Hello all;
I received a notice today that Timimi may no longer be supported on the Chrome browser. I discovered the notice when I opened the extensions page on Chrome. The notice suggested that I search the web store for an alternative.
I was using a Windows 11 computer. I have not used Chrome for a while because I have been relying on TiddlyDesktop, but Chrome has been a useful alternative.
Has anyone else noticed similar behavior? Did I miss something?
Merv
I have an update. After reloading Timimi and rebooting my computer, Timimi works, but the message indicating that it may soon no longer be supported on Chrome is still present. Is this something that I need to worry about?
Merv
Probably. Chrome’s manifest 3 will break a lot of extensions. The developer of Timimi has exited from the TW community.
I run the rclone webdav server on my wiki “farm”. It’s simple and quick to set up, and is browser agnostic.
But there really needs to be an official, supported method for saving, just as there are with Obsidian, Joplin, and virtually every other note-taking software out there.
Download the executable to a directory. Your executable might be rclone-v1.53.exe or similar, but whatever it is, use it’s name. Open a terminal and go to your rclone directory. Run something like:
rclone serve webdav ~/data/Wikis --addr :8080 --vfs-cache-mode full
Where you use your TW parent directory instead of ~/data/Wikis and whatever port you want instead of 8080. I honestly don’t know how much difference the --vfs-cache-mode full directive makes. It was something I found on the net.
I believe rclone will serve up everything in it’s subdirectories, including images and other resources. You could hypothetically make your main drive the root and serve up your entire file system, but I feel that might be dangerous.
In your browser go to 127.0.0.1:8080 and then navigate to your TW and open.
RCLONE is well documented, and almost every command comes with too many options. So if you want to open up your wiki to other devices on your local network, for instance, I think you can do that. Just be aware of the danger, especially on public wifi systems.
Let’s see, on windows you’ll now have a terminal screen, but you can minimise that.
Just for completeness, you can use the RCX app on your android phone to serve up your TW files there. This is handy if you want to have two TW files opened up, rather than 1 at a time as with Tiddloid.
I am trying to do it…but haven’t yet fully succeeded in getting it running. Will try again tomorrow. Thanks for sharing Mark
Edit: I was above to mount the onedrive folder using rclone. I was also able to serve the onedrive folder using rclone webdav server
But the the initial loading of the wiki and images is slow . How to fix it ?
Attempted to port Timimi to Manifest V3 on Chrome, and it seems to be working. Chrome: Try porting to manifest_v3 by FSpark · Pull Request #96 · ibnishak/Timimi · GitHub
Hmm. How big is your TW? I regularly open an 8M file and it seems ok. But I imagine any server will be a little slower than opening local, so it’s more what you’re used to.
I forgot, there is also tiddlystow and nativesaver for local saving. But if you want to use Saq’s uploader, you’re going to need a server anyways. Neither of these two methods are as seamless as Rclone or Timimi.
I noticed the slowness of loading images only during first time … subsequent usage has been smooth
Do you think you could compile and release the extension ? So people could side-load the extension into their browsers ?
Repackaging and recompiling will result in a change to the Chrome extension ID. Consequently, the corresponding Chrome extension ID in the native host application must also be updated. This requires the native host application to be recompiled as well.
Additionally, it’s necessary to pay $5 to register as a Chrome Web Store developer in order to obtain a stable, unique ID that can be bound to the native host application and used for publishing in the store.
That’s why it’s hoped that @ibnishak can merge and release the update.
Pls have you had success building and running the host application for MacOS? I’ve used your fork of the original Timimi to rebuild and load the plugin, replaced the extension ID in the host code, but have not managed to get the host rebuilt and running.
I have only tested it on Linux. In fact, you don’t need to recompile the host program. The host installer only writes the configuration file to the specified directory (for example, $HOME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/NativeMessagingHosts on MacOS), so you can directly modify the configuration file with the new ID after installation.
I think it is the time to work more seriously on Saving on Browser with File System Access API
Great - it works perfectly - thank you!
I was kind of aware of this… it’s worrying, mainly because I don’t have a clue what I need to do IF it stops working. And what exactly will happen?
So far, Timimi is still saving and loading my TW files. I’m still using 5.3.0 and haven’t updated my browser, Brave, for quite a while.
I do think Timimi should become part of the core solutions but it involves a browser based component. Browsers are always making addons adhere to new standards and thus need to be maintained.
That’s why I’ve switched to TiddlyDesktop. Timimi has served me well, but I rely on some third party applications, and when Chrome upgrades, sometimes the interaction between the browser and the application changes. For example, I have Google Calendar embedded in my wiki using an iframe. Presently it is not working because something in Chrome has changed. But the embeddment still works on TiddlyDesktop.
I’ve downloaded Firefox (as suggested by Emily on Discord) to use offline only with Timimi. That solution works for me. Hopefully I don’t need to worry about updating anything for a while at least.