Totally agree with this. I think it was a mistake on Mozilla's part not to put more effort into extension parity before the switch-over. But I'm relatively optimistic for the future.
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.