Firefox Quantum adopted the idiotic behaviour of Chrome and does no longer
retrieve Cookies for pages read from local file system. It stores the Cookie
data into its local cookies.sqlite, but it does not retrieve it anymore.
For aledged "security reasons", however it happily retrieves HTML 5 web storage
Since TiddlyWiki classic just accesses the document.cookie at 3 points,
it is easy to patch around that problem. Just check, if we're using a modern
browser with support for HTML5 web storage and branch accordingly.
Basically, TiddlyWiki "classic" is in maintenance mode, but it is still supported.
This minor upgarde brings some bugfixes, most notably a minor adjustment to work well
with the new Firefox Quantum, which switched to the more restricted WebExtensions
and discontinued support for the old-style XUL based plug-ins.
This bold move by the firefox project placed a lot of well established, mature
extensions on the brink of extinction. Especially TiddlyWiki has gradually lost
its original appeal of a low-ceremony guerrilla wiki. However, it is still
a sweet little gem for experienced users, albeit a bit brittle to use.
You are now either
- forced to enter the target destination on each save
- or forced to arrange tiddly wiki to reside within your default download folder
and use a firefox plug-in to automate the save process (I use at the moment
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/file-backups/
- or forced to install a 100 MB blurb of java-script based local server
to run TiddlyWikiDesktop
The bitter irony of the situation is, what still works more-or-less painless
is to place your TiddlyWiki into the cloud. Yikes, here we go.
Notably TiddlyWiki provides now a fallback mechanism
in case the saving to a local file fails due to security
restrictions. When this happens, TiddlyWiki generates a
download link pointing to the current content; this way
one is at least able to "save as" through the browser
context menu.
Due to some controversial policy changes in recent Firefox versions
the support for saving to local files was removed. The rationale
given by the Firefox developers was that this is a rarely used
and generally outdated concept; preferrably people shall use
extensions and save to cloud services (!)
Anyway, Jeremy Ruston, the original author of TiddlyWiki, wrote
a Firefox plugin called "TiddlyFox" to work around these
arcane limitations.
we were using an very ancient TiddlyWiki version, basically
unaltered since the start of the Lumiera project.
Recent Firefox versions (starting with FF-17) effectively
removed the ability for JavaScript code to get additional
privileges for writing local files; this change seriuosly
undermines the usability of TiddlyWiki and a lot of similar
portable local JavaScript applications.
The original author of TiddlyWiki, Jeremy Ruston, has written
a Firefox plug-in to work around this restriction; this prompts
us to upgrade to a recent TiddlyWiki version as well.
The good news is: recent TiddlyWiki versions are able to import
Tiddlers from older Wikis without much hassle.
