And while the average web user might have no clue what gopher does (it's a protocol, like http), or has (a lot of archived information, but also a lot of new stuff; it's still alive folks, just smallish) I can't see what advantage there would be in removing gopher support from the Mozilla core.Apparently their reasoning has something to do with a potential security vulnerability. Of course no protocol is supremely secure; that's wishful thinking. Http has it's problems, and yet no one's talking about removing support for it from the Mozilla core. Even more disturbing; a couple months ago there was a debate about removing ftp support from the Mozilla core. Why: for security reasons, and because it had a small user base. How long will it be before that's revisited (and implemented)? For now I shall cross my fingers and hope that the Mozilla developers will see the light, otherwise, I guess I'll be looking for a new and better graphical web browser with real protocol support. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under internet, browsers, gopher, bad news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4 Responses to "Seems a Gopher just can't get no love..." ========================================================= 1. Asa Dotzler Says: August 30th, 2007 at 1:09 pm What's your definition of "a lot of archived information" and "a lot of new stuff"? thousands of archives? hundreds? dozens? - A ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. dan Says: August 30th, 2007 at 3:51 pm I must admit I'm slightly surprised that this garnered a response. But a question's a question, so I shall (try to) answer. I'll start by stating the following: I don't operate a gopher server, or site. My interest in gopher has as much to do with how different it (and its underlying culture) is from the realm of http, as it does with whatever information I find. I find it to be sort of a zen garden in a sea of noise and clutter (this site no doubt adding to such clutter). Now to the question (had I known someone would call me on my statements, I would have chosen my words with a bit more care (probably...) -- lesson learned: "teh internetz = srs bsns"). So, a definition is sought. It probably wouldn't serve to claim 100 documents is "a lot of archived information". Truth be told, I'm not sure I can give an appropriate definition for what constitutes "a lot of archived information" (henceforth: "aloai"). I'm not sure that an appropriate definition could be provided for the http based web. Does porn count as "aloai", or forums debating the relative merits of Kirk, Picard, Sisco, and the two ladies? Is it of value? I don't know. Suffice it to say, I'd call "aloai" 100,000 documents. It's a small number compared to the rest of the net, but vast compared to most personal libraries. I can say with certainty that I've found information in gopherspace that I never managed to find within the realm of http. That's not to say it wasn't there, but the sheer quantity of information stymied my efforts to locate it (it was probably on page 44 or 45 of Google's search results). As to "a lot of new stuff" (did I really say that... crap...), that was probably a poor choice of words. A better statement likely would have been: "and new stuff being added". This I shall blame upon misplaced overzealousness. I was having a good morning. Still, there is new stuff that's added to gopherspace, and personally, on average it seems more useful (or at least entertaining) than what's added to the http servers. And of course there's the history to think of. Won't someone please think of the child... history. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Asa Dotzler Says: August 30th, 2007 at 6:18 pm :D Thanks for the honest and entertaining answer. These kinds of decisions are difficult to make. Every piece of unowned code, especially in the lower levels like networking and layout, is scary. More capability in those lower levels means increased attack surface so you've got the trade-off between security and functionality with no one responsible for managing that risk (an owner for that piece of code). For Gopher, where the functionality is, as best I can tell, only interesting to a very small population of users, but the security risk is there for all users, the balance is going to lean towards removal. On top of that, Mozilla, Microsoft, and other software vendors have of late come under a lot of fire for exploits in specific protocol handlers or mechanisms for content handling handoffs between different programs. With increased scrutiny, it makes a lot of sense to either audit and own well the existing niche protocol handlers or to push them out of the product. The cool thing about Mozilla though, (well, one of the cool things) is that our networking stack has very extensible protocol handling capabilities. That's why we even have Gopher there to start -- because it was pretty darned easy to implement. We had/have finger:// support too. One thing that I think results from this pluggable protocol handler architecture is that it shouldn't be too difficult for someone to build a simple protocol extension for Firefox that added Gopher support back in. It could probably be done in JavaScript, making it cross-platform. Then, anyone that wanted Gopher support in Firefox could install a simple extension while the other 99.99% of Firefox users would be somewhat safer. - A ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. dan Says: August 31st, 2007 at 7:02 pm It does all makes sense. Not that I wouldn't/won't be a bit sad if/when gopher support is pulled from Mozilla core. But under the light of realism, there doesn't seem to be an alternative. If 30 or 40 percent of web surfers used Gopher, there probably wouldn't be this move to pull support (of course with that kind of support, Gopher would be searchable by Google... To dream the impossible dream...). Ah well. I shall hope for the best, prepare for the inevitable and salute Gopher with a pint when the fateful day arrives (whenever that might be). And then I'll find a Gopher plug-in.