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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

«The Nightly and Developer Editions of Firefox based on 42 and above will retain the preference to disable signing enforcement, allowing the development and/or use of unsigned add-ons in those versions»

So I think running the Developer Edition (which I expect to be much more stable than Nightly) is probably your best bet.

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The thing is, I'm not a web developer and I don't think I should be forced to use the Developer Edition just so I can remain in charge of what I install in my browser. Now that I'm writing this it occurs to me that after this change it's not really my browser anymore, is it?

Use Iceweasel or GNU Icecat?

Thanks for the suggestion! That's what I'll prolly end up doing although neither of them are in the Ubuntu repos.

Are you sure you are a 'power user', then?

I'm not sure what you mean, but are you suggesting that if I'm a savvy driver I should just drive prototype cars?

Are you suggesting that the developer edition is merely a prototype and not a production browser?

Indeed, I am :)

According to a comment lower down, Developer Edition is on the alpha branch, so yes, it is a prototype.

I don't think prototype is fair. A prototype is a proof of concept. Just because something is in beta or even alpha shape doesn't make it that.

i tried running firefox developer for a while and since it's based on the alpha code, it broke all my extensions on each update. so yeah, i'm a power user (i run 3 custom extensions that i wrote, pentadactyl and dotjs) but it's not feasible for me to keep running developer.

I hear you on the control thing. You mention you are a power user above so my two cents is that likely puts you outside of the user base Mozilla covets. In the last couple years, the words "Firefox" and "power user" went hand-and-hand but I'd wager Mozilla would trade customer bases with Google in a heartbeat.

FWIW, the Developer Edition feels pretty lean and mean. I haven't tried since I am a web developer, but it looks like you can remove most or all of the parts that make it web developer-y if you are so inclined.

I've ran Nightly and Aurora (which is now Developer Edition) for a while but extensions/themes broke more often than I'd have liked because there was too little time for extension devs to update their extensions in case incompatible changes were introduced.

"You mention you are a power user above so my two cents is that likely puts you outside of the user base Mozilla covets."

Mozilla's business model needs users who can't figure out how to turn off Yahoo search. That pays for their new Firefox offices on the waterfront in San Francisco.[1]

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895991,-122.3883498,3a,36y,...

There will also be special builds of Beta and Release without this limitation - you won't need to use Developer or Nightly.

Does this mean that the FTP server will now offer a choice of:

1) Firefox without DRM, without lockdown

2) Firefox without DRM, with lockdown

3) Firefox with DRM, without lockdown

4) Firefox with DRM, with lockdown

...for every language?

I don't know if they'll offer each permutation of all those possibilities. I don't see why not though, it's just a little more build time.

In any case, if the specific combination of features you want is missing, the option to build from source is always there. (At least on Linux, building Firefox is also pretty easy.)

AFAIK, yes, that is the plan.

However, "without lockdown" is going to be an "unbranded browser."

So likely you will see two folders, something like this:

/browser/release/

1) Browser with DRM (no lockdown)

2) Browser without DRM (no lockdown)

/firefox/release/

1) Firefox without DRM

2) Firefox with DRM

That doesn't sound like an option that will fork for my use-case - I manage a bunch of Windows machines; if we upgrade Firefox to "Noname Browser" with a different icon, the users will be confused and unable to find it.

They said previously the unbranded non-lockdown beta/stable releases would be enUS only.

you don't need the developer edition, you can use the unbranded version which is the same as the regular version except without the branding.

Agree. And as someone who's been running the Developer Edition as his primary browser for some time, I'm happy to report that it has been by enlarge reasonably stable--even though I've had e10s enabled.

s/by enlarge/by and large/

This was true for me until the most recent major version (42.x) that broke the Tree Style Tabs extension. My whole browsing workflow depends heavily on that extension, so I had to revert to using the stable version for now.

I also used to rely pretty heavily on Tree Style Tabs. With the release of 42 I've been using tab groups (cmd+shift+e) with pretty satisfactory results.

e: cmd+shift+e assumes a Mac. Not sure what other systems use.

Hmm, i'll have to try that thanks for the heads up.

Losing tree style tabs in 42 has made me nervous, it was the primary reason I love firefox. Without that most of the why in using firefox goes away for me.

Tried Pale Moon?[0] And no, I am not affiliated in any way just a happy user that assumes more users are better then fewer users.

[0]:https://www.palemoon.org

Never heard of it, quick scan of the page seems to indicate that it is windows/linux only though? I did a quick look at the download page and didn't see an osx build.

That is overall fine but I like to keep my browsers portable across all of my primary operating systems.

Yeah, that's kind of my only advantage for not liking Mac (wish I did:).

Still, it is just a forked Firefox so it uses the same extensions etc for now, maybe using FF on Mac and PM on the other platforms would be possible?

Pale Moon for Mac OSX 24.7.1

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=41

Pale Moon's stance on pdf.js makes me very nervous:

https://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml#features

As I understand, the author's opinion is that Adobe Reader is more secure than pdf.js. I'm not sure I would trust them with maintaining a secure browser in light of that.

Their monetization model is also questionable (I understand it injects ads / referral links).

> Their monetization model is also questionable (I understand it injects ads / referral links).

Any source for that? A quick search didn't turn up anything and seeing as Pale Moon is now on my shortlist of Firefox alternatives I'd be interested.

Sorry, I might have been confused there, looking at where I thought I read that I see it's just the default search engine:

http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7818

For my own reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10100294

Extensions breakage is not the same as low browser stability though.

Keeping things working is not solely the task of mozilla devs, extension developers have to do their part too.

Sometimes it's easy easy as toggling off some experimental feature or installing a beta build of that extension.

At other times you'll have to report a bug yourself.

And sometimes extensions just die because they're unmaintained. It happens eventually.

That's nothing unique to developer edition. You're just more likely to see something that'll trickle down to release builds soon anyway.

Personally I've managed to live with some annoyances on nightly for a few weeks until they got fixed.

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab master works fine; you just have to clone it and replace extensions/treestyletab@piro.sakura.ne.jp in your profile.

The Developer Edition won't help much if plugins that don't fit the new API are abandoned, which strikes me as a likely occurrence. I don't think many will bother to maintain non-developer-oriented plugins just for those using the Developer Edition.

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