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Comment by callahad | Hacker News Reader

Welcome back! Fair warning, legacy add-ons can perform worse under multi-process Firefox, since any synchronous APIs now require cross-process locking. To the greatest extent possible, try to limit yourself to add-ons badged with "Compatible with Firefox 57+" on addons.mozilla.org, which are guaranteed work well under Electrolysis.

Also, get ready for Firefox 57. Just one example, in one benchmark, but the last data point on the right is accurate: https://screenshots.firefox.com/1DYGktRBpiIJBc7T/arewefastye...

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I looked for an ad-blocker badged "Compatible with Firefox 57+" and noticed ABP and uBlock Origin didn't have this badge.

I was hoping FF would get something like Safari's Content-Blocking Rules. For such a common use case its an area ripe for optimization.

There is a webextension version of ublock origin. I'm not entirely sure ff 54 supports all the needed APIs.

uBlock0.webext.xpi @ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.12.4

Edit: I've disabled the addon signing requirement and all seems to be working. Hopefully it gets on the AMO soon.

ublock will work fine with e10s. It's not a webextension yet, but it is e10s compatible already

Firefox 57 will no longer support XUL extensions at all. It's due to be released in November 2017.

ublock is actively maintained, and afaik they have been working on a webextensions version, so I assume they'll be ready by then if not soon after.

In the meantime ublock works fine and is e10s compatible.

I wish there was an easy way to see which of my currently-installed addons are not compatible with Firefox 57+, instead of having to look at which I have installed and searching for each of them individually on addons.mozilla.org.

I did search and it looks like HTTPS Everywhere, LastPass, and RescueTime aren't compatible. Privacy Badger is compatible, which may satisfy people looking for an ad blocker.

Try out Firefox 55 (Beta or Developer Edition). It puts a big "Legacy" badge next to each add-on that is not a WebExtension in about:addons.

Hah, every one of my addons is legacy. FireGestures, LastPass, Session Manager, Tab Mix Plus, and uBlock Origin.

LastPass and uBlock Origin have Chrome versions so I have some degree of confidence they will be ported over.

FireGestures is absolutely essential to me, and no confidence there. Once Mozilla stops supporting XUL extensions I guess I'll use a Firefox fork or switch to Vivaldi. After... geez... 13 years of using Firefox. They finally forced me away.

Hopefully Vivaldi supports customizable mouse chord gestures by then.

There are already several gesture add-ons that are compatible with Firefox 57 and beyond: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/search/?q=mouse+gestures&...

Foxy Gestures in particular claims to be deeply inspired by FireGestures: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures/

I'm dubious, because after nearly a decade, Chrome has exactly zero mouse gesture addons that I consider remotely usable. None of them work consistently. Not a single one is comparable to FireGestures.

But thanks for the link to Foxy Gestures-- I'll give it a shot!

Edit: Tried out Foxy Gestures. Not usable. First, no support for mouse button chording. Second, every single gesture pops up the right-click menu. Third, gestures don't work maybe 75% of the time-- difficult to tell if that's due to the right click menu popping up or if it's just plain broken.

Seems like it's this bug at fault. Mouse gesture Webextensions are broken on MacOS and Linux.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278

We're still nearly half a year away from Firefox 57's release, so many add-ons, like Foxy Gestures, are still going to be a bit rough. There's no harm in sticking with FireGestures for now, knowing that replacements are in the works.

(Though it's probably worth letting the Foxy Gestures author know what bits seem to be missing as a FireGestures user.)

Use Firefox ESRv52 with XUL support until June 2018 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ Pale Moon started a fork of the current XUL-based Firefox. Hope it will be popular. I hate XUL but a lot of people love it. I hope it will live with Pale Moon. Why would you use Vivaldi? A browser is a very personal tool, why use proprietary software for it?

What particular change is responsible for the performance improvement seen in that benchmark? Not anything related to Quantum/Servo surely; I expect those benchmarks to reflect Javascript performance exclusively, and I haven't heard anything in a long time from Mozilla regarding Spidermonkey improvements.

The change in that benchmark was from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1369140, as part of the Quantum Flow (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow) effort.

That particular benchmark stresses DOM and layout performance, that test just programatically clicks all the delete buttons in the page under test.

There's been a steady march of performance improvements in Spidermonkey, though they haven't gotten very much press. They've been rearchitecting most of the inline caches so there's more sharing between the baseline and optimizing compiler and less in the way of performance cliffs. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259927 and its dependencies (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=12599... for the dependency view). Things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140 led to significant improvements to the sort of megamorphic code you commonly see in frameworks (e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140#c14 shows 25% improvements on Ember benchmarks).

This work has been ongoing; a bunch of it landed in 53, more in 54, and more has been landing since. What makes it a bit harder to advertise is that it's aiming at reducing performance cliffs and improving the chance that real-life code lands on fast paths, not on improving the performance of those already-fast paths. WebAssembly is where the "make the fast bits faster" action is, mostly.

Is there a way to search for only 57+ addons? I took a quick gander and didn't see anything.

Yep: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/firefox57

With 30+ extensions installed, It would be nice to list incompatible extensions in the about:addons page. From about:support page, I see Multiprocess Windows 0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)

You might want to install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter available from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

thanks for recommending this.

It lists dozens of incompatible installed add-ons such as cookie monster, Live Http Header, UserAgent Switcher, Vimporator etc.

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