While we're throwing anecdotal statements around...
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.
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!
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.