It makes me uninterested in Firefox. I want webapps to be able to talk to files, but Mozilla thinks it's too dangerous. Even though we already have APIs to talk to the local filesystem, & the main difference is this one isnt hideously slow.
This issue is one of those that when people are screaming, why are folks using chrome, why haven't we all switched to Firefox I point to and say, because I want a good web, I want a fast web, I want a featureful web, and Mozilla definitely does not share my priorities.
If it doesn't do what you want, it's fair not to like it.
Just to offer a different perspective, though: I don't consider a lot of the things that Chrome does (bittorrent functionality in this case) to be part of "a good web", or really part of the web at all. I don't need my browser to be an operating system. I can use other apps to do other things.
It's much more important to me to avoid another Internet Explorer-like monoculture, and to have a browser that's relatively respectful of privacy.
Probably the main benefit of another browser engine (Ladybug?) entering the scene is that it would force Mozilla to come up with a more compelling sell than "not Chrome."
Do you mean Ladybird? It would be nice to see it become competitive with the others, at least. Diversity would be welcome.
I was a little surprised to learn that they'll use Swift for future development. It's not among the languages I usually think of for cross-platform work. On the other hand, maybe Ladybird using it will help drive improvement in that area.
Firefox can definitely download very large files with no problem, JS doesn't even need to be involved, downloading a file is ancient browser functionality.
The server sends an application/octet-stream response and a few other headers and it works.
It hasn’t been working for me for years, but somehow I always end up there when I need to transfer a large file. It’s just so easy to remember the name and url!
