Firefox 57.0 Released
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
Chrome is not open-source. Chromium is, but Chrome is not.
Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the non-profit.
> both are open source
Not to the same degree, as Chrome != Chromium
In contrast, when you sign into Chrome, "Your experience in other Google products is personalized by including your Chrome history with your Web & App Activity."(https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277)
But if a substantial portion of Mozilla's funding comes from an organisation that does have a profit motive to monitor and monetise my activity on the web, then surely that's almost as bad (for me as the end user)?
- If you do frontend work, our CSS grid inspector is unparalleled https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...
- Firefox has built-in tracking protection (https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/11/12/firefox-to-offer...)
- Powerful add-ons like Tree Style Tab make managing large numbers of tabs much easier (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)
- Our WebAssembly performance tends to be better
- We should have better resource utilization when you have many tabs open
- You can mute audio on a page clicking the little speaker icon in the tab
If you want to contribute to the DevTools themselves, they're built using standard web technologies: HTML/JS, React/Redux, etc. https://github.com/devtools-html/
Although I don't know if chrome has this on by default nowadays as I turned it on so long ago.
But mute audio on per tab via speaker icon is available in chrome as well.
in chrome://flags/
* Tab audio muting UI control
If enabled, you can mute/unmute per tab via doing same thing.
(And I will have to find appropiate replacements for Leechblock and FireGesture)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...
Short of being able to optimize it soon, perhaps you could try buffering and displaying it at once. It would look less clunky and flimsy.
That said I'm giving FF57 a run as my main browser, will keep using Chrome Dev Tools for now.
https://superuser.com/questions/1261660/firefox-quantum-ver-...
(basically, hacking some CSS rules by creating a file in your AppData directory, so that the top bar is hidden)
Incidentally, I also discovered that Tree Style Tab's settings page under Firefox has a nice little box where you can configure the CSS it uses, which was nice because I prefer it with a smaller font and less padding.
Is there a way to selectively unblock certain trackers on a specific page?
I currently have the Tracking Protection set to Always and the block list on Strict. No problems yet, but I know there will be a few sites which won't correctly. Previously I always used Ghostery and there was a nice option to view exactly how many and which trackers were being blocked on each page. When viewing the blocked trackers, they could be selectively unblocked one at a time if required. This was handy to make some embedded video work, without necessary enabling Facebook tracking, which would occur if the whole page was unblocked.
I wish I had the time. So I'll have to wait for someone else to add the element DOM properties tab in thr panel that has the style rules and layout. Firebug had it, Chrome has it.
The right click and then Show DOM Properties with the results in the console pane is just painful to use.
Always watch where the incentives run, Chrome is for Google's best interests, not the web's and not the user's. Always has been and always will be because it's a for-profit organization.
Tab containers are useful for having multiple accounts on the same site (Gmail/Github), or isolating work or most secure sites from regular browsing. The containers are more light-weight and more general than Chrome profiles (and they don't depend on having external accounts).
Pinned tabs don't close on Command+W. It's a small thing, but I kept accidentally closing my pinned tabs in Chrome.
Chrome Dev Tools are hard to beat, although Fx is slowly catching up there, too. I don't mind launching Chrome just for web dev.
They were! I think they've shrunk, though that might be an optical illusion... And I can't see a simple way to make them bigger (simple as in: not editing the css file).
Or the Sco Linux lawsuits.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-go...
The real world is not Star Wars. For all the privacy considerations etc., this comment above reads extremely naive.
https://winaero.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/firefox-...
I'll give it another chance in a couple of weeks, and hope that there will be a bypass that will force my outdated addons to work.
This is a good thing, and it's just a shame that so many addons haven't been updated yet.
however I've just ran nightly and although it says vimfx will work as a legacy plugin it's not working, so the deal's off. I shall not use my mouse!
Though losing Electrolysis will defeat one of the main benefits of running Firefox 57...
Other than a couple that were useful but ultimately not that important, and a couple I can do without until they get updated eventually, I managed to find that most of my Legacy extensions do have updated versions out. Namely, Video DownloadHelper and Greasemonkey, both extensions I thought would die with Firefox 57 out. That said, I wouldn't have known if I hadn't looked at the add-ons site as near as I can tell, while they still say "Legacy" in my Add-ons tab, they do have separate releases on the add-ons site specifically for Firefox 57 which are incompatible with my current browser and I'll probably have to install them again when I do update.* Assuming that is the case, you might find a decent chunk of that 70% already ready and you just have to take some extra steps to get them working again.
Overall, I am optimistic, lots of people have lots of nice things to say about 57 and the extensions situation is not looking nearly the sort of bad I was first expecting. I'm sure I've had more painful wait periods for my extensions going back almost a decade ago as it seems I really am waiting on just one and that one is coming shortly. Even those extensions which are now unsupported actually seem to have decent replacements and I've switched them over already.
* Note, this portion is entirely speculative, refer back to my commentary on waiting till an updated NoScript comes out before I actually install Firefox 57. It's possible they would just update once I do upgrade to 57 rendering my subsequent speculation entirely wrong.
I wish FF performance was as good as it is on Windows.
As much as I want to like Mozilla, even with Quantum, there's pretty much no hardware acceleration at all, missing out on potentially big performance benefits.
As others mentioned, e.g. VDPAU has been available for a long time now and there's no excuse for not taking advantage of GPU acceleration.
Now contrast this to evil Google and Chrome.
Firefox: https://imgur.com/mvtDenC Chrome: https://imgur.com/HBOpucc
Implying that it wasn't deliberately disabled. HW acceleration on Linux isn't enabled by default, and for good reason. Until those underlying reasons are changed, Linux does have a hardware-acceleration-on-Firefox problem.
The most critical one, Tree Style Tabs, has been converted. That was the key blocker that prevented me from seriously using Chrome. But many more remain; Cookie Controller, RefControl, some kind of Classic Theme Restorer equivalent (to get a menu bar back for Bookmarks, at a minimum), etc.
Is that something other than the "Bookmarks Toolbar" or the "Menu Bar" (which includes a bookmarks drop-down) that I can enable by right-clicking on the empty space in the toolbar?
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU...
In the dev tools, you can right-click on a request in the "network" tab and click Copy > Copy as cURL.
Sadly, this only works for requests you haven't already done with the dev tools open and it doesn't generate wget commands, but you might get some use out of this while the add-on is being updated.
Are you missing having it in the context menu?
All that matters is the "shiny" (often wrapped in some kind of "social consciousness" claptrap), and those of us that has come to rely on existing behavior has to either suck it up, move on, or fork (And even forks struggle)...
I'm not happy about the situation as it stands, and I don't expect anyone else to be. I would be a lot more not happy about having to switch to Chrome because Firefox had become unusably slow - which it had already more or less done, before e10s started to land this year. Absent that I'd probably have had to switch already, just to be reliably able to get work done. And then there would be no one on the teams I've worked on who cared at all about maintaining Firefox compatibility, because everyone else already switched years ago. Less than ideal though the status quo be, I have a hard time seeing how any of that would be preferable.
Not to you. But not everyone cares about the same things. I have used Firefox as my main browser ever since it split off from Mozilla Suite. Personally, I have never, in the whole history of Firefox had a problem with its speed. At various points I might have had some problems with stability, some problems with compatibility and some problems with memory usage. But speed is just not an issue for me. Even in the "slowest" browsers most of the time is spent on network latency anyway. But I have, over the years, customized my Firefox experience to some degree. I do not do anything crazy, I don't have a zillion of extensions, but I am really used to the few I do have. And this release broke those with no sufficient replacement. And the release was distributed as automatic upgrade, so I was not even asked if I want to upgrade. A warning of some sort would be nice before breaking so much functionality. And now that the upgrade happened, there is no clear way on how to revert it. A quick google search tells me that downgrading runs a chance of corrupting my profile. I might have to risk it anyway, since after using FF57 for a day at work, I feel that my productivity and workflow are seriously impaired. At this point I am not sure whether I should stay with the LTR version of FF, switch to an FF derivative like Waterfox or change browsers altogether. The FF57 experience is so vastly different from my pre-57 workflow that I might as well be using a different browser already. There were important features to FF that kept me a loyal user through many years. Those features are gone now.
Don't get me wrong! I'd love to have both. But if we can't - and it seems right now that indeed we cannot - then I think perf has to be the one to pick. Otherwise the browser dies and we're all SOL.
Try backing up your profile and downgrading. I'd be surprised if anything breaks. Although I had also assumed anyone bringing legacy addons into 56 would be warned before the 57 update, so maybe I'm overly optimistic here.
That's... weird. To put it nicely.
I've been using Mozilla since early in its milestone phases, and Firefox since it came out. Firefox was originally a pretty nimble browser, but fairly quickly became super slow. When Chrome came out I couldn't believe the difference in speed. Everything from UI responsiveness to rendering speed to reliability was better.
At some point I moved back to Firefox for a single reason: I had an 8GB laptop and Chrome's memory usage would balloon with the number of tabs I usually keep around, to the point that it made my laptop unusable. I lived with Firefox being much slower in general because its worst-case performance was much better than Chrome's on a memory-constrained laptop.
Since I force-enabled e10s a year or so ago things have gotten much better (despite the bugs). I still use Chrome every now and then for the odd website that chokes on some combination of Firefox plus the extensions I have installed, not to mention Chromecast support. But Firefox 57 is finally now faster than Chrome by default, and the difference is night and day. It's completely inconceivable to me that you suggest that Firefox hasn't had severe performance problems. The fact that Mozilla has been focusing so hard on perf for nearly a decade now is more than enough evidence to me that it's been a huge problem.
I tried to explain it and I am not sure whether I am doing a bad job at it or people just don't believe me. I don't think browser speed matters. Even in the slowest days of Firefox, the time it took for content to download was longer or at least comparable to rendering time. Even now, with broadband access everywhere, if I look at dev tools, network access takes much longer than page rendering for most pages I access. So why should I care if rendering takes an extra second or two if it already takes just as long to actually get the content across the net. I do not expect web pages to be instantaneous, simply because they never are and so I do not get annoyed at render speed.
I do get annoyed when a forced upgrade removes features I relied on in my workflow.
There have been periodic warnings on HN's front page for two years.
Every popular extension will be ported within a matter of weeks, worst case scenario 2-3 months for those that are unabanonded, but less popular. If you are missing a deal-breaker extension, then don't upgrade yet... how is that a bad thing? "But I want the latest and greatest, super fast Firefox now - with all my extensions!". Talk about wanting to have one's cake and eat it too. The new Firefox wouldn't be new and improved if it was backwards-compatible with the stone age.
The transition could have been managed gradually, by piece by piece replacement of the old extension API with the new web extension API (made available to old style extensions). Extension developers would have made the small changes needed to port from a deprecated old API to a new API that does the same thing, up to the final step of reorganizing without significant code changes the old extension, now relying exclusively on web extension APIs, into a web extension. Abandoned extensions would have fallen by the wayside very fast, deficient APIs would have been fixed before actual usage, and Firefox would have moved forward without betraying users.
At some point, however, the rest of the world keeps moving and, no matter how painful for everyone involved, it becomes unfeasible to wait for all add-ons to be ported (or even portable).
In 4-5 months, ESR will be replaced by Firefox 59, and support for 52 will end shortly after.
Sure, the old version isn't "going anywhere", but running an unsupported browser these days is pretty foolish security-wise.
Some very important extensions have fortunately been able to pressure Firefox into supporting them, but the typical Firefox user who depends on some niche extensions has no clout.
If Mozilla could have done both, Mozilla would have done both. They could not. I get that that's super frustrating. I'm not happy about it myself, because the change broke my workflow a little as well - until I engineered my way past that, because I'm a grown-ass adult and I solve my problems, or learn to cope, instead of whining about them - and also because I put myself on the hook for a Firemacs reimplementation that can't land for probably another year at best. That's annoying. I get it.
But slinging vitriol on the subject obtains nothing and aids nobody. It makes the people who do it look like jackasses, it makes the people who do the actual work feel like they can't win and may as well not try, and it makes everyone else embarrassed both on the behalf of the whiners and for their own sake in being associated, however loosely, with a community so full of Tumblr-grade drama. It's embarrassing and stupid and pointless and counterproductive and I wish people would stop. There are better ways to spend the same effort - like, for example, contributing patches to the webex implementation. Hard work, I know, and whining is easy. But that doesn't really play in favor of the whining, either.
(Yeah, I get that you're not really a major example of what I'm complaining about. You just happened to be right here when I lost my patience. All the same, though.)
There are a few extensions I use that have stopped working that don't have a replacement (yet?), which sucks, but the tradeoff is well worth it.
And the extensions' authors had, what, two years advance warning or so?
Criticize the real culpits, not Mozilla.
"Complain loudly" was the strategy that got Mozilla to implement Tree Style Tabs as a WebExtension feature so that the addon could be rewritten for FF57, but there are presumably still legacy extension capabilities that haven't gotten that treatment.
And how many of those lamenting the absence of some API have actually told Mozilla what they need?
By all accounts Mozilla has been very responsive and helpful. Not everything was possible, but the problem lies mostly not on their side.
I don't know that that's fair. The discussions I've seen and participated in have revolved around equivalency, not identity.
> how many of those lamenting the absence of some API have actually told Mozilla what they need?
The Vimperator devs and some users have been very clear on that point.
> Mozilla has been very responsive and helpful. Not everything was possible, but the problem lies mostly not on their side.
Mozilla has indeed been responsive and as helpful as they can be given the constraints under which they operate. But extension developers aren't really to blame here either, because if WebEx doesn't include an API you can use to do what you need to do, then what option do you have? There's frustration on all sides - Mozilla devs, extension devs, and users. But we're all pulling together toward the same ultimate goal. I don't know what improvement anyone expects to elicit by trying to assign blame.
I've developed a couple of Firefox extensions. One of those was an e10s-compatible replacement for Vimperator, because Vimperator relied on XUL[0]. (Vimperator broke long before Firefox 57, because e10s broke backwards compatibility with some extensions long before Firefox 57 did).
The old extensions "API" was essentially a way to plug into arbitrary parts of the Firefox codebase. A Firefox developer has previously said that "[previously] the entire codebase was our extensions API".
That's not scalable or maintainable in the long-run, and I would assume that any software developer who's worked on a moderately-large project would appreciate that allowing arbitrary entrypoints and coupling makes it impossible to do literally anything without breaking some part of that extremely ill-defined API.
It's really, really unfortunate that moving towards a modern approach to browser extensions meant breaking work that people had put in over the last fifteen years, but... there's literally no other way to do it. Firefox was the first non-experimental browser to allow browser extensions, and there are both benefits and costs to being first-to-market. In this case, the downside is that they ended up accruing this technical (maintenance) debt.
As someone who's written Firefox extensions that are no longer available due to the switch, I'm disappointed that this had to happen. But as a Firefox user, I'm much happier having Quantum and Electrolysis (e10s), and if the tradeoff is between those two directly, I'd choose Quantum + Electrolysis over those extensions.
Or, to put in XKCD form: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Uh, yes, I'm the author of Electrovim, so I'm quite aware of the functionality that I was literally unable to implement because no equivalent API existed.
> The problem I have isn't that they broke legacy things, it's that they broke legacy things without offering a path to rebuild them.
Did you not read the rest of the comment, where I explain why there is no feasible way that they could have offered any path to rebuild them?
Replacement for Vimperator implies it's, well, a replacement for Vimperator.
> Did you not read the rest of the comment, where I explain why there is no feasible way that they could have offered any path to rebuild them?
I don't see how your addressed that. Yes, existing extensions that used XUL would have to be rewritten using new APIs. My issue is that those APIs don't even exist. That there are good reasons the old APIs aren't available anymore doesn't address the lack of new APIs that offer anything near equivalent functionality.
Yes, because those things are now running in different processes, which means it requires IPC, and allowing extensions to communicate over IPC with the chome throws all the benefits of e10s out the window.
It looks like it's been broken down into a number of separate issues since then, and there's some discovery yet to be done on how exactly the implementation will need to proceed - I feel like Firefox 58 is very optimistic, but I also feel like saying "this is never going to happen" is pretty premature at this point. At the very least, the Firefox devs don't seem to agree.
Well, I'm a Firefox user, not an extension developer, and Pentadactyl happened to be one of the extensions that made using Firefox bearable. Now that it's permanently broken, I'll be moving to another browser which can offer a similar experience: Qutebrowser.[1]
Pentadactyl was all-but-abandoned for years before Vimperator was broken. It's been almost four years since it saw a release - which was for Firefox 24.0-30[0]. Its website still links at least three links to code.google.com on the front page! (I'm actually shocked if Pentadactyl has even been working for you until now, given that it was supposed to break a few release cycles ago - when e10s shipped - but maybe you just haven't updated Firefox in a while, or you manually disabled e10s.)
Vimperator - which is also incompatible with Firefox 55+ for the same reasons Pentadactyl is - at least has been receiving maintenance attention in the meantime[1], and also provides alternatives for use with Firefox 55+ (and 57+).
If you'd rather switch browsers entirely than use something like Vimium[2] on Firefox, go ahead, but it's hard to justify holding an entire browser back just to maintain compatibility with an extension that has been abandoned by its own maintainers. As I mentioned, I can't even reasonably expect them to hold Firefox back to maintain compatibility with the extensions I wrote and actively maintained. As a Firefox developer, I'm disappointed, but as a Firefox user, I'm more than happy enough with the changes to make up for it.
[0] http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/
[1] https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/?sr...
"it's hard to justify holding an entire browser back just to maintain compatibility with an extension that has been abandoned by its own maintainers"
Pentadactyl was far from the only extension that Firefox decided to break. Many other extensions were affected.
As far as Pentadactyl itself went, the reason its maintainers abandoned it was because Firefox kept breaking compatibility with it over, and over, and over, and over. They understandably got frustrated by that and moved on to other things.
Then, when Firefox put their foot down and announced that they'd be changing the browser so that Pentadactyl will never again be able to work on it, no matter what its developers did, a lot of people didn't see the point of putting more effort in to. It survived only because of the dedication and help of the remaining community. Now there's nothing even they can do. Not with Firefox anyway. So we're moving on to something else.
I just worry that people using some of these alternative browsers are opening themselves up to security issues since those code bases are less well-tested for security problems, and often they don't have the developer resources to implement things like process isolation and sandboxing.
Absolutely. The web browser is one of the most notorious attack vectors on computers these days. I find it hilarious that a vocal minority of power users is protesting this _massively impressive_ Firefox release just because they lost Tree Style Tabs or some extensions for downloading videos. Switching to a legacy fork like Waterfox or Firefox 52 ESR is not an enlightened move!
And it sucks that you don't feel that way -- it really does -- but I suspect the vast majority of Firefox users feel as I do, and in the end Mozilla needs to cater to the most users possible.
Maybe it's not possible to support window event listeners without breaking e10s. But I see no a priori reason why it should be.
I haven't seen anyone in a serious discussion demanding 100% XUL API compatibility or feature coverage. (For the purposes of this comment, most discussion of the issue on HN is unserious.)
So yeah, the Firefox devs didn't have much to go on except inactionable "just do whatever Vimperator needs" junk, and no other vested interest seems to have lifted a finger to help the VimFX guy speed up his work on the experiment after he finally got the ball rolling, so blame doesn't really rest on the Firefox devs here.
One of the lead Firefox extension API devs is also the primary Pentadactyl (and former Vimperator) dev. I'm sure they were aware of exactly what was needed for that and similar extensions. They also made it clear from their earliest announcements that they intended supporting these extensions.
It simply isn't a priority which may be fair enough.
Pentadactyl still works well on ESR.
Other addon devs did help push things along, and they got the abilities they needed much sooner. We can only excuse ourselves so far before we share in the responsibility for things not getting done.
I'm in that position myself right now, having volunteered to take over Firemacs development before I found that there is no way to listen for keypress events in browser chrome. You can only do that in injected content scripts, which don't work except in web content and are also affected by CSP. Until that changes, there's nothing that I, or the Vimperator developers for example, can do to provide an acceptable user experience.
It's super frustrating, and I don't blame users of such extensions for being angry about the indefinite lack of a future for them. But I also don't really blame Mozilla for prioritizing the implementation of the necessary APIs below other tasks which are important to a larger fraction of the Firefox user base.
Obviously I paid nothing for Firefox and Mozilla owes me the same nothing in return, but if it wants to keep users and remain significant, breaking arguably its main advantage might not be the best plan.
If you chose to update to the new version where you knew exactly what extensions would be running and which wouldn't... well, your fault.
The problem remains that now I have to choose between:
56 (without security updates)
57 (without many useful extensions)
52ESR (without functionality and performance updates, and only until mid-2018 anyway)
Clearly none of these is as good as what I have had until this point.
EDIT: although i have it set to auto-update in the settings, maybe i just don't realize this because i never close/restart it heh :D
As a Firefox user (and dev) I believe that breaking some extensions today in a clean manner that will let us maintain compatibility in the future is way prefereable than randomly breaking extensions with every single version of Firefox, as this has been happening forever. Plus this break has set us free to actually improve Firefox and make it competitive again, something I believe is in everybody's interest. I realize that it's painful for the users who lost some add-ons upon which they relied, but I believe that given the alternative, this was the best choice possible.
Unfortunately, as a user, the bottom line is still that if I update I will receive very little benefit and lose a lot of very useful functionality. It's not just the odd extension for me, it's things I use every day that are the most important reason I've stuck with Firefox.
I accept that I'm probably in a minority and that Firefox is going to go with what makes Mozilla money and pays the bills, which in turn probably means what attracts larger user demographics at the expense of the rest of us.
Mozilla in turn will have to accept, as I'm sure it does, that it's going to turn off power users and that it's going to prompt legitimate questions over why anyone would go with Firefox, even with these developments. The obvious alternative for most people, Chrome, already had the performance and architectural advantages, but previously lost out on flexibility and privacy concerns, and unfortunately Mozilla just surrendered a significant part of those advantages.
FWIW, Firefox 57 is currently looking like a net loss in terms of security and privacy. A significant number of the extensions people have previously used for blocking or restricting potentially intrusive or dangerous behaviours seem to have been lost, in some cases without equivalent WebExtension alternatives being available.
If you're arguing that 57 is now more secure and better for privacy, perhaps you know something that people like me don't, and if so, maybe it's worth highlighting whatever built-in functionality can now replace those protections more in the documentation/marketing?
First, I'd like to put things in context. When you write "Firefox 57 is currently looking like a net loss in terms of security and privacy", I suppose that this might (arguably) be true for you and a few other power users, but for the ~100% of users who do not use these power add-ons, their life will only be improved by the change.
Plus, I actually think that all the add-ons in the domain either have been ported or have an equivalent that has been ported. Certainly all the ones I use have been. Am I missing something that people actually use for their protection?
> If you're arguing that 57 is now more secure and better for privacy, perhaps you know something that people like me don't, and if so, maybe it's worth highlighting whatever built-in functionality can now replace those protections more in the documentation/marketing?
There is only so much message that marketing can propagate in a single campaign. I expect that we'll have another marketing campaign in a few months detailing what we've been doing for security and privacy. Especially since we'll have exciting stuff to showcase :)
Let me give you a few keywords of stuff we've been doing to improve security: a gazillion fixes, better static analysis, replacing some critical components with Rust, introducing the first formally proved implementation of cryptography components in a browser, sandbox improvements, etc.
On privacy, I'll admit haven't really paid attention, but the new add-ons you install don't have access to your private data without your consent, I remember that we've been working working with Tor Browser to reduce fingerprinting, etc.
Someone has helpfully made a spreadsheet showing many old extensions and possible 57-compatible replacements, with notes on where things are a full replacement, there is limited functionality, there are known privacy issues, etc. I can't immediately find it again, so apologies for the lack of link, but have been references posted in some of the major online forums today, so perhaps you'll come across it. One of the things that was striking was that a lot of the extensions relating to blocking content or selectively toggling behaviours like running JS seem to have broken and not to have full replacements. I know that NoScript was a big one (though I've seen reports this evening that a 57-friendly version has just been released in that particular case). Quite a few ad-blockers and similar tools also seemed to have been affected, along with extensions like Greasemonkey that allow running customised JS and some analogous stylesheet customisers, and a few aimed at controlling the use of cookies and other data storage mechanisms.
For completeness, let me also say that the internal security improvements are all welcome, as is the continued separation of search from address bar and general lack of trying to spy on everything happening in the browser that seems to be ever-increasing in certain other quarters.
This definitely makes sense. I know that we have new APIs that make some of it much easier to implement, but I imagine that they still have some limitations (I haven't checked). My hope is that APIs will be progressively extended to remove these limitations.
Regardless, I believe that we're better off with a sane API that add-on developers can trust, that we're going to maintain and extend, rather than with all-powerful stuff that breaks randomly :)
Firegestures had 270k users, according to AMO. A quarter of a MILLION people.
You broke mouse gestures entirely on MacOS and Linux, and didn't allow them to work well on Windows (DOM needs to load before gestures can be used because you force script injection, don't work on internal pages, don't work on top of browser chrome, etc).
I do agree that Mozilla has handled the transition terribly; they should have made the API available first before removing everything. That way they would at least have the excuse of it being the add-on authors not cooperating. The way they've done it, before actually making the things possible, just makes it look like they're arrogant.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?sort=users&...
I fully expect that this move will certainly lose Mozilla a few Firefox users, but on balance it'll be a net win: they were already losing users to performance problems and lack of modern security features. The users the lose due to lost extensions will be tiny compared to the users they won't lose in the future now that Firefox actually feels like a modern browser performance- and security-wise.
I expect Mozilla knows a ton more about their users than we do and any guesses about user retention due to this move are pure speculation (including what I wrote above). I trust them to do the right thing here, a trust they've earned over the past (nearly) two decades that I do not place in, say, Google & Chrome.
I certainly hope so, for the sake of an open web. Hope they can take on the universal pushing and bundling that Google does with Chrome. Anecdotally I can say that none of my acquaintances are even aware of Firefox because Chrome can with their OS and they never saw a need to look beyond it. I hope Mozilla has a clear strategy to advocate and market Firefox, since technical merit alone is not going to out-compete Chrome's entrenched position.
Porting an add-on to a whole new architecture is lots of work. People who do this on their spare time, or small companies, or companies relying on contractors, may not have the time/resources/will to do it, even within two years. Also, in some case, the APIs are simply not available.
As for why I believe that the move to WebExtensions was necessary and could not be postponed further, I have written a few lines in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15695854
When actually millions of users get a vastly superior Firefox. Many, many extensions have been updated. And some extensions – mostly niche ones haven't. I love that trade-off.
The point of your post on which I disagree is the idea that we need to name a "culprit".
Insofar I was wrong. It's not authors who are to blame, it's very vocal users. You can see a few of them right here.
The user diligently updates Firefox, optimistically hoping that this new version will be as awesome as the previous ones that vastly improved performance. Firefox starts and, suddenly, a bunch of things that used to work stop working.
Why?
Well, essentially, something that they can't hope to comprehend and that they never asked for and had no input on just ruined their browser.
What do you think they are going to conclude? That extension developers are to blame?
Nope.
Their conclusions are going to be something along these lines:
"Those idiots (Mozilla) broke Firefox... again"
"Firefox 57 is a buggy piece of Turd"
"I'm tired of dealing with this shit. I'm switching to Chrome"
Users won't blame the extension developers. They will blame Firefox.
Mozilla should have done a better job with this transition. "Upgrading" an extension to use the new API requires a complete rewrite, AFAIK.
It is TOTALLY unreasonable to expect that a bunch of developers - who probably are doing this for free - are going to be able to quickly migrate their extension to the new API - especially considering that the API isn't even stable yet, and is missing a ton of functionality.
This is the mother of all breakages. Mozilla should've tried to smooth this transition, not just simply pull the pin on the web extensions grenade and yell "Catch!".
They screwed this up big time. Time will tell what this will do to their ever shrinking market share.
What's funny to me is that these 'users' you describe are apparently on HN - I thought this place was mostly software devs, but it's striking how many posts seem to fundamentally misunderstand the decisions made by Mozilla.
> This is the mother of all breakages
I would be that somewhere above 90% of FF users will be unaffected. Given Firefox's market share that's still a lot of people, but let's not pretend like they broke everything overnight.
> Mozilla should've tried to smooth this transition, not just simply pull the pin on the web extensions grenade and yell "Catch!".
You're implying that this was an unexpected change that Mozilla was not forthcoming about. It is the opposite. We've all known about this for months.
The value prop of no longer being tied to an extremely old system is significant and you're not giving it any of its due credit.
Years, in fact.
Now I have not one but two fast browsers with a UI that I do not like.
It's perfectly understandable that Firefox devs would love Firefox to be more like Chrome, but that has nothing to do with what the (existing) users want: they already have Chrome available, they are not holding their breath waiting for Firefox to become Chrome.
That was already happening, where "this shit" was crippling performance issues, and a lack of sandboxing and modern security features.
I expect Mozilla believed that the user fallout from breaking some extensions would be less than the existing continuing fallout of the ongoing issues.
> Mozilla should've tried to smooth this transition, not just simply pull the pin on the web extensions grenade and yell "Catch!".
You do realize that this transition has been going on and has been publicized for years, right?
For example, in Sep. 2015 around 40% of users did not use any extensions at all. Another sizeable number of users is going to have their ad blocker and nothing else. Even with 2, 3 or 4 extensions, it's unlikely that you're going to experience a breakage, and if you do, it's likely that you'll find a replacement.
Average users rarely use unpopular extensions and popular ones either are maintained or will have a replacement made. There are some semi-popular ones that currently can't yet be fully recreated, but those are the types of extensions that change so much about the browser that average users won't be using them anyways.
2) Users aren't retarded. I know, we like to act like they are, but only the most cynical are going to switch browsers, because of this. Out of spite. It does not make any sense to switch to a different browser, just because the browser that you're used to has become different. Nor does it make sense to switch to Chrome, which is still by far less extensible than Firefox 57, just because Firefox has become somewhat less extensible.
3) The core of the API is more than stable. It's Chrome's extension API, that's been battle-tested in Chrome for years. Most extension developers will not need more than that. And it's most definitely not missing a ton of function, especially not things that non-power-users need.
4) Their market share is not anymore shrinking. It's been growing again since the release of Firefox 48. That was the release which shipped the first iteration of multiprocess. They could not have shipped multiprocess as early as that, if they did not know legacy extensions to be deprecated now with 57. Because the majority of legacy extensions are not multiprocess-compatible and neither would have been updated to be.
AMO would be reverse Russian Roulette where only roughly 1 out of 6 extensions will not kill your performance. That's just as well something you can't expect average users to understand and it would be like that for the next few years still.
So, yeah, they did rush this, but it was to save their market share. Had it continued to drop like in the half year before Firefox 48, we'd now be deep into negative user numbers.
This is simply not true as there had been many popular UI-centric extensions that just can't be replicated as webextensions due to lack of API support. "Advanced UI features belong in extensions, not in main" had been the Firefox mantra for many years and negativity about 57 is the logical consequence.
When I discovered Classic Theme Restorer, Tab Mix Plus and similar, I was already a semi-pro user and I still found them intimidating.
There were a lot of checkboxes and they changed around a lot of things and I didn't yet know how to create a separate Firefox profile where I could've actually just wildly tried different options without the fear of something breaking irreversibly.
And regardless, there are still a lot of things that the old extensions API let you did that you simply cannot do with WebExtensions.
Having said that, Mozilla did the best they could in this transition. You can always argue that they cut over too soon, and that they should have waited until WebExtensions was a little more mature and covered more use cases, but the reality is you have to draw the line somewhere, and I'm sure they agonized for quite a long time over where that place would end up being. They also know a ton more about their users than any of us random HN commenters do and are way more qualified to make that decision than anyone here.
In which case, switching to webextension support exclusively is premature at this point, don't you think? It would have been better to wait until the API was robust enough to allow 99.99% of legacy extensions to be ported.
As a Firefox dev (I'm still working at Mozilla, although not much on Firefox atm), I have seen many, many occurrences in which I couldn't optimize codepaths, or even in some case fix bugs, because the old extension mechanism made it impossible.
Consider the necessary steps:
1. realize that an internal API is broken;
2. come up with a new non-broken API;
3. port all the internal code using the non-broken API;
4. add a compatibility layer between the broken API and the non-broken API;
5. check all the existing add-ons to find out which ones use the broken API;
6. hope you didn't forget any add-on;
7. attempt to get in touch with all the add-on developers;
8. repeat 7. many, many times, until you are sure that the add-on developers that do not respond have simply abandoned their add-on;
9. negotiate a transition plan with the add-on developer with whom you have managed to get in touch;
10. land the patch that you have written now 3-4 months ago;
11. maintain both the broken API and the non-broken API (and their tests) for ~1 year, until you are reasonably sure that all add-on developers who intend to migrate have done so;
12. maintain (and test) a downgrade path for people who switch between versions of Firefox;
13. finally land your code;
14. realize that you still have accidentally broken some add-ons and people are (rightfully) unhappy because "Firefox broke my add-on";
15. it's 18 months since you wrote your 2-lines patch, you can finally get rid of the dead code and tests and move to something else.
This was one of the reasons for which the Chrome teams managed to be faster and more efficient than the Firefox teams (well, that and a bazillion dollars to hire way more people). The add-on architecture is the main reason for which projects such as multi-processes only landed ~8 years after we had working prototypes and some other performance projects never landed at all.
So, yes, removing the add-on architecture is definitely painful for a number of Firefox users, but I believe that we could not postpone it any further, even if it meant that some useful addons could not be ported immediately. Also, for what it's worth, we have postponed it by something like 7 years already :)
As long as you're here: I was told that the old extension API was way too broad, locking in a lot of design choices that were not really considered from the "do we want to maintain this for years and years" perspective. And that the new one is much more focused and considered. Is that the case?
> As long as you're here: I was told that the old extension API was way too broad, locking in a lot of design choices that were not really considered from the "do we want to maintain this for years and years" perspective. And that the new one is much more focused and considered. Is that the case?
Definitely. The old extension mechanism was basically "here is the toolkit we are using to build Firefox, come and plug anywhere/replace anything". If my memory serves correctly, at the time, Mozilla Browser/Firefox was (almost) the only browser doing any kind of extensions (I'm not counting M3 and a few experimental/academic browsers), so there was no real precedent on how to do this.
For a time, it worked extremely well. After all, much of today's Firefox is built from add-ons that were progressively integrated in the browser. And then, progressively, we realized that there were drawbacks to this "anything goes" approach, but we couldn't fix things because that would mean breaking thousands of add-ons.
So, after many years trying to postpone the inevitable for the sake of our users, we finally switched to a much better defined API. This WebExtension API is much smaller, much better documented, and does not expose internals-only stuff. Which means that now, we can fix internals-only stuff without breaking the API. Which should make the life of both Firefox developers, add-on developers and users much better :)
> This WebExtension API is much smaller, much better documented, and does not expose internals-only stuff.
It also doesn't expose a lot of stuff that's useful and not tied to Firefox internals in any way.
The browser is one of the most heavily used programs on people's computers. Integrating it with the rest of your system and workflow can have huge payoffs in user experience and productivity. The traditional XUL-based extension system, while not always pretty, allowed for that. WebExtensions are severely lacking here and some of that seems by design.
As an example, I'm still trying to figure out a non-insane way to implement something akin to the It's All Text extension that allows editing text areas on websites using a proper text editor.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na...
I just checked the It's All Text github repo, and their suggested replacement is a thing called GhostText¹, which actually seems a good deal fancier that IAT ever was.
If I understand the native messaging API correctly, nothing in there requires the presence of any networking daemon. The browser just execs a program you can communicate with using JSON messages on stdin/stdout. That is already a lot better than I thought.
(and sorry about your extensions)
This would have automated steps 5 through 8, but not significantly reduced the problem.
> The addon developers then get the chance to change it or not. If it's broken oh well (eliminating steps 8 through 15).
Ah, well, sure, in that case, randomly breaking add-ons all the time would indeed have made our life easier. But everybody else's life would have been much worse, so we decided not to do that :)
> Making it the responsibility of the FF core team to sit on changes while waiting for a reply is a procedural problem not a problem with XUL/XPCOM.
It's a problem of the combination of having no API (i.e. XUL/XPCOM) and not wanting to break user's add-ons.
> Moving to Web Extensions, which fundamentally make it impossible to access the full file system, permanently breaking many useful addons with no functional way to migrate to FF57 and calling that better is frankly dishonest.
Let's just say that we have different priorities. While it's not as powerful, it's better for security, performance, privacy, bugs and future-proofing.
This is the part that I think you are going to get the most flak for. People are willing to deal with temporary setbacks if the changes can be brought in at some point. Permanently breaking things and calling that better will get the Mozilla Foundation a mountain of angry hate mail from people who committed to the platform.
> Let's just say that we have different priorities. While it's not as powerful, it's better for security, performance, privacy, bugs and future-proofing.
I have no problem if the Mozilla Foundation or the Firefox team has different priorities, but say that rather than telling technical people the reason for the changes is because XUL or XPCOM are somehow so hideous the team had no choice. It smacks of dishonesty when everything that you have described here is a problem with procedure not anything technical.
If you provide an API you'd better commit to it.
A lot of work is being wasted because of this.
"Do not break userspace".
That's not "do not break userspace" – which makes sense – that's "do not change anything, ever" – which is project suicide.
Now, with WebExtensions, there is a difference between the API and the internals, so we can commit to something. And, while there is a cost to this change, that's definitely a much, much, much better base for developers on both side of the API.
[1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/e7aa8c2eb11ba69b1b690...
Nor were they userspace: http://dblohm7.ca/blog/2017/11/16/legacy-firefox-extensions-...
It's the guideline from Linus and for a good reason. It's impossible to base work on shifting sands.
Well, some of our priorities with WebExtensions are (not necessarily in this order):
- stable, documented, future-proof API;
- improving security;
- improving performance;
- improving privacy.
You are, of course, free to consider these things "not anything technical", but they were impossible as long as add-ons weren't based on an API at all.
So, again, while I fully realize that there is a cost, I believe that we're moving from something unsustainable to something sane, which makes it better in the long run.
It is only unsustainable because the FF team chose to make the process more difficult than it had to be. This is how what you are saying sounds:
1. We didn't want to break plugins so we involved addon developers
2. The process takes so long that it takes 18 months to introduce any new code
3. Since 2 was so slow we decided instead we would PERMANENTLY break plugins with no way to ever fix them
Put another way: things were taking too long because of Mozilla's own self-imposed guidelines so the Firefox team had no choice but to PERMANENTLY break addons that will never be fixable by design because the Firefox team was so concerned about temporarily breaking plugins. This is double speak. The predicate (3) contradicts the subject (1).
After it was pointed out how ludicrous this sound the caveat is added that this had to be done in the name of security, performance, and privacy. At what point did security and performance become more important than an open platform and why? Numerous addons exist solely to provide privacy by blocking fingerprinting, stopping redirects, providing control over cross-site requests (RequestPolicy Continued), super-cookie safeguards (BetterPrivacy), and these options are no longer available. How are these privacy enhancing features being added now that the option has been removed since the goal is privacy?
The whole thing is hard to take at face value when everything seems to be self-contradicting (sans performance).
Have a good day.
First we hear the changes are because adding new code took too long because the team didn't want to break addons, yet WebExtensions does just that in ways that are far worse than just temporarily breaking addons.
Second we hear it's about privacy. Yet WebExtensions breaks a large number of privacy plugins that won't be ported. There is also the Cliqz partnership and the October experiment. "In August 2016, Mozilla ... made a strategic investment in Cliqz. Cliqz plans to eventually monetize the software through a program known as Cliqz Offers, which will deliver sponsored offers to users based on their interests and browsing history."[1] "Mozilla is experimenting with including the Cliqz plug-in by default in its open source Firefox browser."[2] The reader can decide for themselves whether or not this is in the interest of privacy.
All that is left then to explain the changes are possibly security and speed. Security I am not so sure about as privacy and security tend to go hand in hand. It would be nice if you could respond to the earlier questions. FF57 is noticeably faster however so that is at least believable.
Whatever the real story is I do appreciate you engaging with us because you have no obligation to be here and you deserve respect for that.
Stay well David, hope you have a good day too.
[1] http://archive.fo/zjf8a#selection-319.2-323.243
[2] https://www.htmlgoodies.com/daily_news/mozilla-experiments-w...
but you did exactly that
>Let's just say that we have different priorities.
seems so, your priority became... trying to speed up hoping that people too dumb to care would switch back from chrome despite it's horrendous and unethical marketing while sacrificing everything that made your browser viable
I know I have access to clumsy workarounds such as copying FF56 to a VM with updates disabled, or to have parallel Firefox installs, but Scrapbook is a daily-use tool for me, and clunky workarounds won't last long.
I'm thinking about reverse-engineering the way ScrapBook stores data so I can write my own migration to something else, but...oof.
Anybody have any suggestions for another plugin/product that offers the same features? Or, dare I dream, one that can import everything from ScrapBook? My searches for the latter have come up dry, but perhaps something obscure exists.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7btuln/so_long_and...
The Firefox team has specifically said they won't add support for the foreseeable future.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246236#c113
More here: https://github.com/danny0838/firefox-scrapbook/issues/209#is...
Losing several hundred thousand users¹ probably isn't in the team's best interest; so hopefully they will make it a priority to revisit this, but I have a feeling there are resource limitations that will make this by design won't fix.
¹ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU...
Looking around on the ScrapBook website[0] reveals that "gomita", the author of the plugin, has a GitHub profile[1]. Sadly without a repository of ScrapBook source code. Still, you could try contacting gomita and ask if they want to put it there to help with reverse engineering it? Or maybe even document how it works.
Not to discourage asking for help, just that the source not being on github isn't super relevant.
I wanted to suggest Zotero as a tool to capture information of different kinds. It’s a multi-platform tool that also has “connectors” (extensions) for different browsers. [1] It may probably not be a complete replacement for ScrapBook.
You can 'install' it anywhere you want (Documents folder, other drive, cloud folder, etc). You can copy your profile in using the steps outlined here: https://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#local_prof...
It will remain updated through April 2018 and your profile will stay separate from your installed copy of Firefox. In April, ESR is switching to a newer Quantum version of Firefox, so old extensions will be disabled. If, at that point, there isn't a suitable replacement for ScrapBook, disable updates in your copy of Firefox Portable (if you're using the PortableApps.com Platform to automatically update it, rename your FirefoxPortableESR folder to FirefoxPortableESROld or similar) and only use it for ScrapBook not to go online.
Not sure how much that helps in terms of retaining the actual functionality, which unless I'm badly mistaken would only be feasible in the WebExtensions API via the external application messaging interface - and you'd need a separate program that would receive those messages and do the mirroring for you, and maybe expose a local HTTP server or some other such horrible hack to let you fetch the content tree for rendering in the browser as a table of contents/tree of bookmark-style links. But at least you might not have to lose what you've got.
The remaining question becomes: how to replace it? What other tool supports all this?:
* Local saving (as opposed to cloud)
* Storing source URL with support for re-fetching
* Bookmarks (for pages that won't save locally in a useful way, such as YouTube)
* "Deep saving," saving the main page AND linked pages, and keeping them bundled together
* Full text search
* Probably other features I do not recall offhand
Even if I can get the data out, it's hard to know where to put it. Most solutions these days are cloud-oriented, which is unappealing to me. I could build my own stand-alone replacement, but what a headache. I could fork ScrapBook and try to make it work with the latest Firefox, but I have no experience in the plugin domain, nor the time to prioritize learning it.
Sorry for the rant, I'm just trying to figure out how to proceed without severe productivity loss.
you can use the ESR[0] release with the extension AND disabling auto-update, and use -no-remote paramater to run multiple instance FF...
So in your case, you can have two instance, one FF running ScrapBook, the other is new-and-shiny FF... I used this setup daily with multiple FF running at my whim, didn't feel clunky
p/s: ScrapBook sounds awesome, I myself did saves PDF version of website, where it still can be indexed/searched properly
I did find this add on to convert Scrapbook files with a quick googlin' (no experience with it). Hopefully it helps. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbookx-co...
The other option is to look at some of the PDF printing add ons because I remember a few supporting batch operations on scrapbook data. At least they did in 2010-ish.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ramback/?src=...
I use both Firefox and Chrome, but for very different purposes. In Chrome, I have 20-50 tabs spread across two windows. In Firefox, 400+. Tree Style Tabs is necessary for how I use Firefox. My backup plan was staying on an older version, possibly indefinitely.
I'm sorry if I sound a little condescending, but have you considered using bookmarks instead? I cannot even imagine a workflow where four flippin' hundred active tabs are needed.
(Personally, I believe a good bookmark-like system could solve most reasons I have many tabs. But I neither know what exactly that'd look like nor do I want to spend the time developing it, so tabs it is)
Combine with a solid session manager (I use Session Manager) to back them up regularly, and they fill in a third space between an open tab and a bookmark: something you only want to visit once, some time in the next few days / weeks, and have no desire to keep around longer than that.
Bookmarks take an extra step to save to, an extra step to load from, and do not stay in sync as I browse. Synchronizing a bookmarks folder with 10-20 tab changes would take significant human overhead.
Bookmarks are also slower to review than tabs, if you need to see anything besides the name/url/icon. You would need to load the bookmark into a tab before viewing it. Tabs are already in a tab, though not necessarily loaded.
Bookmarks are flat by default. You can make folders, but that takes manually opening the bookmarks manager and placing newly created bookmarks into the appropriate folder. Folders also waste space in the tree; one bookmark can't directly be the parent of another. The web doesn't have folders, it has links.
Bookmarks don't preserve structural context the way tab trees do. For example when using an API documentation site I'll open the site in a window, and from there open classes I need info on in tabs. Methods or related classes go in sub-tabs. I eventually end up with tabs for all the bits of the API I need to reference AND THE STRUCTURE!
Bookmarks are also hidden behind a menu, and are slow to access. Tabs can simply be suspended to save resources, and their trees collapsed.
Etc, etc. Bookmarks have horrible UX compared to tab trees.
1283 tabs open in the session that I'm trying to open. FF56.0 the session opens in around 20 seconds. FF57.0 I let it try to open the session for 40 minutes and still wasn't finished.
Not sure how it would perform if it would manage to open all the tabs but currently it's pretty much unusable for tab-heavy user.
When starting a new profile and starting session from scratch the browser seems really nice. I'll try nightly at some point and see if it's any better. If not I guess I'll write some tickets for them.
But seriously, save all tabs as bookmarks. You're surely not using 97% of these tabs anyway.
It's not ideal but not a showstopper for me. I mostly use one window, where the toolbar is restored by default, and when I open a new window I got used to clicking the toolbar button (which I moved to the left) or pressing F1.
> You need a css hack to hide the standard bar
> There’s an ugly title thingy at the top of the tab pane
I just copied the "css hack" once and forgot. The last item is solved the same way. For those who don't know:
Inside the profile folder (with a name like "xxxxxxxx.default"), create a folder called "chrome", and a file inside called "userChrome.css" with the following content:
#TabsToolbar, #sidebar-header {visibility: collapse !important;}
#TabsToolbar {margin-bottom: -21px !important;}
1. Go to about:support in Firefox URL bar.
2. the address is in "Profile Folder" row.
I have no idea why it's so slow.
Does anyone know of any alternative?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-tabs-we/
Take a look at Servo's current UI for how this could work.
Of course this doesn't help much with Quantum in its current state.
I've even got the non-technical SO on tree style tabs, they consider the browser broken if the add-on isn't working.
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
/* to hide the native tabs */
#TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse;
}
/* to hide the sidebar header */
#sidebar-header {
visibility: collapse;
}
Pretty amusing tbh
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/736cji/how_to_hide...
In time, they say, they will bring back the various APIs for the extensions (although it's still "might" and there's no timeline yet) - so in the meantime, if you liked FF for it's customisation, we just have to suck it up. It's similar to when Ubuntu moved to Unity and attracted all the new users but pissed off all the existing userbase. We should expect a big backlash when all the linux repos get updated and the power users release they have a degraded experience.
Second: I agree with your point that most of the userbase is most likely not running some weird addons that are hooked into the internals of FF via the old API. I actually suspect a rather significant portion of the userbase is running at most one of the handful of variants of ad- and/or scriptblocker.
And I'm actually thinking of switching from Firefox to Chrome now.
[0] https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/79mwsc/waterfox_w...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
I was a Firefox zealot before they decided to go in this direction. For me Chrome does all the things FF does but much faster(at the moment).
Very basic functionality already works.
The API is still missing the ability to implement some things, which is preventing developers from supporting the latest Firefox.
I won't upgrade until Keysnail is able to run.
I've been turning the menubar back on in Firefox for ages now. It's really dumb to hide it IMHO because they never used that space for anything else. It was just useless blank space.
I have been using Master Password+ extension for a very long time, but without it using a master password is hell. I had a lot of other modules, but this one was the reason I was still using firefox.
The annoying password prompt taking focus like popups in IE every time you open the navigator or a website you are not logged in is just crazy. It is annoying enough that I am asking myself if anyone at Mozilla even using Firefox accounts and master passwords.
Does anyone have a nice sync alternative to firefox accounts that include bookmarks and passwords (and it would be even better if I can sync using a git repo)
57 hasn't been released long enough for me to tell how it'll go... but when I dismiss the prompt once I don't want it to go modal every time firefox tries to sync or every time I click a link on a page I'm not logged in.
If anyone can see how to disable the tab bar at the top, please enlighten me!
Getting a menu bar no longer needs an extension, you can just right-click in the blank areas near the address bar and select "menu bar".
uMatrix can control and spoof Referer sending (I'm unfamiliar with RefControl, so this may not be exactly the same.)
Self Destroying Cookies[2] is a good way to keep cookies under control, though again I'm not familiar with the addon you mentioned.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20170125 Firefox/51.0;
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
privacy.resistFingerprinting = true
Edit: Something is resetting that override every time the browser starts. Dunno what, the only addons I run are uBlock and RES (and now TST).
Edit 2: It was being set in user.js. No idea how it got there...
privacy.resistFingerprinting = true
https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/issue...
I cannot stress enough how it helps me to switch between contexts. It's one of those things that you just did not know that you needed so much.
What options do we have?
Between Tab Groups and Tab Mix Plus for a multi-line tab bar I have to seriously redesign my workflow.
I could live with Tree Style Tab if it could nest tabs on the horizontal tab bar. I run FF on a portrait 1200x1920 screen and the vertical sidebar takes up too much space.
Much easier for extension developers (most extensions are unpaid open-source work) to support for multiple browsers.
To track the conversion progress for a particular extension, have a look here: https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/
UPDATE: There is a "Customize Firefox" button which allows modifying the theme, which fixes the colors, but not the shape of the tabs or the animations.
UPDATE: In about:config, you can disable some of the animations with `toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled: false`
UPDATE: You can bring back curved tabs with this: https://github.com/wilfredwee/photon-australis
The top bar is also black-ish now rather than the system grey. This looks particularly bad with the new "blue" highlight indicator. The tabs are all square rather than rounded. It all looks pretty hideous.
The overall design is really a mess in 57, although browsing does seem faster.
You might like the "Light" theme, which I think is available by default. That won't do any rounding for you, however.
Labels of background tabs became very transparent. This makes them completely unreadable, as my desktop background is quite dark. So, these tab labels are written with black letters on a dark blue background. So freaking good usability! /s
1) by default tabs are now white on a white background, with the active tab only being a slightly darker grey.
2) Everything is much more crammed together (tabs and bookmarks toolbar especially) which makes sense on a small laptop monitor, but on my desktop is just annoying.
3) Dialog boxes to confirm closing of multiple tabs have white text on grey background. (?!)
4) Folder icons in bookmarks toolbar now have this retro black and grey design.
5) Tabs are at the top of the window with no gap, even when not maximized, making window dragging more difficult.
In many ways it feels like a throwback to much older designs.
If you've migrated from a previous version of Firefox and customized the browser at all, you may not be getting the default settings, though-- right-click the toolbar or Bookmarks Bar, and take a look through the options at the bottom of the page. Themes will give you an option between the default, light, and dark themes (it sounds like you're stuck on the light one); density adjusts spacing in the toolbar area. And you can check "Drag Space" to add space above the tab bar for dragging, or check "Title Bar" to turn the system title bar back on.
And thank you for that drag space tip. Definitely part of what I was looking for. I just assumed it toggled the ability to drag whitespace around while customizing!
It's not currently packaged and uploaded to addons.mozilla.org, but you can try it by cloning the repo, navigating to `about:debugging,` and clicking "Load Temporary Add-on." Select the `manifest.json` file and you're good to go.
I also notice now that when I close a tab the screen flashes white. This is very distracting when closing a tab with a dark background.
Decades of UI/UX knowledge, down the drain. Usability is gone.
Man, am I glad that UI/UX knowledge went down the drain
I do not understand the significance of having the address bar above tabs from the UX perspective.
If anything, I feel that it should be below so that it can appear as a part of the tab's content - because it's contextual (each tab has it's own "instance" of the address bar)
Exactly the opposite; this is an evolution that has been taking place over the past decade.
Firefox has had tabs-on-top as the default since Firefox v4.0[1]. Chrome has had tabs-on-top for its entire existence (starting in Sept 2008); Opera had them before Chrome.
The merits can be argued either way, but don't act like this is sudden or arbitrary; it's neither.
Consider that maybe--just maybe--the dev teams at Mozilla, Google, et al. have done some usability studies in the past decade that informed these decisions.
I get that you may prefer tabs below the URL bar, but your claims about the greater state of UX are baseless and absurd.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmgtW2Iw-kE posted June 2010
EDIT: Google made a comic for the release of Chrome 1.0 that includes an explanation of their original rationale for putting tabs on top. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_18.html
The idea that someone else can know what another wants better than the other person is absurd. Your arguments might be valid for defaults, but they must be configurable defaults, because taste is subjective, arbitrary, and, despite what some believe, never in error.
I know what UX I want better than anyone else. Nobody can gainsay my personal taste.
https://i.imgur.com/qygcIv4.png
I used the light theme and density = compact and enabled the title bar. And then I followed the instructions on this reddit thread to put the tabs on the bottom and the bookmarks above the tabs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6x2tmz/can_i_have_...
I also added a little CSS to space things out a little.
I wish I could find a full-size screenshot of this, but here:
http://news.mynavi.jp/articles/2010/06/29/firefox-tabs-on-to...
Green is "page-controlling UI", Magenta is "browser-controlling UI".
Can anyone post a screenshot?
Countless research and engineering hours.
With actual amazing, noticeable results as soon as you try it.
With a bunch of useful UI features.
"But tabs aren't curved, so fuck these guys! I won't upgrade!"
Oh well...
Edit: It seems that I was too hasty with my "who cares about speed" question. Apparently a lot of people do. I guess I just never found FF that much slower than other browsers. If it takes a second or two longer to load some page it is just not important to me.
I do. I can't use a browser that does not feel snappy. I couldn't care less about whether tab edges are round or not.
Millions of people who've switched to Chrome. Including hundreds that have said as much in HN comments over the last 5 years.
I do care very much if you break all of my current extensions and as a result the UI behavior I was used to is gone. It's like being forced to switch to a completely new browsers. If I wanted different browser I could have switched to Chrome years ago, thank you very much. Customization is much more important than speed.
Obviously it's not, since the majority of Firefox user base (which used to be very high) jumped to Chrome 5-10 years ago, despite the first having customizations (add-ons) and the latter not yet (and when it added, incompatible ones).
In fact, by mozilla's own estimates (based on telemetry), only about 33% or so of their users even use add-ons.
still - as you wrote, folks who cared about speed jumped the ship already. Honestly, I don't believe they're coming back, just because FF's speed is now comparable to Chrome.
> In fact, by mozilla's own estimates (based on telemetry), only about 33% or so of their users even use add-ons.
alternatively: advanced users that tend to use add-ons also happen to be those who know how to disable telemetry.
Pretty much every end user, especially non-tech related end users.
It's kind of a huge deal FYI.
This, from Hacker News, who not one week ago was complaining about "everything being perceptibly slower" and who constantly complains about latency in applications. Pretty sure everyone cares about browser speed.
I lost my entire workflow one day when I did an "emergency upgrade" to FF that broke my addons and wouldn't even let me fix it.
I got some German actors to play it out:
1. At a minimum I'd be happy with a toolbar icon set that was a little more in step with OS X design (but willing to hear
if I just have misunderstanding of design :D)
2. As a reach, os-native menus or at least more native-style menus for things like the toolbar menuhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keychain-serv...
I will miss it and I'm not sure what to do next.
[1] Or is it a "macOS native mozilla browser", these days? everything seems to lose its uppercase.
The one thing it doesn't do is to use native widgets to render the UI of the browser chrome. Using native widgets for Web content in a cross-platform browser isn't a very attractive proposition, because native widgets either can't be composited at all (Windows, GTK+) or require that you delegate your entire graphics stack to the OS-specific compositor for Web content (macOS). Delegating the entire graphics stack to Core Animation would prevent us from making any improvements to it (for example, WebRender). Given that a lot of browser UI (e.g. preferences) is becoming Web content in both Chrome and Firefox, for consistency's sake it seems better to use the same widgets for chrome and content.
What does drive me crazy is
1. not having bounce scrolling
2. not live-panning the page when using a swipe gesture to go back
Bounce scrolling, especially, I think is table stakes if you want to take the Mac seriously.
[0]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/umatrix/ [1]http://adamantine.me/index.php/2015/11/18/umatrix-desperatel...
There are a few tools to make it easier though: if you're dealing with a site that uses a lot of semi-random subdomains (like googlevideo or cloudflare), it's possible to just whitelist the whole domain and get all the subdomains automatically (and then block individual subdomains if you want).
It might be defeating the purpose, but you can also change the "scope" of the changes you make by clicking the blue button in the upper left corner of the panel. You can choose the scope from current domain, current subdomain, or global "*". If you select global, you can, for example, unblock the various youtube/googlevideo related embeds/iframes/xhrs there, and then youtube embeds will work on every site.
The one thing I wish the addon would do is sync my black/whitelists through Firefox Sync so I didn't have to either redo everything on a new computer, or go to the trouble of exporting/importing them.
It's technically possible, although UX is terrible. Go to uMatrix settings, make sure to "enable cloud storage" option is set in the "settings" tab, then manually upload and download rules in the "my rules" tab.
No automatic sync (won't be implemented[1]) and, no merges at the moment (button's broken[2]).
By design. Losing all rules because of sync snafu out of control of uMatrix is the absolute worst case. Importing/merging manually will prevent such disaster.
As I get it, it would require significant changes to the code, though.
I personally just stick to base domains usually. When a site is broken, allowing one or two 3rd-party base domains is often just enough to fix it.
If you want to go subdomain-granularity, this is your choice -- it's not forced on you. Some even go as far as subdomain/type (the cells in the middle).
I myself though i had to enable each sub-set individually until i took a closer look at the behavior when clicking certain ui elements (that as i recall were unlabeled).
Noscript on the other hand only present a list of domains, though one can enable sub-domain granularity in the options (never felt the need).
Safari is zero. Dead still. I type this and it moves to 0.3%.
No idea what Firefox is doing...
edit: Also, even without focus, Firefox climbs to 8.9% CPU just by hovering my mouse over it. Safari goes to 0.2%.
youtube.com: Firefox ~6%, Safari ~0%
news.ycombinator.com: 0%, ~0%
amazon.com: ~2%, ~2%
Are there any reasonable proxies for battery usage that I can run during continuous integration? E.g. measure CPU usage while running tests, measure CPU wakes (somehow?), measure memory bandwidth or IO used? How would I do this?
Tab Groups (which was originally a first-class Mozilla feature called Panorama) absolutely changed my browser workflow, and I can't imagine regressing...
The new APIs won't support replacement any time soon, and the dev has already given up, since they'd already had to run a fundraiser once to add Electrolysis support, just to find that their work would be thrown away in the near future anyways.
And that's just one example... :(
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170128013037/http://fasezero.c...
Nobody knew in August 2015 that Mozilla would delay the Electrolysis rollout, allow incompatible extensions would continue working into 2017, pick an arbitrary date to drop XUL extensions instead of tying it to WebExtensions milestones, drop the Add-on SDK at the same time, and not really support gradual porting.
I don't know why you think 57 uses less memory than 56 for the "renderer and JS engine". I don't think it does. In fact, the data shows that it actually uses a bit more than 56, though this obviously depends on workload.
(Disclaimer: I work on the Firefox rendering engine and have done some work on the JS engine.)
"AMD VP9 hardware video decoder support for improved video playback with lower power consumption"
Pretty sure it is the empty set.
I hope that our next priority becomes energy. Stay tuned :)
We need the OS to store credentials and expose a well-defined, OS independent API for apps/sites to identify themselves securely and request for the user's authentication. This will go a long way towards mitigating exploits like cross-site scripting attacks, phishing, software keyloggers, clipboard sniffers and so on.
I really find it amazing that this is something none of the major OS creators have tackled in a standarised manner.
In fact, I imagine almost every OS vendor would try some form of lock-in.
The one issue I see is that to sync properly such app would need a changelist (with the vector clocks and stuff), and the only thing most credential stores provide is the current state and no history track. An app may implement such list to itself, though, outside of the OS credential storage - without actual credentials, just referring to the record IDs so it's not too sensitive.
Another is, such external app would need to repeatedly access the credential store. If there is no API to detect if the store is locked or not, it may either require to keep it unlocked, or spam user with access prompts or something like that.
Oh, and it would be problematic if the store pins records to the applications and doesn't allow e.g. Chrome to access Firefox passwords and vice versa. You'll need highly privileged access (root) or somehow hook another app and inject yourself into its address space (WinHook, Xposed, etc).
But e.g. Windows Vault <-> KDE or Gnome keyring sync is certainly possible. In theory. Don't know if anyone had ever implemented it in practice, though.
It's been working fine for me.
All in all though. Nice job so far. :)
Edit: I do sorta feel like the tabs are now smaller (when there is a lot of tabs open), any way to make them bigger?
I know it's available in Beta / Nightly, but I don't know if it got backported to Stable nor will it.
https://help.getpocket.com/article/1025-disabling-pocket-in-...
If you're missing the option then you can open about:config and set "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories" to false to get rid of it. I also blew away the "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories.options" key that contains all of the configuration crap for pocket.
Unfortunately non of this is or the op's settings are synced in your Profile so you have to change it on all of your machines. :(
* Also, that's very cool regardless.
I miss the Mozilla that actually acted like they cared about privacy.
Now that I'm not on a mobile and can actually look at the code, it looks like it's defined at [1]. I must be reading TelemetryFeed.jsm wrong, though, because that says addSession() holds on to the URL (as .page) and createPing() puts it into the ping...
[1]: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-release/file/FIREFOX...
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/modules...
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=symbol:%23Rem...
> I have Firefox installed on 8 different machines and the option to remove "Recommended by Pocket" in the New Tab Preferences only appears in half of them.
The gear you're referring to opens the "New Tab Preferences" screen that I was referring to.
+ uBlock Origin
- Self-Destructing Cookies
- YesScript
- Video DownloadHelper
- Save Session - DownthemAllI'm not even asking for all of the functionality present in DownThemAll, I'd just like:
* to be able to queue up multiple downloads without actually starting them, so I can start/resume them once I go AFK for example
* auto-scan all links on the page and be able to filter them to add links to the download queue, e.g. to queue up all files matching a certain filter
* rearrange the queue's order
* persist the queue across browser sessions
* pause any given download and be able to resume it across browser sessions
For what it's worth, thankfully the author of DownThemAll is working on a WebExtensions version [1], which may also get released on Chrome and other WebExtensions-compatible browsers [2].
[0]: https://www.downthemall.net/re-downthemall-and-webextensions...
- Zotero weakened
- mouse gesture addons
- Tab Groups
It makes it much easier for extension developers (most of which work for free, on open-source projects) to maintain support for multiple browsers with a shared codebase.
If you want to track the conversion progress for a particular extension, have a look at this site: https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/
Edit: Forgot to mention but if you check the add-ons site, you should be able to find an updated extension for Video DownloadHelper.
+ uBlock Origin
+ Cookies AutoDelete
+ Video DownloadHelper
- YesScript
- Save Session
I gave FF57 (Quantum) a try during Beta and it was FAST. I am still using Pale Moon, but installed FF57 to see the improvements, to keep an alternate browser installed and also because Mozilla "Container Tabs" looks very interesting. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...
Using Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs looks to be AWESOME, once they do a little bit more polish to switching between containers.
At the moment, they haven't implemented hiding of the horizontal tabs as Mozilla haven't officially implemented the feature. It is a work in progress though.
See this workaround to remove tabs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15343940
Now that FF57 is out of beta, I'll give it another go.
It's too bad FF had to abandon it's massive library of legacy extensions for this upgrade. The myriad of extensions is one of FF's main benefits over other browsers. I've happily accepted lower performance in trade for configuration options. I suppose the most popular extensions will eventually be ported.
From my point of view they should also provide mouse gestures because the WebExtensions work only after DOM is loaded and not having gestures on internal pages is a huge discomfort and user experience dissonance to put it mildly.
WTF? Who in their right mind can think that the only reason people installed add-ons was to manipulate the web content? UI is the main differentiating factor between browsers, FF strength was the ability to customize UI for user liking.
I wish firefox could do that.
That being said, I don’t use any native app at all other than a terminal emulator. Just terminal + vscode + chrome.
It's a shame, because I would really like to be able to move my chat clients out of the Firefox UI.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
I don't have an answer to your other question (maybe someone else will), although since that post says they'll keep us posted and I haven't seen anything, and since it hasn't been that long ago, I don't think too much has come of it yet.
There are bugs though. I'm using Debian Stretch. Right click menu doesn't work: it appears for a fraction of a second then disappears; so does the top-bar menu of LastPass plugin.
I'm happy to provide more information via email.
>Jessie and Stretch backports of Firefox release and beta are gone because of the requirement of rust to build them, which is not available in Jessie or Stretch. Please update your apt sources to use Firefox ESR instead.
I've downloaded the tarball from the firefox homepage, extracted it, and put it in ~/opt, and symlinked it to ~/bin/firefox, which is on my path first.
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/10/31/firefox-58-for-android-ena...
But even without Quantum Firefox on Android is way faster than Chrome because it supports ad blocking plugins.
TBH FF on Android has felt a little choppy, even with ublock origin enabled. The Chromium-based Firefox Focus feels faster, but too bad it doesn't support extensions. Hopefully FF58 will be the best of both worlds on Android soon.
If you're missing blank tabs like I was, restore blank tabs at Preferences|When Firefox starts, and set Home Page to `about:blank`.
If you prefer new tabs to be blank as well, that's managed via the gear button on the new tab page, and by deselecting checked options.
Themes are set at Tools|Add-ons|Themes. (For example, if you want a lighter-style theme restored.)
I posted more thoughts here:
There is an extension to get rid of it. However, you also have to manually install some other garbage too. They provide a debian package, but I'm not using a debian based OS so it's a pain in the ass. I'll stick with Chromium, thanks.
Experimental Nightly build with the Client-Side Decorations that you want enabled: https://github.com/stransky/gecko-dev/tree/titlebar-csd
(This link is taken from comment #64 in that bug report.)
There is a noticeable lag before first paint of the page. This is specially visible if you have a fast site. I was able to click through links on the site with no lag, now there is a small, but noticeable lag.
Also, where did the "Restore tabs" button go from the homepage?
EDIT: Also, it looks like my fans are running more often, so CPU usage could be higher as well.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708
I don't like search suggestions even in Chrome. I find it makes the omnibar less useful.
The omnibar was the game changer for me when Chrome did it. I never have many tabs open as I can recall anything I've visited previously by typing a few words. More often than not what I want is one of the first suggestions.
So to help with this, I turn off search suggestions since they are not relevant to my past browser activity. I also got in the habit of frequently using Private window so that my History has more relevant content. It's great and I'm confident I don't need to bookmark a lot.
Still not perfect, since I'm just zooming in some PNGs. And the new thumbnails are square while most pages that I view are rectangular. But it will do, for now.
Best solution so far seems to be to use the New Tab Override addon and point it to a blank page somewhere online.
That's a blank page, as you might have guessed, but it's built into Firefox, so should load a lot faster. Really don't know, though, if Firefox actually treats it like a webpage or not.
> The point of parallelization is to harness the full power of the CPU. If you don’t want that try reducing the content process limit near the bottom of general options.
[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-h...]
Apparently "vibrance" is one of the culprits and switching to the light or dark themes can help a lot. But yes, it's destroying battery compared to Safari for me. Which is a shame, as it's already my default on Windows.
What I DO want to see is something like ublock matrix become a standard feature. Matrix is an incredible add-on that has made the web more useable and more debuggable for me. If it was built-in, the defaults would have to be toned-down or turned off, because it breaks too much of the web, but a simple “privacy mode” toggle to step up restrictions would be welcome in a private browsing window.
Call it “War Mode” or “Paranoid Window” when using a private window with maxed out Matrix.
Safari's got a native engine for the execution part. And you pass in the blacklist with declarative rules. It's the best of both worlds in that you get competing blacklists, but the actual engine is even faster than JS. And for security like you said, there aren't any shenanigans since it's literally a JSON blacklist and can't contain code.
This is default-enabled in Private Browsing. To enable it in normal browsing, you can toggle privacy.trackingprotection.enabled in about:config. I think, there's also now a GUI toggle in the settings to do that, I haven't checked yet.
And well, the main-motivation for not default-enabling it is not some Google-conspiracy, it's because they'd take away the income source of many webpage owners who in turn would simply stop testing against Firefox, if not block it completely.
Apple doesn't have to give as much of a fuck about this, as they have basically guaranteed market share with macOS and iOS, and because Chrome uses a fork of their browser engine, so if webdevs test against Chrome, it'll almost certainly also work in Safari.
Regarding engines, Chrome uses Blink, as opposed to WebKit. They were forked a couple years ago.
The new one is way too minimalist. It also appears to target people with poor sight all chrome elements suddenly became larger.
EDIT - The upgrade also wiped all GreaseMonkey scripts for some reason. Hmm.
EDIT - Downgraded back to 56. Way too many jarring UI changes as well as the AddOn breakage to justify the new snappiness. Mozilla also appears to have pulled the link to the "old releases" page from their main website, so here it is - https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases
For the chrome elements size: Menu -> Customize -> Density -> Compact.
The top part of the browser window is now an utter mess. I can live with the new tab style, but the layout with absolutely no vertical spacing/padding and these new "minimalist" icons is just... ugly, and unnecessary at that. I don't think I'm the only person who cares for how things _look_ in addition to how they _work_.
But the browser speed feels A LOT smoother.
Update: In the last hour I'm now reading about 1.8GB at 16 tabs. Still acting really fast though.
Is there a location where I can submit a bug report?
(In general, it's fine to chuck bugs into Firefox -> Untriaged and they'll eventually land in the right place.)
If Bugzilla's a bit of a pain, just let me know and I'll happily file it for you.
You're probably looking for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi
In my own personal testing (you can run on your machine in a couple minutes), FF57 is 10% faster than FF56 on that benchmark, and Chrome 60 is 10% faster than FF57.
I like the awesome new speed even on my old Sandy Bridge, but the death of ANY possibilities to add features to the browser UI is not worth it. Really.
That is pathetic. More paternalistic nannying of the user, making their life actively worse in favor of closing off a very limited security hole. If that’s the mindset, wouldn’t it be even safer to not have a browser at all?
I mean, obviously there's pros and cons, but it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
VimFx hasn't, but Vimium has replaced it for me.
That's total BS. It's my software running on my computer. I get to decide what I consider a security risk, not Mozilla.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435013 (Ten years old, fixes proposed, questions unanswered. Note the status.)
If I sound upset, it's because this is personally offensive (not to mention infuriating) to me, and many good-faith questions have gone ignored.
As I said elsewhere, it is frustrating as well. But it's not like there aren't upsides to it as well, that just might not apply to us.
Thanks!
It seems i also got Ebay as an additional search engine. Oh well.. deleted it. :)
1. Firefox is sitting at 15-20% of my CPU with 2 tabs open. I've never had the fan come on just from browsing tabs on chrome. I opened gmail while typing this and now I'm at about 50% of my CPU and the fan is blaring. Something seems very wrong.
2. The import from other browser (assuming say I already had an old version installed and selected "replace" on mac install) option is VERY hidden behind a bunch of menus. It also didn't import any of my cookies to google, HN, or probably most other passwords in the keychain.
3. Resizing a window feels really sluggish and not snappy, as does tabbing back and forth between tabs. It takes a noticable like 500-800ms to switch to gmail. Most tabs are around 200-400ms. This feels massively slower than chrome thus far
4. The design when typing in the search bar is pretty jarring, filling up a huge amount with white space.
I'll keep trying but if the CPU doesn't chill out this is basically a non-starter for me.
Looks like positron used to do this but is now dead :( https://github.com/mozilla/positron
Looks like that was ~48 days ago and I think I've opened up Chromium maybe two or three times since then.
(WRT extensions, LastPass was the only thing I "missed" (we have Enterprise for $work) although I normally use the CLI utility instead anyways. They came out with a beta a few weeks ago and it was actually working great until about two days ago when it suddenly broke for me. The other extensions I use -- uBlock Origin, Vimium -- have been working just fine.)
Another thing to note, and maybe most people don't instinctively realize this, but Chrome should get a lot of kudos for bringing both browsers and the web forward in such a short time. Let's not forget - the clusterfuck both Firefox and IE were before chrome came to the scene. A lot of the implements that makes Firefox awesome now came from chrome.
Chrome played just as big of a role as FF did to bring IE out of the gutter.
I haven't used IE (or whatever it's current incarnation is called) for a long time as a daily driver - spend some time about 6 months ago - wasn't impressed, but still better than what it was before.
Thanks, Chrome team.
EDIT: Okay, tested again; it depends heavily on the website you do this on.
In Google Chrome I navigate with the omnibar so much, it was the game changer for me when Chrome was new. The ability to quickly recall any page I visited before. Coupled with the ability to finetune these suggestions by removing unwanted entries.
I need to access occasionally extensions unsupported in the new version: namely Scrapbook and the extension that provides maff file support.
This sort of cynic statement is based on this legacy extension system having been a major maintenance burden for Mozilla, so now one developer or even a small team trying to take that over, I can hardly imagine to work out.
I've had to open task manager twice now to kill it. Only downloaded it 10 minutes ago.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-is...
Now that the changes are mainstream I'll be switching to version 57.
But I can't stop using Chrome yet. We write a lot of functional tests and Chrome is better at it.
It's got libraries like Puppeteer, good Webdriver support and a headless mode that just works. I can't put my finger on it, but it's difficult to run automated tests with Firefox.
I hope Firefox gets something like Chrome's DevTools protocol.
Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/o8f4ZHp.gifv FF 57: https://i.imgur.com/kaQl5gN.gifv
FF 57 is much slower. Maybe a very specific use case but confirms my experience so far that FF is much slower than Chrome on basically everything.
I have 30000+ bookmarks, and I use my bookmark structure all the time on all my devices, that's my workflow to write later content on my websites ( my folders = my categories, sort of) and I don't want to change my workflow.
When I was using FF two years ago, it couldn't sync that many bookmarks, and that's the only reason which was keeping me from using FF (besides speed and memory usage, but that tend to vary).
I'm not interested in trusting a third party extension with all my network data either, so the plug-in to do this isn't an option. It's weird, but this really is a blocker for me for general use.
Part of the delay is the complete rewrite that most of the DevTools are undergoing. As we move from legacy, in-house solutions (XUL) to standard web technology (HTML/JS, React/Redux, etc.) as part of the "devtools.html" project: https://github.com/devtools-html/
I guess I'm part of a minority of people who does a lot of websockets work? Well, that's guaranteed to be true - a random feature deep inside the devtools is probably a deal-breaker for like four people.
* https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ leaves original firefox row of tabs opened. so now i have two sets
* ffox currently eats 8-12% of cpu (i.e. almost one whole core) for itself. the consumption does not seem to stop.
Also installed a plugin named Vim Vixen. Now I am able to navigate and use the browser almost without touching the mouse.
Thank you Mozilla. Keep up the good work!
That particular welcome screen seems like a really poor choice to demonstrate the supposedly much-improved rendering engine on my machine.
Has anyone experienced that in a browser other than Firefox?
It' be awesome if some of my bookmarks always open in a pinned state. Examples: rain.today (white noise). ... But I don't want them to be there everytime I open the browser, hence to remember the pinned preference with bookmarks.
Anyone knows if the other major browsers are working on a similar approach to increase performance?
The very first thing I was greeted with on the "top sites" page was a bunch of "Recommended by Pocket" links, and no way to disable that.
I can't find anything in about:config to disable this either. How about NO, goddammit?
Shame on you, Mozilla.
On the Android version, they appear on the homepage->History->Synced Devices.
Mind that they don't sync immediately. There's an interval for syncing. You can lower this interval in about:config by editing one of services.sync.scheduler.*, also possibly services.sync.syncInterval, but I don't know for sure what each individual one does. Also, you can tell it to do a sync right away, on the desktop version with Alt+t, then s; on the Android version by going into the settings, then tapping on "Firefox Account" at the top and then "Synchronize now".
Hamburger -> General -> Home -> Top Sites
Then it can be toggled off. Whew!
EDIT: It's still not nice to have this sort of thing come up by surprise.
Unfortunately, I quickly bumped into one simple deal-breaker (the same that discouraged me from using Opera once, if I recall). Firefox adds a few pixels of useless gap space above the tabs, meaning I always have to move the cursor slightly downwards when changing tabs.
Some googling revealed the bug was actually reported over a year ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1302168
As of now, it persists. Back to Chrome - see you again next year : )
The problem - see the link to Bugzilla I pasted - is supposedly related to the use of multiple displays (which involves different DPI settings). A small thing to be sure, but somewhat annoying, given that switching tabs is a fairly common action when using a web browser.
What's unpleasant is how long it takes to resolve it. From Bugzilla:
> This is a pretty annoying usability regression that will ship in 50. Will we be able to fix it for 51?
It's version 57 :)
I kinda like it, small text looks a bit stronger and smoother à-la OS X.
(which is a link to details)
Compare this to Chrome, Safari, and Edge (tagline: "A fast and secure browser that's designed for Windows 10"): https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/features.html, https://www.apple.com/safari/, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge.
Perhaps this is just a marketing or internal communication issue. Did somebody from security engineering have a seat at the table when the Firefox 57 marketing material was discussed?
The message for Firefox 57 is performance. This doesn't mean that other stuff wasn't improved (case in point, better sandboxing), just that you can only tell one story at a time.
This affects more than just the pulse, but you'll probably actually be happy about that...
It's more or less:
let quickStretchPW = PBKDF2(email, password)
let authPW = HKDF('authPW', quickStretchPW)
let unwrapBkey = HKDF('unwrapBkey', quickStretchPW)
I keep two instances of Firefox (Release and Nighly) on my work computer (Windows 10), Nightly on my phone (Android) and a couple computers at home running Firefox ESR (Debian). No problem whatsoever, even with such an heterogenous setup.
Do you have any particular need that you think steers from the normal and that Chrome does currently serve? Because for my use case, everything works perfectly.
2) Any way to remove the bottom bar icons when the omni bar completion box shows? ... wait... How do I even edit search engines in Firefox? Like say, typing "yt (space) search term" to do a search on YouTube?
http://www.stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/%s
When I add a search via right clicking the search box on that site it doesn't work.
Plus, the completion UX is great on Chrome, as soon as you press space or tab aftert he keyword it confirms with a special UX "Search Wikipediea" for example. Here, you get no feedback whatsoever... if I type sfs 1.1.1.1 is it going to google that, or is it actually going to search StopForumSpam for the IP ? I have no idea until I press enter. :(
UPDATE
Looks like you have to use "keywords for bookmarks"
(it will access the other bookmarks directly)
(fixed you try to I try to make it more about me ;)
Where did you report it?
[0] https://superuser.com/questions/982182/firefox-freezes-when-...
(Hint: if your post said “every time I try” instead of “every time you try,” I’m sure it would have been better received.)
Not too long ago it was the best.
The add-on support (uBlock) is absolutely crucial on mobile though so I could never go back to Chrome.
I end up swapping to safari for some functions and then using firefox for others. throw in 57 changes the look for no reason. I don't need dark tabs as default, updates should not change the user experience without permission
Seems like vertical-tabs-reloaded no longer works.
And no gestures if you are on Mac or Linux.
> As part of our focus on user experience and performance in Firefox Quantum, Google will also become our new default search provider in the United States and Canada.
Does that mean the deal with Yahoo! has lapsed? And is there a new deal with Google, or no deal at all? (And what would be the revenue impact of that?)
Edit: Just saw an announcement for this as well [2], with no word about revenue. Guess that means that Yahoo! isn't paying anymore and that it means Google is the more sensible choice when nobody pays - though that's still reading between the lines.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox...
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-go...
> According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), Yahoo paid Mozilla $375 million in 2015, and is obligated for the same amount each year through 2019 under a five-year contract.
> Under terms of a contract that has been seen by Recode, whoever acquires Yahoo might have to pay Mozilla annual payments of $375 million through 2019 if it does not think the buyer is one it wants to work with and walks away.
They could instead switch to some underdogs to help them improve, but no... Google it is again, with the excuse of "It's better for the user". Sad day, Mozilla!
But, Mozilla does often do partnerships with smaller, local search engines in small markets.
(I'm a Firefox dev)
Netflix revenue: $8,800,000,000
Lawsuit amount: $9,000,000 (or approx 0.1%)
Lawyers received: $2,100,000
Plaintiffs received: $30,000
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/class-action-law...
Netflix's global net income in 2012 was apparently $17 million.
A $9 million fine is then over half of their annual income.
[0] https://www.scribd.com/mobile/document/121853053/Netflix-4Q-...
DDG has every incentive to sell user data, given that they don't have their own ad network with which to target. How else would they make money off of it?
[1] Brendan Eich https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...
[2] Mozilla Information Trust Initiative : https://archive.fo/jcJWg
> Mozilla’s Open Innovation team will work with ["like-minded"] technologists and artists to develop technology that combats misinformation. Mozilla will partner with global media organizations to do this, and also double down on our existing product work in the space, like Pocket, Focus, and Coral.
Firefox is the gatekeeper to the web for many and if Mozilla or this initiative is going to inject their bias in the browser, then it means that anyone that Mozilla or the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative disagrees with will get censored or their speech altered. No organization that is run by humans can make the claim that they won't have a bias one way or another. In order to have a free society, we must have the freedom to express any idea (no matter how stupid they might be). People have become too lazy to look at other sources or challenge what they hear. Ideas need to be challenged in the open and be able to hold their own weight. We should not need an organization or a browser making those calls.
tl;dr FF without NoScript is basically Chrome, without NoScript Firefox is meaningless to me, it's the only thing that has kept me on Firefox.
* No multi-row tab bar and no way to get it (from Tab Mix Plus)
* Tabs are ugly square and no way to get them rounded
* Tabs are too small and no way to set minimal tab size
* Tabs are all the same color and no way to get them colored again
* No tab groups, the replacement is containers, but there is no way to move an existing tab into a container and no way to only see tabs for a particular container.
* Tab Session Manager seems to provide named sessions, although I have not tested it properly yet
I wouldn't say that the new FF is completely useless, but it has affected my browsing experience in a strongly negative way. I will give it a few days, but at this point Chrome might provide more features I actually want (never thought I would say that).
Edit: Reading other comments in this thread, I found a link to a set of CSS files that bring rounded tabs back (https://github.com/wilfredwee/photon-australis). Unfortunately it disables color coding container tabs which makes separating containers a pain. Well, guess you cannot have everything.