Status of this project? about lazarus_addon

[stephanmahieu]

My humble (biased) opinion: the original Lazarus codebase is very outdated and worked well for websites from that era. Latest web technologies require different solutions and techniques so resurrecting this add-on from the old codebase would be pointless, it would have to be totally redesigned from scratch in order to make it work with the new Firefox/Chrome web extensions and to cope with the ever evolving website technologies and frameworks of today.
If you don't believe me, use a patched Lazarus version or try an older (portable) FF version with the original Lazarus add-on and visit a modern website. You will find out that not much (if all) formhistory will be captured.

[NormG1]

Much as I loved Lazarus, and much as I appreciate the efforts to resurrect Lazarus from everyone in this group, all of whom have skills far exceeding mine (I can't write a line of code). I gave up on this project years ago.

Let's be honest, money makes the world go round and we all have living expenses.

I am in awe of people who write add-ons and give them away to the world. Those people are few and far between these days.

I don't know the actual structure of the software industry very well but while apparently there is money to be made in apps or things that can be sold on the app and play stores, no infrastructure exists to sell add-ons through Mozilla or Google.

I switched to Form History Control II. Not nearly as elegant as Lazarus, but still being supported by the developer who just released an update.

Do you think someone who can talk programming lingo should reach out to him? He probably has no clue this group exists. But he may be the person with the right skills or could use the Lazarus code to enhance his project?

He's here on GitHub as https://stephanmahieu.github.io/fhc-home/

[adamryczkowski]

I understand the pain of being the author of an addon that found itself to rely on deprecated firefox API. Please be kind and post an info about the status, even if it is "I don't think I will ever support this addon anymore"

[maphew]

@adamryczkowski the status is: we're a collection of users who've come together to try and resuscitate some form of Lazarus for our use, but we have no one on board, at this point, who knows how to do the work. (No developers with the right skills to move it forward.)

[nihaals]

@stephanmahieu

[maphew]

I'm afraid I pretty much agree with @stephanmahieu. There's been too much drift between now and then to feasibly adapt the codebase. The chief value of the project here now is as memory of what was and, possibly, inspiration for another developer. Form History Control looks like the new best lifeboat.

On a related tangent: I've been very happy with the CopyQ clipboard manager. It's like Lazarus, a memory of things that is stable across time, but works across all apps not just a single browser. It's drawback in this context is that it only saves things explicitly copied. So it's a useful adjunct, not a successor.
https://hluk.github.io/CopyQ/

[sierracircle]

I still have Lazarus installed on my FF and it works half the time.
@maphew us Linux people have had clipboard managers for many years now. It never occurred to me what life would be without that. I use it probably 100 times every day.

Still, a form-filler in another thing. It is just surprising to me that more developers have not jumped on making one

[Tormen]

Hi @maphew , I use FormHistoryControl and it works quite nicely I can confirm!
So I am a happy camper. I agree, that it would be wrong trying further to revive Lazarus. Instead it would be more effective to focus on supporting FHC :)

[stephanmahieu]

The FHC developer welcomes feature requests ;-).