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> I want the addons to have full control over my browser

I can assure you that you only want this if you can guarantee that your add-ons only do what they claim, don't have security vulnerabilities, and are never acquired and maliciously updated. Otherwise, a permissionless add-on model means a bug in TreeStyleTabs could potentially be used to exfiltrate your entire password database, plant malicious binaries on your system, and destroy local data. If TST had limited permissions along the lines of only being able to manipulate tabs and their UI, that wouldn't be a problem.

> Have you seen "treestyletabs" implementation on chrome? It's a whole other window that has to be started an placed on the left of the screen by user because of the addon limitations.

Firefox will not have this limitation.

> Firefox will not have this limitation

Is that a statement about future Firefox visions or Firefox 57? I assume you know the gritty details while I'm a rather confused Firefox power user / fan / advocate (using .. addons that are affected, vertical tabs/tree style tabs plus vimperator/pentadactyl mostly).

The outrage The Internet™ seems to feel is probably not about XUL being deprecated/killed. I'd say no user cares about the technology, the only people even caring are probably the addon developers.

From what I can tell, the outrage is mostly due to the impression (and I dearly hope that you will dismiss this as wrong, just like the 'addon limitation' reference above) that the web extension switch happens before popular, polarizing addons are even remotely possible given the new API.

"Will not have this limitation", as in "it won't support that use case in 57 at all" or as in "you can do better than this Chrome extension you describe"?

Firefox 54 will support WebExtension sidebars.[1]

You're basically correct about the APIs, though. Developers of some popular add-ons don't know when or if the APIs they need will be implemented. Support for migrating gradually (embedded WebExtensions) was just released in 51 and will be gone in 57 -- not even a full ESR cycle.

Developer burnout is a problem, too. This comes right after many of them put in significant work making their now-deprecated code multiprocess-compatible, which came after mandatory extension signing, which came after a bunch of UI changes. It's not surprising some of them have quit.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208596

Pseudalopex pretty much nailed it; Google has strongly resisted adding sidebar APIs to Chrome, or allowing add-ons to hide / relocate the tab bar. Those are two of the major reasons why it's difficult to build a quality Tree Style Tabs add-on for Chrome. Firefox will explicitly include APIs that allow that, which should be landing soon.

Most of these changes and their timelines are motivated by fundamental architectural work happening deep down in Firefox. We're doing the best we can to get as many add-on APIs in place before 57, but for heavy add-on users, it has the potential to be a rough transition.

For deeper meddling in the browser, and for APIs that don't yet exist, WebExtension Experiments (https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/i...) should provide a reasonable option. Basically, you can keep using old-style "bootstrapped" add-ons in DevEdition and Nightly. Kind of an explicit way to opt-out of API stability guarantess so we can continue refactoring the browser core. Experiments are intended for prototyping new WebExtension APIs for eventual inclusion into mainline Firefox, but you could also use them for power-user APIs, so long as you don't mind the maintenance burden.

"Firefox will not have this limitation."

Can you clarify/elaborate? Last I heard, UI modification by web extensions was still unconfirmed at best.

A sidebar API and tab modification API will be implemented specifically to allow TST to work. The addon will have to be rewritten completely on a very short timescale, though.

So, can I use that to add Tab Thumbnails to Firefox? Can I use it to port AutoHiDPI, which changes the scale of the UI depending on which screen the window is on?

Can I use this to replace the entire browser history system and omnibar autocomplete with a custom one?

Can I use this to replace the entire browser chrome?

Some of these changes I need (AutoHiDPI) to use a browser at all. Others I wish for. All of them I currently am using.

The alternative is me staying on an ancient browser, or forking Firefox and browsing with a horribly outdated and barely patched version. Or reading HN with a magnifying glass.

You could continue to use Firefox LTS until somewhere in 2018.

Replacing the entire browser chrome is unlikely to happen on the release channel of Firefox, but everything else has potential.

Generally, the way forward will be to use WebExtension Experiments (https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/i...), which let you run classic-style "bootstrapped" add-ons in Firefox Developer Edition or Nightly. The intended use is for prototyping new WebExtension APIs for eventual inclusion into mainline Firefox, but nothing limits you to that usage.

That’d require a lot of work from me – at this point it would be easier for me just to switch to Vivaldi, or hardcode my fixes as patches into Firefox itself.

In fact, the per-screen HiDPI setting even has an environment variable on most Linux systems (Qt’s QT_SCALE_FACTORS), but Firefox completely ignores that.

I don’t have the time anymore to rewrite half the UI stack of every single application I use, and then take over maintenance of that. I’ve done that with a few open source projects, but my time is limited. And if I wanted to implement extending the UI properly, I’d definitely have to rewrite the entire stack, similar to what Browser.html does.

Dunno if you have taken a look at Palemoon.

https://www.palemoon.org/

If I already have to switch the browser, I might as well switch to Vivaldi.

But neither of them is good enough. (Especially Palemoon’s UI is painful to look at, and hard to fix).

Well Palemoon is a fork of pre-Australis Firefox that is trying to maintain compatibility with the existing XUL extensions as best i can tell, so i figured the transition would be smaller than going to a webkit/chrome based browser.

> But I want the addons to have full control over my browser, that's the whole point! It's my browser and I've tailored it to myself and my requirements.

Owning the code that runs on your machine is your right as a user of open-source software, but there's no right that says that Mozilla must be the one to maintain that code. And nobody's asking you to maintain your own personal fork either: find all the other people who care about unlimited (if fragile) browser extensibility via unrestricted addons and form a community (or hell, a corporation) to collectively make the browser you want, starting from a fork of Firefox (or Chromium, or Midori).

If you believe that there are enough people in your position to make such a collaboration successful, then you're all set. And if you don't believe that there are enough people out there who care about unrestricted addons to make such a project viable, then--while I sympathize with your plight--maybe it makes business sense for Mozilla to drop support for unrestricted addons, especially due to the ways that this feature hinders all the other features that Firefox users are clamoring for: speed, reduced memory usage, speed, HTML5 adoption, speed, ES6+ adoption, speed, speed, security, and speed.

> but there's no right that says that Mozilla must be the one to maintain that code.

And there's no right that says I have to use FF. They are giving up one of their big advantages.

From where I stand, it looks like they're trading one of their big advantages for a massively reduced maintenance burden which will unquestionably allow them to compete better on every other front. It may or may not pan out, but I think we can all agree that some change of trajectory from the past few years is needed if Firefox hopes to stay relevant. You're free to think that Mozilla leadership is incompetent, but in this particular instance I think their stance is grounded in sound reasoning, as inconvenient as it is undoubtedly is for some power users.

> You're free to think that Mozilla leadership is incompetent

Source on me saying that? I think they are making a few dumb decisions, but that's putting a lot of words in my mouth.

FF has very few advantages. They aren't competing on speed, mind-share, ease-of-use and now they aren't competing on reliability of add-ons. I get that this can help them focus, but pushing away their limited user-base is like using an axe to help a sinking ship.

But Mozilla cares about average users, not about making something for power-users only. That seems to be the big conflict here: power users saying "you've lost the masses, so make something for us" while Mozilla's mission is making something that would be good for the masses, and they'd rather fail trying than failing that mission by abandoning it.

Except this doesn't make sense.

The set of clueless users who would install arbitrary malicious extensions and the set of clueless users who would download and run arbitrary executables is basically the same. Yet if they do the latter, any extention sandboxing is completely and utterly moot. It's the same issue as with mandatory extension signing; requiring signing for extensions while nothing stops someone from downloading an unsigned .exe (which could memory-patch Firefox if it so wished) is absurd.

I think the difference is that they want to try to prevent installers from installing unapproved extensions, which even many of the software that looks more legitimate often does. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/AMO/Policy/Revie...

Yes, and the point of this is what, exactly?

In particular, all the checked by default boxes to install things like the Ask Toolbar.

The power users are saying, Firefox became successful by being powerful. When it ceases to be powerful, it will cease to be successful. People will just use Chrome.

Most average users have already switched to Chrome. Even slightly above average users are going to lose from the switch to WebExtensions.

I do not consider myself a power user of Firefox, but the two extensions I use (DownThemAll and tab groups) are not going to be ported.

But when they roll out their Servo Renderer late this year everyone will be singing a different tune. Firefox is already faster then Chrome with the Electrolysis update, but Servo is rendering completely on the GPU. I just tested the the dev build of Servo and it's so fast it almost kicked my dick off!

Servo has been in Dev for 5 years, so if google isn't working on something to compete with that, Firefox is going to completely dominate the web for years.

The only reason Firefox became popular in the first place is because it was adopted by power users, who then evangelized it to their less technical friends and family.

When Firefox is no longer an attractive option for power users, the only thing it will have going for it is ideology. And that will not be enough to compete.

While i agree with the idea of being able to install whatever you want. What's wrong with it being behind a developer mode?

I would bet that 99%~ people don't need or even want that kind of absolute freedom. As a chrome user, the only plugin I have that I can't get on the play store is one for downloading youtube videos but I can still install it from the author website, just takes a few extra clicks.

> What's wrong with it being behind a developer mode?

The fact that one doesn't exist. "Developer edition" is really just their alpha build, they don't have release builds that allow unsigned extension installs.

There are some release builds that do.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...

Ah! Thank you, I stand corrected. I didn't realize they actually have those now. Still hard to find, but at least they exist.

You mean like the Unbranded builds of Release (and Beta) that allow unsigned extension installs?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...

It seems that those very much exist.

How easy is it to switch to Developer mode? Genuinely asking