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!
And yes, it is to some degree subjective whether this is worth it, but at the end of the day, you, as someone who uses lots of extensions and complex extensions, are only a very small fraction of the Firefox user base. Most users have no extensions or just the obligatory ad blocker. They don't benefit at all from keeping onto the old architecture with all of its problems, which they are suffering under.
And then, yeah, Mozilla has to at some point piss you off in order to help the majority of their user base. It's not like all other browsers had such a complex extension API and Mozilla is just being lazy by dropping it.
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.
doesn't sound like an "only" to me.
Plenty of those long-time users giving advice to the young-uns are more than happy yo sacrifice a small part of firefox for big improvements elsewhere.
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.
I'd argue that many of the users that choose Firefox over Chrome do so for the fact that Firefox is 100% open source and isn't tied to an advertising giant trying to capture tons of extra private data from you. This won't change that. It will mean you can't change the layout of the entire Firefox window and add tons of new custom buttons and things like that. But most users don't care about that.
For the niche that can't stand using a UI they can't fully customize, they're free to use a slower and less secure browser that continues to support XUL and the associated extensions while still keeping up to date with at least the slower Firefox ESR branch of renderer underneath. Pale Moon, for example.
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.
Per Mozilla, aside from security problems and other nightmares, these deep hooks allowed developers to write plugins that were incompatible with a multiprocess browser architecture where each tab/window can have its own sandbox and remain responsive even if other tabs go down.
And that is one of the killer features that has caused FF to bleed massive amounts of user share to Chrome in the last decade: Chrome almost always "felt fast" in situations where FF ground to an embarassing halt because something was happening in another tab/window that was causing the entire browser to become unresponsive.
I don't know what precisely is missing from the new WebExtensions API but I have to imagine that Mozilla will work to expand its capabilities as much as possible over time...
The Add-on SDK was supposed to fix the "deep hooks" problem and is mostly multiprocess-compatible. As far as I know, most currently maintained XUL extensions are multiprocess-compatible, too.
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).
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?
P.S FF is now not a crappier version of Chrome but Chrome is crappier if you don't have powerful hardware or RAM (mine's hardly 2 GB and everything sucks a lot though its only 4 years old)
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'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.
Vendors have learned that if they fail to provide this protection, the average user will blame them directly, not the extension that makes memory usage bloat 6x. The solution is to enforce stringent controls, including limiting modifiable parts of the experience to some well-defined areas.
Nah, it's the other way(s) around - it's for [longterm] developer convenience; so users don't have to switch to another browser because an add-on they need isn't available in FF.
In a few more releases I really won't have any concrete reason to recommend FF over Chrome anymore (and no, 99% of users outside of this forum don't care about memory usage and keeping 100 tabs open at the same time)
So like this [0]? The title bar isn't blue, but neither is any other title bar on Windows 10.
To achieve this on Nightly I opened the Customize view, switched the theme to "Light", checked the "Title bar" checkbox, and enabled "Menu bar" under the "Toolbars" dropdown. Tabs have squared edges by default.
It's not part of a plugin, though, I had to patch something manually (I never remember what and have to re-google it every time).
Square tabs have been back for a while now. The Compact Light and Compact Dark themes are included in Firefox by default. Set the theme in Add-ons Manager -> Appearance.
I use Compact Light.
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.
Now there is no requirement to keep them stable even across the patch-level releases. Whenever things would break faster or at the same pace is unknown.
The important part is ability to replace (overlay) chrome resources, patching/extending the browser code. I hope that's going to stay for a while.
The Mozilla-supplied legacy extensions continue to function, because Mozilla is updating them as they make changes to the internals of Firefox. So, I imagine maintaining such a legacy extension is now as much work as it is to just directly contribute and maintain the feature in Firefox's codebase.
[0]: "extensions.legacy.enabled" in about:config. This won't be shipped in Stable, though, and will likely be taken out from Firefox Nightly soon or with the release of Firefox 57.
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.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Guides/Multi...
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.