I just tried the Nightly on Windows and I'm very impressed. Much faster and better looking.
Long time Firefox user and have been dreading the extensions going away, but it looks like Nightly has resolved some of the problems I was using extensions for (i.e. duplicate tab context menu) and I know some of the more prominent extensions (like NoScript) are being worked on.
I can't even express how awesome it feels to hear it. Particularly, because the "duplicate tab context menu" landed just yesterday and I happened to write the final patch [0] :)
I haven't been a serious FireFox user since Chrome hit the streets nearly 10 years ago. I've gone back to try it many times. I've really wanted to like it, but it's always felt really slow and stiff. I just installed the Nightly and I totally agree – I'm impressed! It feels like modern browser again.
I switched to FF nightly after reading a comment here in HN. I had tried FF stable with electrolysis and still went back to chrome. FF nightly is SERIOUSLY fast and snappy, like ridiculously so. I recommend it to everyone.
just tried it on macOS and I have to agree it feels very well made.
Some issues though: instead of going for 'native', they still seem to feel like Firefox is a little planet of its own. It doesn't use macOS-style menus, nor transparency. Not that Chrome uses all macOS style elements, but it at least feels like it has had some effort put into making it feel at home on macOS. There's also some weird defaults / ignorance of convention: every browser launches a private window with cmd+shift+n, Firefox uses cmd+shift+p. There's still a separate search field next to an URL&search field. Probably a few more that I missed.
On the issues - what you listed is the eternal dilemma of cross-platform software. Balancing cross-platform behavior vs. platform-compliance.
There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window.
Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each.
Those choices are hard to make perfect. I've been recently fixing the drop-down menu lists styling [0] to allow websites to style some of it, while keeping it looking native when they don't. It's pretty tricky to get it right :)
Humorously (at least to me) Safari has a at least a couple of standout non-native UI quirks.
One is the location of the red/yellow/green titlebar buttons. Like FF, Safari eschews a traditional titlebar and puts those buttons level with the main browser chrome. (IMHO I think this is a good trade-off to make for a browser; I'm not complaining)
Two is Safari's scrolling behavior. It seems to use its own scrolling behavior, separate from the standard scrolling behavior provided by MacOS. I've tried a few apps that modify system-wide scrolling behavior, and they work everywhere but Safari. They make Safari's scrolling insanely twitchy, with a single click of the mousewheel causing Safari to scroll 10x or 100x faster than anything else on the system.
I use an old thinkpad x201 for everything, and chrome works great. Firefox flickers during scrolling(disabling hw accelaration doesn't help) and no alsa support in the builds(no i will not install pulseaudio just for firefox).
Please Firefox developers : always keep in mind that power users are loyal to Firefox for some specific reasons. One of those reasons is that Firefox is, by far, the browser with the most customizable interface. The "Customize..." feature is why I personally stick to Firefox :
I really don't care which browser is #1 in speed tests. I don't care about integrations with social networks. I simply want a browser that I can configure the way I want!
Another suggestion : when you change something, even if you are 100% sure everybody will like it, please at least leave an "about:config" option that can revert that modification.
Sadly, I realized that, when Firefox is updated, I'm not trilled anymore to see what new features are included, I'm instead anxious to see what has been changed/removed!
The fundamental problem with the legacy Firefox extension API is that its incredible power comes from putting incredible constraints on Firefox internals. Every stable API commitment involves some constraints, but the constraints from legacy Firefox extensions were out of control. They were killing the browser.
The "legacy" Firefox extension API is powerful because it reaches its tentacles into every corner of the internals of the browser. Keeping that API stable involves freezing a large amount of internal architecture and behavior.
Firefox needs to evolve if it's going to live, and it can't evolve in the ways that it needs to if so much of its internals are effectively frozen. It's a painful drag on development, slowing things down and preventing necessary changes.
I'm not even going to get into the problems with the API itself except to say that it had many, including widespread dependencies on synchronous behavior.
Mozilla's sacred-cow-level commitment to preserving legacy extension support is a big reason why Chrome beat Firefox on so many technical levels for so long. It ate up a ton of developer time, held off or killed critical architectural changes, was the cause of a lot of crashes, hangs, memory leaks, security problems... Thank goodness that's about to be over.
I'm sorry that you'll miss it but this is a really important step. Mozilla is doing a great job with WebExtensions, I suspect you'll be happy with how things shake out in the end.
Incredible short sighted decisions on Mozilla side, destroying their legacy plugin & addon platform. It's like Microsoft would switch off WinAPI support and kill thereby their platform. Firefox is all about "legacy API", Windows is all about "legacy API (WinAPI)" - almost no one gives a shit about WebExtension or UWP, there is no advantage over better competition Chrome / iOS or Android. Good luck with that.
Wouldn't it be better to offer a legacy addon API shim - old addons would still work even on new Firefox.
>I really don't care which browser is #1 in speed tests.
You're in the minority then. The majority of users care, a lot, about speed, and Firefox is visibly slower than Chrome, probably one of the main reasons it has lost so much share.
Personally I care about both, that's why I am so conflicted about this update. But it's disingenuous to assume this is an unwarrented regression. You cannot get better in terms performance while keeping the extension system as it is. This reworking is necessary for Firefox to even compete wit Chrome. I understand the dillema but this is far from clear-cut one way or the other.
Yeah. I care about browser speed a lot; I'm one of those guys always looking for settings to tweak and measuring results and so forth. I spent I-don't-even-want-to-know-how-many hours a week using a browser so even small improvements become noticeable quality-of-life upgrades.
But, still:
1. Benchmarks are important, but aren't always the best reflection of actual performance, either real or perceived. Subjectively, Safari on Mac and Edge on Windows "feel" fastest to me even though benchmarks say otherwise. Within reason, that's what typical end users care about: "feel" vs. benchmarks. (FWIW, Firefox is my main browser; I'm not telling anybody to use Safari or Edge)
1a. Chrome benchmarks the best, but it also uses the most memory due to its multiprocess model, so for users on memory-constrained devices (particularly with spinning HDDs, where swap's going to be really slow) I'm not convinced reality always lines up with benchmarks here
2. The user's network connection is still usually the biggest factor.
3. I don't think actual site content's getting much heavier. All this extra browser performance is just getting soaked the hell up by heavier and heavier ads. So I can't get as excited about browser performance as I used to.
Just wanted to say that, annecdotally, I switched from chrome to firefox not because of speed, but stability, four years ago. Chrome would reliably crash on my laptop after opening three tabs, while firefox would let me open dozens without trouble. I guess it was an OOM issue, but I never really cared. Firefox worked, chrome didn't.
The added extensibility, while nice, was mostly an afterthought. The only extension I'll miss is cliget, and hopefully it can be added back eventually.
Why do you want to customise so much? I know there are people like you but maybe like the Firefox developers I don't understand it. I use software as it comes. I almost never change any options. I don't even change my desktop wallpaper. I think making developers add options for everything creates bloat. Just use the defaults!
I'm not quite sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but one of the things I value more in software is costumizability. I don't want someone else to make my choices for me and force me in a given mold. No browser, no software, can be made perfect for everybody. Different people want different things, so a good software must always offer users the option to change it to fit their use case.
For instance neither "classic" top tabs nor a side list/tree is the "best" or "right" way to design a tab selector. Some users will prefer one, others the other. You should give them choice.
There are always things that people want to customize, and this is where Firefox differs from Chrome. An example is the recent change in Chrome that make the Backspace key no longer go back a page. Chrome just flatly forced users to adapt it, with no configurable option anywhere, whereas if Firefox ever adopts this, I have peace of mind that I can always go to about:config and change it back.
I've just had my "last straw" moment with Firefox after over a decade of using it. Several addons broke with their developers saying, in effect, F-it, and then it lost all of my saved logins. So, yep, F-it. Firefox has been moving toward becoming a clone of Chrome for years. I just skipped to the chase and started using Chrome. Congratulations, Mozilla. Nice work.
Instead of going to Chrome, I think you should consider moving to the better alternative to Firefox, Pale Moon. It has all the same mindset of decent Firefox, XUL compatibility (and an oath to never use WebExtensions), and other features.
Back in ~2015, there were several Firefox developers who visited a local hacklab where I used to hang out. I was aware of a bug in the current version of FX at that time, and I knew how to fix it. I wanted to get their help to create a patch for the bug and get it submitted.
After about two hours of trying, we were unable to produce a working build from a tagged release point in their version control - even before applying any changes.
I'm also happy to say that we actually did improve our build chain. I have a build env for Firefox on Mac, Windows and Linux and it all works quite smoothly.
The only issue is that full compilation takes time (30 minutes on my laptop).
Fortunately we also now have Artifact Builds which allow you to hack on the front-end JS code without having to rebuild the C++ backend [0].
The Linux x86_64 build experience has worked very well on Ubuntu for many years. These days you don't even need to copy and paste the apt incantations: ./mach bootstrap takes care of that.
Had a similar experience trying to debug some UI problems I was facing a few years ago.
Building and contributing to Chromium is a breeze, in comparison, that is as long as you have a steady and fast Internet connection.
Reading the comments, I get that many users are upset about the XUL extension APIs being dropped, but what I don't get is that many of them plan to switch to Chrome.
a. You're getting a less powerful set of APIs in Chrome than in Firefox, even with WebExtensions being used by both.
b. You're supporting a browser by a major corporation that is already number one anyway and has a IE-style chokehold on the web, giving them even more power is not the best solution, helping Mozilla make the new APIs as close in power to the old ones would be a better alternative in my opinion.
Again, it's everybody's personal choice and am not saying what anyone should be doing, just found it curious that many consider switching to WebKit/Blink to be the solution, where they won't get more power and give Mozilla even less of a say in terms of web standards and just having a decent alternative to WebKit.
Dear Mozilla developers! I've been using Firefox since v1.0. And I want you to know that by ditching the old plugin architecture you are alienating your faithful users, myself included.
I'm sorry, but I decided to stick with Firefox 55 for now, possibly switching to Palemoon later. I need my old extensions to work: Status4Evar, EdgeWise and Classic Theme Restorer. I can't stand the current FF UI and I will not give up on this.
I'm the same. Been using since Phoenix 0.3 and am stoked about these changes, and the thought that Rust, and the major perf and safety improvements that come with it, are beginning to find their way into Gecko. Amazing work from a team that many had dismissed as irrelevant.
I’ve been using Firefox as my standard browser since 0.9.3 (except for a year or so when it was run-a-browser-from-a-USB-disk-or-use-IE and Firefox was just too terribly slow, so I used Chrome—by the next year Firefox had fixed its game and I could switch back), and for the last few years Nightly has been my standard browser.
I get why you’re dropping the legacy stuff and I’m looking forward to what’s possible after it’s gone. When the announcement came out in November last year that WebExtensions would be the only way come 57, I was intensely sceptical that it’d be ready within a year (no one was using it at that time) and prepared for a deal of pain: I’d just have to live with it, come November. (It’s not like I have any better options in mainstream browsers; they’re all hopeless with even only twenty tabs.)
Well.
You’ve proven me wrong, and I’m delighted. I was able to replace all my legacy extensions with WebExtensions ones with minimal loss of functionality (I miss the ability to style the chrome with Stylish, not that I was actually using it for anything other than shaving half pixels off here and there on my high-DPI screen). My Dad (also a programmer) is still grumbling about some status bar thing that broke a short while ago, but we went through his extensions and came to the conclusion that it’s really not that bad—the extensions that stop working at 57 were ones he didn’t use, or ones where there are already good alternatives available or a clear plan for the changeover.
(The fact that in several cases I did have to swap out one extension for another was a mild nuisance, but as a Nightly user I’m doing this a few months before everyone will have to, so I expected it.)
All in all, I’m happy with how things have gone and impressed at how well the migration is going. All that I really want now is to be able to hide the horizontal tab strip in favour of my vertical tab bar. And it looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 is almost there. (It’d also be good if file: URLs didn’t mess with said vertical tab bar something awful, but as I haven’t filed any bugs about that yet or investigated to find existing reports I’m not allowed to complain.)
Dear niche community using legacy extensions: We're sorry, but legacy extensions are holding back Firefox development in every way meaningful to the vast majority of users. In order to continue to exist as a viable option for an open web, Firefox must move forward. - (What I imagine they'd say)
Of the extensions you listed, the largest (Classic Theme Restorer) is only used by 333,000 people while the smallest (Edgewise) is only used by 218 people.
Your arguments may convince Mozilla not to port these features to WebExtensions, but what are you trying to tell me? To go fuck myself? What you're missing is there are many niches like these, and many people using many niches. It might still be a small percentage of users overall, but we're the geeks and we sit right in the center of the culture. Get rid of us, and the care-about-Mozilla temperature goes down significantly.
Mozilla should find a way of moving forward while keeping the code open enough to modding. AFAIK, features offered by these extensions that I use are not implementable in WebExtensions even in principle, and that is the main problem. Break the compatibility if you must, but make it possible for someone who cares enough to step in and rewrite these extensions to the new architecture.
For every user of Classic Theme Restorer, there are probably a dozen more Firefox users who complain about the unnecessary UI changes but aren't aware that CTR exists to fix some of the usability regressions.
I've been using Firefox since 1.5, and I understand completely why they have to drop their legacy extensions framework to modernize the browser. In recent years I found myself using Chromium more and more because of its responsiveness. Firefox 57 is really close to where it needs to be to let me drop all my use cases of Chromium I have now. Yes, it means 4 of the ~12 extensions I've used for years stop working. Most of those have a web extension version being worked on or aren't worth the competitive disadvantage of supporting a 15 year old addon API.
I've seen plenty of my favorite software projects have to make "hard breaks" to modernize. KDE broke everything with Qt5 / Plasma 5, but the payoff is now they are the premier high DPI Linux desktop. Python broke everything with 3, but features enabled by the changes have made Python 3 the best scripting language ever in my book.
Firefox would be doomed to a slow death with its legacy extensions API the same way PHP and Perl languished for years with the inability to push a major version. A slow death is not a downfall anyone wants.
I rely mainly on one add-on: Vimperator. It's a big big productivity enhancer and it's the main reason for sticking with Firefox for so long. Even in a period when Firefox was slower and buggier than the alternatives.
It's sad they will deprecate the old extension interface and make Vimperator a no-no. I understand the reasons behind WebExtensions, specially those related to security, and reckon the benefits of the multiprocess paradigm, but the flexibility of the old extensions API was a big advantage in my pov.
No, Vimperator won't be ported (I wish it could), because WebExtensions is a much more limited API. And no, Vimium and VimFx doesn't come even close to it. They are not alternatives.
I hate to add so little to the discussion, but I am on the exact same boat, and I am quite anxious about the upcoming change.
If there is anything to make either Mozilla hear this use case more, or contribute anywhere to make Vimperator a possibility for the future, I would be happy to do my part.
I've been using Firefox since ~Phoenix 0.1 and I don't care at all about the legacy plugins.
It would be interesting to see what percentage of their long time users use more than 1 or 2 add ons (I have 4 installed and only really use 2 of them).
In my case, the critical extension for me is Tab Mix plus (770k users) for multi-row tabs. It's really hard to use a browser without this feature because I've been using it for so long.
The real question is for me is how many users haven't moved onto Chrome -- which is obviously faster and more stable -- because of 1 or 2 add-ons.
i've used ff since the phoenix days (0.6? do not remember). this particular laptop now has 55.0.2 with Cookie Monster, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, Policeman, Show my Password, Tab Mix Plus. some other extensions are installed but not used.
How many of those users really care about firefox and dont just use it for inertia reasons? (already installed, etc)
Frankly if they arnt using extensions they are going to have a vastly better user experience on chrome, and google has infinity manpower to always ensure thats the case.
So what is firefox gaining by becomming a crappier chrome? Why the hell wouldnt I just use chrome at that point, because I feel so great about mozilla, who regularly brushes me off when i try to take advantage of things unique to firefox?
One more voice for the above. I will be stopping at Firefox 56 until I decide what works best for me. I rely on several plugins daily that are about to be made obsolete. Likewise I revert Firefox back to a very classic UI interface that is very compact and familiar. I have avoided Chrome all these years because I can't stand its UI. Now I'm also about to loose the ability to make FF feel familiar along with many of my required productivity add-ons.
I'll ride out FF 56 until I decide where to go next but honestly the many times in the past it has felt FF has ignored the requests of long term users, coupled with lack of differentiation from Chrome, I'm not sure I have much reason to stick around.
Kudos to the team for all the hard work improving the FF core. But you're about to abandon that which kept long term users like myself here through all those rough years. Makes me sad.
I'm going to be switching to the extended support release[1] (based on Firefox 52 but with security patches through June 18th 2018).
I don't mind WebExtensions, and cross-browser compatibility is a nice goal, but a half-baked system that breaks the most important distinguishing feature of Firefox (extensions that can modify any part of the browser) is ridiculous.
I'm already on ESR, but my reason is I need java plugin for my company OEBS (it supports web start, but it takes ages for our admins to patch anything).
At the same time, keeping legacy plugins working is a big bonus, I love Classic theme restorer.
Still undecided what to do after june 2018. I guess I'll just try firefox and chrome side by side and move to chrome if there is no real difference. It is probably more convinient to migrate to chrome, since it is on the phone by default too.
Yes it's a change but it serves a good purpose - to standardize the extension development and making sure that 1 extension can be running on multiples browsers e.g. Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc..
Yes, it's a good purpose to have a standard base. It's bad, though, that nothing besides the blessed parts are officially customizable anymore.
Previously, extensions had messed up with anything they wanted (they could override most of the browser's core). That had allowed third parties to do incredible things that weren't ever considered by the browser developers.
With WEs, though, the only things that browser developers had specifically thought about are possible. All for user's convenience, so they can switch to Chrome, Edge or Opera.
Then they should bring back the old UI we came to love. I want my blue title bar on Windows, my menu bar, my status bar, my square tabs, etc, etc. Also, I can't imagine living without EdgeWise, so they would have to incorporate that, as well. Other people use different sets of features, which are also not supported in the new plugin model. How can Mozilla ever hope to plug all these holes (pun intended)?
Actually, it still does support legacy extensions and probably will do for a while. There are `browser/features/*.xpi` files in the browser install directory. Even in 57, they're all "legacy" extensions, and the only WebExtension there is `screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi` (even then, still a "legacy" install.rdf-type file, with embedded WE).
And I've just copied the legacy `https-everywhere@eff.org.xpi` non-WE addon there - and it worked ;)
I'm sure they're going to plug this "hole" shut, but it's still there. As well as patching omni.ja.
If it keeps working in FF 57 and won't break after every minor update, I might upgrade. I was actually thinking that providing some kind of officially unsupported backdoor for determined users like us might be a way out of this situation.
I used to do that until I discovered the Compact theme (which is now installed by default, previously only available on the developer edition without installing an add-on).
The main problem with legacy extensions is that they won't work with multiprocess firefox by design. Multiprocess is the only way forward, because of the enormous speed and stability benefits.
Unfortunately Mozilla has rushed the transition, and there hasn't been enough time to add important APIs and for developers to update their extensions. Firefox 57 is on the verge of being released, and there are still many addons which aren't webextension compatible.
> I can't stand the current FF UI and I will not give up on this.
Then the simple way forward is to make your own browser, isn't it? Use an embeddable engine which does all the hard work for you and focus on making the UI the way you insist it must be. It really could be a single developer project.
Sadly, I don't think the devs have much of a voice anymore. Corporate and upper management have taken over, as shown by the various SJW and usability debacles.
I'm always concerned of this happening to other large-scale independent FOSS projects. Special interests tend to take over without some benevolent dictator.
Hit the download button for nightly, only to start reading the comments here and realizing that a bunch of addons will stop working. Checking my list, FireGestures will stop working, Self-Destructing Cookies apparently already stopped working this version (broke localStorage deletion), and a more obscure one (QuickJava) is also legacy. The latter is the only one I could find that adds easy on/off toggles for Javascript, CSS, Flash and Proxy. They want to receive telemetry to see how people use nightly? Well, here's my datapoint: can't use it altogether.
I'm not sure they will. Vimperator etc. has a lot of dependencies some of which will never come to be. But the parts that could, like a proper keyboard api hasn't even been reviewed for months. The community complained about the lack of apis, they made a webextension experiment, which is apparently the way you ask for api extensions and it's pretty much just being ignored(the thread is 2 years old [1][2]). The customization thing mentioned also applies since the plugin creates a custom status bar and hides all sorts of other stuff.
I'm not sure what browser I'm going to use to be honest. All the hotkey browsers are buggy as hell since they use qtwebkit, webkitgtk, qt-webengine and whatnot. Chrome has extensions like cvim which sort of work, but they suffer from issues like not being able to properly hook keys and properly notify the user about the state you're in making me frequently make mistakes on what I want to do. As the sibling said a poor imitation of what was possible before.
If firefox just immitates chrome, what's the point in having it? How about trying to eat some of IE's lunch by making enterprise customization a first class citizen? But then again not sure if that matters. And yes I'm aware of GPO[3], but calling that first class citizen is disingenuous at best.
I indeed looked for alternatives and they're just not there yet.
The more I read, the more APIs turn out to be missing or buggy, making it impossible for add-ons to be made (if the developer is active in the first place). I just don't understand this. Firefox was built on the extendible principle and they're now going back to "v0.2 beta" in that regard.
This process should have taken years to mature the new APIs before dropping support for the old method.
Downthemall was the only reason I was still using firefox. The "replacements" are extremely poor imitations, disappointing but I guess all good things must come to an end.
From a link on your sheet, I found that Tab Mix Plus multi-row tabs has over 700k users! This is the killer feature for me and Firefox and I won't be upgrading without it.
TLDR; could someone point me to a tutorial or an explanation on how to properly install FF, update & save the open tabs without making bookmarks (that last point is and edge case we can skip if it's difficult), and having the current icon, on a nix system that has explanations for 5 year olds?
I would love to help but being an amateur I've encountered a few pain points, unless the issue is my search skills are lacking. A few days ago I finally updated my Firefox version on Debian 9 to the developer version 56 (previous 54). The problem has been finding documentation on both the Debian and Mozilla websites on how to do it the right way. Found a decent tutorial, made a back up, installed and my machine is working much better. It is old and got little memory :)
Then FF said there was an update. I got stumped. From what I could find FF sync has a limit of X bytes. I ended up looking into making a web extension but that's going to take me some time. It seems I could save the open tabs using Tabs.tab from the API, maybe. Sorry, I digress.
In short, how can I have two FF versions on at the same time, different directories obviously, with their respective icons, while manually updating them? I guess it would be to delete all the files in the dir, unpacking, and call it a day? Still need help with the two versions though.
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but try just using the same profile for both installs. It contains all the information about your browsing session including tabs, bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc.
His point is concurrent usage of one profile. FF does not support this.
Queue the FF is not tread safe jokes (and only that, not a flame).
OP: you can use Firefox Sync. There is a cloud version by Mozilla but also a WSGI app you could host. I know it is not a 100% solution, but what was recommended to me when I asked during FF alpha and beta testing with stable way back when.
Thanks. I'll read this in a bit. When I was looking into different options I did find a mention about the profile, but the doc/tutorial seemed to be old and couldn't find it in the dir when I looked for it.
I won't be happy if it were to fail but certainly I won't despair either.
I don't want amazing performance improvements at the cost of huge functionality losses. This update is simple a regression: almost every add-on I have been using will stop working and has a stupidly limited or no replacement at all. There will really be no reason for me to still use Firefox over any other browser now.
The only option seems to switch to the ESR version, at least for a while it will work.
Readit News
Long time Firefox user and have been dreading the extensions going away, but it looks like Nightly has resolved some of the problems I was using extensions for (i.e. duplicate tab context menu) and I know some of the more prominent extensions (like NoScript) are being worked on.
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455722
By the way, is multi-process going to make it more feasible to introduce a more robust profile feature like Chrome?
I have it working mostly on Windows but it still feels pretty rudimentary.
That's the only major feature for me that Chrome is really just so much better than Firefox.
Some issues though: instead of going for 'native', they still seem to feel like Firefox is a little planet of its own. It doesn't use macOS-style menus, nor transparency. Not that Chrome uses all macOS style elements, but it at least feels like it has had some effort put into making it feel at home on macOS. There's also some weird defaults / ignorance of convention: every browser launches a private window with cmd+shift+n, Firefox uses cmd+shift+p. There's still a separate search field next to an URL&search field. Probably a few more that I missed.
On the issues - what you listed is the eternal dilemma of cross-platform software. Balancing cross-platform behavior vs. platform-compliance.
There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each.
Those choices are hard to make perfect. I've been recently fixing the drop-down menu lists styling [0] to allow websites to style some of it, while keeping it looking native when they don't. It's pretty tricky to get it right :)
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386015
Wasn't Firefox (or even Mozilla) the first to have this feature and possibly even before there was any alternative?
If so, did this keyboard shortcut change in the new FF?
If not, then the 'convention' is whatever FF has always done, which the others then broke..
One is the location of the red/yellow/green titlebar buttons. Like FF, Safari eschews a traditional titlebar and puts those buttons level with the main browser chrome. (IMHO I think this is a good trade-off to make for a browser; I'm not complaining)
Two is Safari's scrolling behavior. It seems to use its own scrolling behavior, separate from the standard scrolling behavior provided by MacOS. I've tried a few apps that modify system-wide scrolling behavior, and they work everywhere but Safari. They make Safari's scrolling insanely twitchy, with a single click of the mousewheel causing Safari to scroll 10x or 100x faster than anything else on the system.
Other browsers don't have to have "undo close window" as a feature at all, so had the shortcut free for private browsing.
http://i.imgur.com/AH1ahF3.jpg
I really don't care which browser is #1 in speed tests. I don't care about integrations with social networks. I simply want a browser that I can configure the way I want!
Another suggestion : when you change something, even if you are 100% sure everybody will like it, please at least leave an "about:config" option that can revert that modification.
Sadly, I realized that, when Firefox is updated, I'm not trilled anymore to see what new features are included, I'm instead anxious to see what has been changed/removed!
The "legacy" Firefox extension API is powerful because it reaches its tentacles into every corner of the internals of the browser. Keeping that API stable involves freezing a large amount of internal architecture and behavior.
Firefox needs to evolve if it's going to live, and it can't evolve in the ways that it needs to if so much of its internals are effectively frozen. It's a painful drag on development, slowing things down and preventing necessary changes.
I'm not even going to get into the problems with the API itself except to say that it had many, including widespread dependencies on synchronous behavior.
Mozilla's sacred-cow-level commitment to preserving legacy extension support is a big reason why Chrome beat Firefox on so many technical levels for so long. It ate up a ton of developer time, held off or killed critical architectural changes, was the cause of a lot of crashes, hangs, memory leaks, security problems... Thank goodness that's about to be over.
I'm sorry that you'll miss it but this is a really important step. Mozilla is doing a great job with WebExtensions, I suspect you'll be happy with how things shake out in the end.
Wouldn't it be better to offer a legacy addon API shim - old addons would still work even on new Firefox.
You're in the minority then. The majority of users care, a lot, about speed, and Firefox is visibly slower than Chrome, probably one of the main reasons it has lost so much share.
Personally I care about both, that's why I am so conflicted about this update. But it's disingenuous to assume this is an unwarrented regression. You cannot get better in terms performance while keeping the extension system as it is. This reworking is necessary for Firefox to even compete wit Chrome. I understand the dillema but this is far from clear-cut one way or the other.
But, still:
1. Benchmarks are important, but aren't always the best reflection of actual performance, either real or perceived. Subjectively, Safari on Mac and Edge on Windows "feel" fastest to me even though benchmarks say otherwise. Within reason, that's what typical end users care about: "feel" vs. benchmarks. (FWIW, Firefox is my main browser; I'm not telling anybody to use Safari or Edge)
1a. Chrome benchmarks the best, but it also uses the most memory due to its multiprocess model, so for users on memory-constrained devices (particularly with spinning HDDs, where swap's going to be really slow) I'm not convinced reality always lines up with benchmarks here
2. The user's network connection is still usually the biggest factor.
3. I don't think actual site content's getting much heavier. All this extra browser performance is just getting soaked the hell up by heavier and heavier ads. So I can't get as excited about browser performance as I used to.
The added extensibility, while nice, was mostly an afterthought. The only extension I'll miss is cliget, and hopefully it can be added back eventually.
For instance neither "classic" top tabs nor a side list/tree is the "best" or "right" way to design a tab selector. Some users will prefer one, others the other. You should give them choice.
Just customize!
After about two hours of trying, we were unable to produce a working build from a tagged release point in their version control - even before applying any changes.
I'm hoping the new tooling works better.
I'm also happy to say that we actually did improve our build chain. I have a build env for Firefox on Mac, Windows and Linux and it all works quite smoothly. The only issue is that full compilation takes time (30 minutes on my laptop).
Fortunately we also now have Artifact Builds which allow you to hack on the front-end JS code without having to rebuild the C++ backend [0].
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
It's just a ./mach build after checking out the code and running the bootstrap script.
The Linux x86_64 build experience has worked very well on Ubuntu for many years. These days you don't even need to copy and paste the apt incantations: ./mach bootstrap takes care of that.
a. You're getting a less powerful set of APIs in Chrome than in Firefox, even with WebExtensions being used by both.
b. You're supporting a browser by a major corporation that is already number one anyway and has a IE-style chokehold on the web, giving them even more power is not the best solution, helping Mozilla make the new APIs as close in power to the old ones would be a better alternative in my opinion.
Again, it's everybody's personal choice and am not saying what anyone should be doing, just found it curious that many consider switching to WebKit/Blink to be the solution, where they won't get more power and give Mozilla even less of a say in terms of web standards and just having a decent alternative to WebKit.
I'm sorry, but I decided to stick with Firefox 55 for now, possibly switching to Palemoon later. I need my old extensions to work: Status4Evar, EdgeWise and Classic Theme Restorer. I can't stand the current FF UI and I will not give up on this.
Dear Mozilla developers!
I've been using Firefox as my daily driver nearly non-stop since it was Phoenix and I'm totally cool with you dropping the legacy stuff.
Prove them wrong!
I’ve been using Firefox as my standard browser since 0.9.3 (except for a year or so when it was run-a-browser-from-a-USB-disk-or-use-IE and Firefox was just too terribly slow, so I used Chrome—by the next year Firefox had fixed its game and I could switch back), and for the last few years Nightly has been my standard browser.
I get why you’re dropping the legacy stuff and I’m looking forward to what’s possible after it’s gone. When the announcement came out in November last year that WebExtensions would be the only way come 57, I was intensely sceptical that it’d be ready within a year (no one was using it at that time) and prepared for a deal of pain: I’d just have to live with it, come November. (It’s not like I have any better options in mainstream browsers; they’re all hopeless with even only twenty tabs.)
Well.
You’ve proven me wrong, and I’m delighted. I was able to replace all my legacy extensions with WebExtensions ones with minimal loss of functionality (I miss the ability to style the chrome with Stylish, not that I was actually using it for anything other than shaving half pixels off here and there on my high-DPI screen). My Dad (also a programmer) is still grumbling about some status bar thing that broke a short while ago, but we went through his extensions and came to the conclusion that it’s really not that bad—the extensions that stop working at 57 were ones he didn’t use, or ones where there are already good alternatives available or a clear plan for the changeover.
(The fact that in several cases I did have to swap out one extension for another was a mild nuisance, but as a Nightly user I’m doing this a few months before everyone will have to, so I expected it.)
All in all, I’m happy with how things have gone and impressed at how well the migration is going. All that I really want now is to be able to hide the horizontal tab strip in favour of my vertical tab bar. And it looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 is almost there. (It’d also be good if file: URLs didn’t mess with said vertical tab bar something awful, but as I haven’t filed any bugs about that yet or investigated to find existing reports I’m not allowed to complain.)
Good job!
Of the extensions you listed, the largest (Classic Theme Restorer) is only used by 333,000 people while the smallest (Edgewise) is only used by 218 people.
Mozilla should find a way of moving forward while keeping the code open enough to modding. AFAIK, features offered by these extensions that I use are not implementable in WebExtensions even in principle, and that is the main problem. Break the compatibility if you must, but make it possible for someone who cares enough to step in and rewrite these extensions to the new architecture.
doesn't sound like an "only" to me.
I've seen plenty of my favorite software projects have to make "hard breaks" to modernize. KDE broke everything with Qt5 / Plasma 5, but the payoff is now they are the premier high DPI Linux desktop. Python broke everything with 3, but features enabled by the changes have made Python 3 the best scripting language ever in my book.
Firefox would be doomed to a slow death with its legacy extensions API the same way PHP and Perl languished for years with the inability to push a major version. A slow death is not a downfall anyone wants.
It's sad they will deprecate the old extension interface and make Vimperator a no-no. I understand the reasons behind WebExtensions, specially those related to security, and reckon the benefits of the multiprocess paradigm, but the flexibility of the old extensions API was a big advantage in my pov.
No, Vimperator won't be ported (I wish it could), because WebExtensions is a much more limited API. And no, Vimium and VimFx doesn't come even close to it. They are not alternatives.
If there is anything to make either Mozilla hear this use case more, or contribute anywhere to make Vimperator a possibility for the future, I would be happy to do my part.
What does vimperator do that vimium and vimfx can't?
It would be interesting to see what percentage of their long time users use more than 1 or 2 add ons (I have 4 installed and only really use 2 of them).
The real question is for me is how many users haven't moved onto Chrome -- which is obviously faster and more stable -- because of 1 or 2 add-ons.
Frankly if they arnt using extensions they are going to have a vastly better user experience on chrome, and google has infinity manpower to always ensure thats the case.
So what is firefox gaining by becomming a crappier chrome? Why the hell wouldnt I just use chrome at that point, because I feel so great about mozilla, who regularly brushes me off when i try to take advantage of things unique to firefox?
I'll ride out FF 56 until I decide where to go next but honestly the many times in the past it has felt FF has ignored the requests of long term users, coupled with lack of differentiation from Chrome, I'm not sure I have much reason to stick around.
Kudos to the team for all the hard work improving the FF core. But you're about to abandon that which kept long term users like myself here through all those rough years. Makes me sad.
I don't mind WebExtensions, and cross-browser compatibility is a nice goal, but a half-baked system that breaks the most important distinguishing feature of Firefox (extensions that can modify any part of the browser) is ridiculous.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/
Still undecided what to do after june 2018. I guess I'll just try firefox and chrome side by side and move to chrome if there is no real difference. It is probably more convinient to migrate to chrome, since it is on the phone by default too.
Yes it's a change but it serves a good purpose - to standardize the extension development and making sure that 1 extension can be running on multiples browsers e.g. Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc..
Yes, it's a good purpose to have a standard base. It's bad, though, that nothing besides the blessed parts are officially customizable anymore.
Previously, extensions had messed up with anything they wanted (they could override most of the browser's core). That had allowed third parties to do incredible things that weren't ever considered by the browser developers.
With WEs, though, the only things that browser developers had specifically thought about are possible. All for user's convenience, so they can switch to Chrome, Edge or Opera.
And I've just copied the legacy `https-everywhere@eff.org.xpi` non-WE addon there - and it worked ;)
I'm sure they're going to plug this "hole" shut, but it's still there. As well as patching omni.ja.
Oh, and good news, the ui you dislike is going away.
Unfortunately Mozilla has rushed the transition, and there hasn't been enough time to add important APIs and for developers to update their extensions. Firefox 57 is on the verge of being released, and there are still many addons which aren't webextension compatible.
Then the simple way forward is to make your own browser, isn't it? Use an embeddable engine which does all the hard work for you and focus on making the UI the way you insist it must be. It really could be a single developer project.
So why not just do that?
I wonder what the telemetry says about those plugins. If it shows a minority, than Mozilla many not give it a thought at all.
I'm always concerned of this happening to other large-scale independent FOSS projects. Special interests tend to take over without some benevolent dictator.
I might as well switch to MSIE as update to 57.
FireGestures -> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures... SDC -> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
It'll take a bit for the new generation of extensions to fully replace the old one, but it's happening.
I'm not sure what browser I'm going to use to be honest. All the hotkey browsers are buggy as hell since they use qtwebkit, webkitgtk, qt-webengine and whatnot. Chrome has extensions like cvim which sort of work, but they suffer from issues like not being able to properly hook keys and properly notify the user about the state you're in making me frequently make mistakes on what I want to do. As the sibling said a poor imitation of what was possible before.
If firefox just immitates chrome, what's the point in having it? How about trying to eat some of IE's lunch by making enterprise customization a first class citizen? But then again not sure if that matters. And yes I'm aware of GPO[3], but calling that first class citizen is disingenuous at best.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061
[2] https://github.com/Koushien/keyboard-shortcut-api
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/gpo-for-firef...
The more I read, the more APIs turn out to be missing or buggy, making it impossible for add-ons to be made (if the developer is active in the first place). I just don't understand this. Firefox was built on the extendible principle and they're now going back to "v0.2 beta" in that regard.
This process should have taken years to mature the new APIs before dropping support for the old method.
I would love to help but being an amateur I've encountered a few pain points, unless the issue is my search skills are lacking. A few days ago I finally updated my Firefox version on Debian 9 to the developer version 56 (previous 54). The problem has been finding documentation on both the Debian and Mozilla websites on how to do it the right way. Found a decent tutorial, made a back up, installed and my machine is working much better. It is old and got little memory :)
Then FF said there was an update. I got stumped. From what I could find FF sync has a limit of X bytes. I ended up looking into making a web extension but that's going to take me some time. It seems I could save the open tabs using Tabs.tab from the API, maybe. Sorry, I digress.
In short, how can I have two FF versions on at the same time, different directories obviously, with their respective icons, while manually updating them? I guess it would be to delete all the files in the dir, unpacking, and call it a day? Still need help with the two versions though.
If you read all of this, thank you.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
Queue the FF is not tread safe jokes (and only that, not a flame).
OP: you can use Firefox Sync. There is a cloud version by Mozilla but also a WSGI app you could host. I know it is not a 100% solution, but what was recommended to me when I asked during FF alpha and beta testing with stable way back when.
Not sure if you are looking something like this, but OneTab extension it's pretty useful to me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/
The only option seems to switch to the ESR version, at least for a while it will work.