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Comment by mrich | Hacker News Reader

The plugin breakage is the only downside of the new Firefox, the rest is just awesome.

I'm still looking for a new auto form filler that can have multiple profiles and fills in all fields at once with a hotkey. This is useful for filling in bugzilla bug reports where some fields always get the same data.

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Yes for awesome, and the new Web Extension API which now breaks things will make cross-browser browser extension development possible (as far as I have read!). I can very well live in default-land for a couple of weeks for that.

Also, this extension-breakage taking place right now seems to be mostly the extension developers' fault, since they've known well in advance that this is coming. (Not judging, just saying -- many/most extensions are probably hobby projects, and porting them appears to take a non-trivial effort.)

EDIT: removed a word from a wrong place :) Definitely not a spelling mistake, not wording either, hmm, what should I write here.

I have a small extension (~100 users) that I forgot to upgrade until 57 landed and broke it. I hastily threw together a WebExt version and pushed on Wednesday night, but forgot to set the strict_min_version flag correctly (which was, unfortunately, Firefox 57).

The new version worked fine for people on 57, but for anyone that was on ESR or a slightly out-of-date version of firefox and updated they got a broken WebExtension that I couldn't push another update to to fix it - Firefox doesn't let you "downgrade" from a WebExtension to a native extension. Thankfully a user emailed me about it and I had it fixed in less than 48 hours, but it was still a mess. All I could do was add a note to the addon description and disable the bad versions and anyone that got broke had to manually downgrade.

The new Webextensions are nice, but it was definitely easy to shoot yourself in the foot with the transition. I know that NoScript also needs the same API that I was using (the ability to inspect response bodies), FWIW.

The extension is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gpsdetect/ for those curious

EDIT: brevity

"The only downside" Sure. Aside from the number of other extensions that simply won't work in new Firefox. And the lack of any user control to make the browser not work like or look like Chrome.

And Telemetry that's difficult/impossible to remove.

> And the lack of any user control to make the browser not work like or look like Chrome.

How is that? The omnibox is toggle-able. The entire browser UI is drag-n-drop customizable. I literally don't know of a single thing that is less customizable in 57 than 56, but I'm curious to hear more about what you're referring to?

And downvoted for asking someone to explain their handwaving false criticisms. Hope this place never changes.

And the fact that today was the first time I have seen Firefox crash after 3+ years of heavy everyday usage. Luckily I didn't "upgrade" Firefox on my main machine. I'm staying away from 57 until they get it together.

For Classic Theme Restorer withdrawal, try custom userChrome.css code.

https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx

I love FF57 performance, but I'm having a hard time without Vimperator.

Saka keys provides a slice of vimperators functionality, might be worth trying. It's far from vimperator but better than nothing.

Can do that with Lastpass fwiw, but being as it's not a primary feature it's probably a bit clunkier than a dedicated tool. Mostly intended for filling in mailing addresses.

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