[Firefox] Update

[mikhaelkh]

Add autoupdate option to Firefox version. One way is to put new versions on https://addons.mozilla.org. Other way is to avoid mozilla market, like HTTPS Everywhere.

[gorhill]

Dup of #922.

[mikhaelkh]

#922 only suggests to get updates through mozilla market. I suggest to avoid that and use similar update mechanizm that is used in HTTPS Everywhere, which is unavalible in mozilla market, but recieves updates automatically.

[gorhill]

The project has no home server, and asking Github to act as one could be seen as abuse from Github (bandwidth). So it will have to be AMO.

[hackel]

I'm curious, why do you think this kind of auto-update feature would be an abuse of service, while projects like composer, bower, npm, etc. all use GitHub as a repository for their packages and updates and millions of users are downloading software from it all the time? Is it the automatic update checking that is the problem? I don't think anyone wants to abuse GitHub. Hopefully there can be some better solution, though!

[chrisaljoudi]

@hackel

bower, npm, etc. all use GitHub as a repository for their packages and updates

Hmm? Why do you believe that's true?

Pretty sure the npm registry (which is how you install/update bower or update npm) uses a CDN — they've used MaxCDN in the past, and I think they're currently with Fastly.

[mikhaelkh]

YouTube Center Developer Version updates through GitHub (Firefox and Chrome versions)

[chrisaljoudi]

Regardless of which projects use this and which don't:

I've looked into this more, and it appears that (currently) GitHub is happy to serve the binary Releases artifacts. Though surprising, it's quite nice of them.

There were points where they disabled that feature, but they have brought it back since. A subtle thing to note is that GitHub still indeed does not want people hot linking to raw source files from the tree.

As far as I can tell, they're using Amazon AWS S3 to serve the actual binaries.

CC @gorhill ^ this might be good to know.

That said, there's one more trick that would be needed for doing direct Firefox auto-updates properly. Mozilla states that auto-updates need a manifest file which must be served with an appropriate mime-type. I don't know where that'd be hosted for uBlock.

[chrisaljoudi]

To add: right now, for Safari, I'm handling the hosting for the update manifest as well as the uBlock Safari builds.

I'd be happy to host the Firefox update manifest if @gorhill and @Deathamns decide direct updates from GitHub Releases are the way to go.

[hackel]

@chrisaljoudi I'm not that familiar with npm, so I'm sure you're right, but I believe composer directly queries the list of tags from github for each project to determine the available versions. Web developers don't go around automatically updating their dependencies, though (at least I hope!), so it's not the best comparison. Thanks for offering to host the manifest, that would be great.

Perhaps this is a feature that could be added to https://github.com/diegocr/GitHubExtIns so that it works for all extensions.