I'm so hyped by Firefox 57, haven't felt like that about a webbrowser since Firefox 1.5
I don't doubt that such a sea change in public consensus is possible - it happened several years ago with the surge of Chrome in about 2010 [1]. Chrome was markedly quicker than the competition in its day, but I believe that Firefox 57 makes at least as big a performance leap in day-to-day usage over its rivals as Chrome did when it came to prominence. For much of the last ten years, Chrome has been the go-to browser for the tech-saavy user - Firefox is now as well placed as it could ever be to reclaim that crown.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Browser_usage_share,...
You can see some mockups on Victoria Wang's Twitter: https://twitter.com/violasong/status/926189788486557697
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/08/firefox-client-side-decor...
The icon indicators also are really nice. At this point the only reason I use Chrome is b/c of Google Meet (which doesn’t support Firefox).
The only thing I wish was better in the beta is battery life/usage. Safari is still king in terms of its effect on you battery.
Edit: to be clear I use Firefox beta on Linux and macOS regularly.
I think WebExtensions were a good idea, but removing the raw access is removing what made Firefox great in the first place. Hopefully they will add an escape hatch in a future release but I'm not holding my breath. I wonder how long staying on nightly will allow "legacy" extensions.
But sure, a bit of performance is nice I guess.
I still wish they hadn't crammed it down our throats before it was ready, though. Jetpack extensions worked fine.
It's really quite visible, multiprocess was rolled out in Firefox 48 on the 2nd August 2016: https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpc...
The raw access is also what made Firefox slow and cumbersome compared to Chrome. The recent performance improvements would have been impossible with the legacy extension apis.
Honesty I think this is a good move.
This is simply not true as evidenced by the fact that Nightly still has the legacy extension API and the improved performance.
That being said FF was slowing down to keep extensions compatible. This is why I think WebExtensions are a good idea. They should be the recomended path with promised future compatibility. Then FF can not worry as much about refactoring the internals as there are fewer extensions that would be broken and they "signed up" for it.
I would rather have a faster FF and have to patch VimFX every couple of releases then have FF show down development for fear of breaking things. That being said loosing the extensions that gave FF it's magic is not a good tradeoff in my opinion.
On nightly the extensions.legacy.enabled can be set to allow instalation of legacy extensions.
This was for pre-57 and doesn't apply to 57+.
The intent is to have a way to prototype new WebExtension APIs (like hiding individual tabs, or the entire tab bar, or new theme APIs), but there's no requirement that they ever get merged upstream. You're welcome to build and distribute your own for whatever purpose you might want.
https://palant.de/2017/11/11/on-web-extensions-shortcomings-...
Also it seems to not have done much as basically every extension just asks for full access to every page, but I guess that some don't is an improvement.
No. Firefox's WebExtensions API already offers more than Chrome's does (see webRequest as an example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...) and more APIs will be added over time to enable more features.
They've refactored tons of code under the hood, basically all the changes that they've wanted to do for years but couldn't do, because it would have broken too many extensions over and over.
We're also talking about all the performance improvements that were made since Firefox 48. The majority of legacy extensions are not multiprocess-compatible and they would not have rolled out multiprocess in 48, if they wouldn't have known those multiprocess-incompatible extensions to be deprecated now with 57. Otherwise AMO would have basically been reverse Russian Roulette, where only roughly 1 out of 6 extensions will not kill your performance.
Yes, a lot would be. However if they could still be used many of them would have been fixed by now.
> The majority of legacy extensions are not multiprocess-compatible
Yet many are.
My point is basically that I would like if FF supported the legacy "API" and left the community to manage fixing things that were broken. I would take this work over not being able to have some extensions any day.
Otherwise you'd have tons of extensions that could be rewritten as WebExtensions but aren't, because it's less work in the short-term to just fix them for the XUL changes. In the long-term, however, it would be a lot more work, especially if Mozilla starts recklessly breaking things.
Similarly, many unmaintained extensions will disappear and WebExtensions will be written to replace them. Those will almost certainly have better quality and performance. Shouldn't be all too hard to pull off for an unmaintained extension.
And then there's also stories like with NoScript's transition, which very much is a lot of work, but it will leave the NoScript maintainer with a much cleaner code base, not just from the WebExtension API being cleaner, but also simply because he rearchitectured the whole thing, as he was forced to rewrite anyways. And he'll get significantly better performance out of this, too.
He would not have done a rewrite without this, but he's glad that he did it.
However even if the WebExtensions had an "escape hatch" to browser internals it would still require significant porting effort and the promise of being marked as "Full Browser Access" and "Likely to Break" would probably convince everyone who can to port anyways.
[0] Step-0 of https://iotdarwinaward.com/post/improve-your-privacy-in-age-...
I'm not convinced they're going in the right direction. Annoying dicking around adding new stuff as default that should be extensions (ones you can remove, and that you choose to add). Then in FF56 on Kubuntu I've noticed a slow down, a lot of lagging for me; but much worse most of [18/20] the add-ons I use are now "legacy" which gives a sense of foreboding that I'll be left choosing long established add-ons _xor_ bugfix/security updates.
We'll see of course, perhaps I'm just getting a little too cynical having been browsing since the days Lynx, Mosaic and Netscape were new tech.
I understand that a lot of devs and power users are annoyed but hopefully we're not the only target audience, we just happen to be a quite vocal in places like HN.