gopher away in JavaScript

Category: Fun

<p>I was at the University of Minnesota when Gopher, the Internet protocol, was in its prime. It was created by a professor at the University of Minnesota you see, and I had to help implement gopher services.

When the Web kicked off, they still tried to hang on, but made the fatal mistake of not having it totally open, and it quickly died off.

But now it is back!

Cameron Kaiser has updated the Mozilla code with the good ole Gopher protocol implementation. Ah, old times.

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It should be noted that Firefox already has support for Gopher but it is in the process of being removed:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388195

This patch implements Gopher in a pure-JavaScript manner, allowing it to persist within Firefox but incur much less overhead in the process. More details about the patch:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388195#c71

Comment by JohnResig — August 12, 2008

Seems to be such a niche protocol that it ought to be implemented as a plugin, no?

Comment by slaniel — August 12, 2008

@slaniel: One would think that – but if you were to read the comments on the bug that I pointed to you would find a lot of people VERY angrily suggesting otherwise.

Comment by JohnResig — August 12, 2008

@John: in my opinion ( which is not a very educated one on this issue ) mozilla has a heritage in supporting this protocol. In this way it is a matter of continuity for mozilla to keep on supporting it. I think much of mozillas charm derives from these things also. These things = do not drop anything because the business number indicate so… as certain other companies do ;-)

Comment by FrankThuerigen — August 12, 2008

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