2023 Roadmap

[AllanWang]

This project was previously sunsetted, as I don't have much time to work on it. However, I still use Facebook from time to time, and the app is getting to the point where it isn't very usable. I have the following changes planned:

• Simplify home page - no more tab customizations, but this will allow menu to load, and provide a faster experience
• Drop messages support - allow for mobile user agents. By default, Frost will probably keep your existing agent
• Migrate to Firefox's browser - I've tried it and it's a lot of work, but if possible, it might lead to better notification support
• Notification support for friend requests

At this point, it will pretty much be a new app, but if it gets completed, it will replace the original Frost

---

2023-04-25: I expect I'll have time to actually work on this in June 2023, while I have time off

[drakenabarion]

Thank you for the update! 😊

[Gitaroony]

Really hope the ability to choose tabs stay, its one of the main features I use. Being stuck with what facebook decide to have up top when most aren't going to be used is annoying. But even more important sometimes set up face book for older relatives and like to set only what they need, so they dont press or mess anything up, so less customization will be a bummer.

And removing messages means will not be able to send or receive any messages from people, so will need a separate app for messages?

[mattdrepo]

Can I suggest that you attempt electron for desktop apps. This would gain more traction. If you could some how release this in a manner that folk could use on their desktop - long term donations I am sure would start to come in. The ability to turn off unwanted elements and focus on your friends and family make this app worthwhile having!

[AllanWang]

I will probably be working on this in September.

Tabs could stay, but it will make the app slower overall, as each tab is an independent web page. Removing it would mean that it's just a single page for facebook's mobile site, so the option will at least be there for those who want something more bare boned.

Yes, if I remove messages, people will need another app. The two are completely separate platforms, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to bundle them anymore. I don't currently have interest in electron for desktop apps. There are other desktop apps that do similar things.

[ghost]

Hey @AllanWang, I just came across this project looking for a Facebook Messenger alternative.

Since the app is no longer maintained and you're planning on removing messages, do you have any suggestion of a good FOSS Facebook Messenger client?

All I need is Messenger so I can communicate with friends/groups, and get notifications when there's a new message.

[Bartvz]

@engineer22 did you check out Facebook Messenger Lite? You probably need to sideload it as an APK from the known APK websites.

[ghost]

@Bartvz I do use it. I'm looking for a good web wrapper only for Messenger, I don't want to use Meta's apps.

[gothmog123]

Could you un-sunset this app? It would fill a very important niche as there are lierally 0 open source facebook wrappers left

[AllanWang]

No plans to really 'un-sunset' the app for now. Unless notifications break, my personal use case is sufficient. With that said, css updates and hiding sponsored posts (in your own locale) are the easiest part of Frost, and just takes some time to go through it. I might provide updates, but I'm not committed to maintaining atm (hence the sunset).

All the bigger issues and feature support would be better done with a redesign of Frost's web component, which I have been looking into in https://github.com/AllanWang/GeckoView-Playground. Until I make a decision to either go with firefox or stay with webview and fix broken code, these changes are not going to produce a usable app.

One of the benefits of going with firefox is that you'd be able to use mobile compatible browsers. There's nothing stopping you from using a full browser directly + forced desktop mode for messenger

[gbakeman]

Love the idea on principle of switching to Mozilla's renderer, if I'm understanding correctly.

Not that I'm in a position to contribute, but would you be open to accepting pull requests with features back into the Frost project, if someone were to take the effort upon themself?

Edit: if you don't mind my asking, what's the purpose of the playground repo? Are you testing an actual GeckoView implementation on Frost, or are you making modifications directly to GV?

[AllanWang]

You can submit PRs, but unless it's css updates or small features, I'm unlikely to accept it (or we'd have to work together to make sure I understand the changes, and it aligns with what I intend on doing). I wouldn't make changes with the expectation that they get merged, but if you make something you want, and it's something I intend on maintaining, I could take a look.

The play ground repo is just to test geckoview. It's somewhat in its early stages, and the implementation is completely different from webview. Most of the code cannot be reused, so that repo is figuring out if I can do what I need to do first, before doing anything Frost related. Frost work for geckoview will remain in this repo

[atom-smasher]

Does the plan involve custom "user-agent" strings? And/or selecting from a list of "user-agent" strings?

A while ago I got a security notice from FB about possible unauthorised activity, and it took me a while to figure out that a login from "Windows PC" was actually Frost.

If this isn't part of the plan, I can make a feature request for it.

Thanks.

[ahoier]

i primarily use Frost FOR the message feature....lol sad to see you dropping support....? do you have another "alternative"? My biggest complaint is with Facebook and even Facebook "Lite" the "are you sure?" prompts that pop up when deleting single messsages within a chat....I like how "fluid" it is within Frost to delete messages....BUT I've noticed with the latest release, the messages don't actually "delete" until I refresh the messages "tab?" by clicking the "curved arrow menu" and clicking on "delete selected" it then reloads the chat with the messages removed.

[AllanWang]

Firefox does make it a bit easier to have completely different sessions, which helps a bit. Supporting messenger is just a completely different feature altogether. There's no connection with messenger and facebook mobile. None of the interactions you see in messenger is custom be me. What you see or any changes you see are from messenger itself, and I've only added a theme and some minor resizing to make it look okay on mobile.

Changing user agent strings isn't hard, but it seems like that was the source of a lot of a lot of accounts being locked back in a previous version. Even if users can get warned, I don't think it makes sense for me to actively support something that cases account lock downs. You can always update the string yourself and rebuild the app, and it's automated too (I assume it works if you fork the project). With that said, firefox's browser has a desktop mode option, so if I test that out I won't be using a hardcoded string. Not sure what they do exactly

[AllanWang]

Open question:

I'd like to hear what features people are most interested in when it comes to Frost, to help me decide which direction to take this project.

• Notifications - this is my main use cases, and I will continue to maintain it. Notifications will be native to the app. While the new version would support extensions, I haven't found them to be that reliable.
• Themes - I've created 'glass' themes since pre Android L, and I can keep it that way. There are other extensions like Dark Reader that offer themes, though they don't have transparent use cases.
• Open in new window - Frost by default opens many links in a swipeable window, so that it's easy to get back to the main page. This is also the source of many bugs, since not every page is 'independent', and it requires reloading the whole page each time, which may lead to higher data usage. For Facebook specifically, this is one of the main blockers for requiring a windows user agent, since their mobile page is completely different, and no longer has tag info to distinguish between clickable links and non clickable elements
• Adblock/Tracking - part of Frost's use case was to remove identifiers in urls and block ads. That will still be the case with new Frost, but since I can uses extensions, people can just enable adblockers and get way more control without me doing anything. Firefox Android can do this already.
• Multi account - This is supported in Facebook (in that you can log out and get an account selector), along with other browsers, though it's still cumbersome. I currently intend on focusing more here with Frost, so that people can easily switch between 'accounts'. This is based off of Firefox containers.
• Long press for image/video viewing - This is also dependent on windows user agent. It's not difficult to do, though it's also the source of bugs, as a lot of Facebook image formats aren't supported by the library I'm using. If I were to add back videos, it would be with actual PIP, rather than my custom one.
• Tabs - Frost lets you customize tabs, and gives you a lot of bookmarks in the drawer. Do people use that? Would people prefer something like facebook tinfoil where there are no tabs?

[HarriBuh]

Thank you for asking, here is my list: 1. Adblocking- has always stood out in your app. It's still amazing how perfectly it works even today (in contrast to most of the other forks); 2. Tabs. Using a customized order in the header is the second favourite thing I like when using Frost. I don't care about the Messenger and Marketplace tab, since I either don't use it or have another app for that; 3. Open in new window. This feature has indeed always been buggy, but also useful to me. Not having to reload the whole main page when going back (instead, just closing the front window) has been comfortable; 4. Long press. Also useful to me, because I don't have to load the post and go back to afterwards. I never cared about Notifications, Themes, and Multiaccounts, as I do not use them.

[ahoier]

I'd like to see an easier way to delete private and group messages from within Frost. Currently it seems when using "delete selected" it doesn't seem to refresh tje page upon each message delete. Hace.to go to the drop down and it will refresh the page with new messages to delete.

It's hard to explain bit I use the delete selected a lot across a couple group chats to remove irrelevant messages and keep others.

On Monday, June 19, 2023, HarriBuh @.***> wrote:

Thank you for asking, here is my list: 1. Adblocking- has always stood out in your app. It's still amazing how perfect it works even today (in contrast to most of the other forks); 2. Tabs. Using a customized order in the header is the second favourite thing I like when using Frost. I don't care about the Messenger and Marketplace tab, since I either don't use it or have another app for that; 3. Open in new window. This feature has indeed always been buggy, but also useful to me. Not having to reload the whole main page when going back (instead, just closing the front window) has been comfortable; 4. Long press. Also useful to me, because I don't have to load the post and go back to afterwards. I never cared about Notifications, Themes, and Multiaccounts, as I did not use them.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/AllanWang/Frost-for-Facebook/issues/1902#issuecomment-1596487131, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AFLSJAOBP7WFHHOOMJNXBBDXL7K5VANCNFSM53JTZOSQ . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>

[gbakeman]

@AllanWang Thank you for checking in with us, I'm glad to see you're still interested in maintaining an app to access Facebook.

Generally I like to use Facebook in a read-only mode (in fact if we had a global toggle to prevent us from accidentally "interacting" with posts, that'd be great.) Notifications are definitely nice to have. I do occasionally use the Messenger feature, as well as Marketplace so it's helpful if those functions are well supported. I use media less, although there's a friend who I've introduced to Frost that likes uploading media and has had some issues with that. But foremost, limiting Facebook's ability to track me is the primary reason why I use Frost so I'm glad to see that that's still on your list as well.

Just as a general point on inquiry, how much are you able to take advantage of APIs versus straight web requests into a wrapper? I can image how hostile Facebook is about API access. Do you think there's any value/risk in trying to decipher how the native app talks to Facebook?

[flightmansam]

I am really enjoying the legacy release of Frost. I would be very happy to help or test your improvements. The world needs this, big time!

[iFUCKINGHATEcomputers]

Please let us keep using Messenger - it's my main use case, and it's broken right now (the page is/was cropped in an impossibly tiny corner), and currently Messenger also doesn't allow me to log back in (it asks me to "go to facebook" in order to verify, and then tells me that link is "invalid or expired"). Facebook's Messenger app is still ass, though thankfully I can contain it and automatically turn it off with Shelter.

[senolfndk]

When is the new version?

[quinb96]

Do you have any update on this?

[biladina]

Open question:

I'd like to hear what features people are most interested in when it comes to Frost, to help me decide which direction to take this project.

* Notifications - this is my main use cases, and I will continue to maintain it. Notifications will be native to the app. While the new version would support extensions, I haven't found them to be that reliable.

* Themes - I've created 'glass' themes since pre Android L, and I can keep it that way. There are other extensions like Dark Reader that offer themes, though they don't have transparent use cases.

* Open in new window - Frost by default opens many links in a swipeable window, so that it's easy to get back to the main page. This is also the source of many bugs, since not every page is 'independent', and it requires reloading the whole page each time, which may lead to higher data usage. For Facebook specifically, this is one of the main blockers for requiring a windows user agent, since their mobile page is completely different, and no longer has tag info to distinguish between clickable links and non clickable elements

* Adblock/Tracking - part of Frost's use case was to remove identifiers in urls and block ads. That will still be the case with new Frost, but since I can uses extensions, people can just enable adblockers and get way more control without me doing anything. Firefox Android can do this already.

* Multi account - This is supported in Facebook (in that you can log out and get an account selector), along with other browsers, though it's still cumbersome. I currently intend on focusing more here with Frost, so that people can easily switch between 'accounts'. This is based off of Firefox containers.

* Long press for image/video viewing - This is also dependent on windows user agent. It's not difficult to do, though it's also the source of bugs, as a lot of Facebook image formats aren't supported by the library I'm using. If I were to add back videos, it would be with actual PIP, rather than my custom one.

* Tabs - Frost lets you customize tabs, and gives you a lot of bookmarks in the drawer. Do people use that? Would people prefer something like facebook tinfoil where there are no tabs?

for me, some useful features:

• seeing such long user post (more paragraph), either expand the post or open in new window, its okay..
• adblock, its a must
• seeing image/video post
• open link from user post in new window
• seeing whole comment from post, right now some post can see whole comment, and some post just show partial/suggested comment
• marketplace, huge deal for me, many people sell their stuff for cheap
• messanger, most people find it useful
• notification, its nice to have, but not really urge to develop, maybe in future release
• tabs, not really useful, but its okay to have
• themes, not really useful, maybe just light & night mode will be enough, and not really urge to develop, maybe in future release
• multiple account, don't know this, not so much people have multiple account for personal stuff, mostly for bussines stuff that sometimes require multiple account, people prefer to use original app or web app.. CMIIW