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Comment by super_mario | Hacker News Reader

As far as I'm concerned Firefox is dead. I'm sticking with 56 and Pentadactyl for the times I need to do extensive research online where it is so much faster to browse and find things.

Otherwise, I'm using Safari and weaning myself off of all the power of VIM like browsing. Safari also happens to be so much smoother and does not kill the battery.

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I would switch to ESR version - at least you will get security updates.

Was there anything changed between versions 52 and 56 that would make this a retrograde step?

Perf improved considerably over that span, even before e10s officially landed.

For another year. And that year flies fast...

FWIW, I've been using Vimium-FF [0] and it works great. There's no need to give up "vim-like browsing".

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

Vimium is nice, but if you've used VimFX/Pentadactyl or other XUL based VIM addons, the WebExtension versions are lacking in important ways.

The biggest problem I have with them right now is that FF entirely prevents addons from working in "system" pages like the settings pages or the new tab page (NB this includes some actual web pages that Mozilla has "blessed"). Another problem is that there is no way to focus the address bar programmatically, forcing addons to use clunky workarounds like the Vimium omnibar, which has an inconsistent UX compared to the rest of the system.

Hotkeys, especially in a VIM-oriented model, must work consistently across the entire experience, and Mozilla has decided to explicitly disallow this for addons.

Vimium is better than nothing, but due to limitations of the WebExtension system, is strictly incapable of providing the browsing experience that I'm used to. In its current state, it is not a suitable replacement for me.

The same is true for the various mouse-gestures addons.

I applaud Mozilla.

Never had any use for extensions. For me Web browsing is all about HTML/CSS and some occasional JavaScript, everything else is better achieved via native apps.

If your use case is so simple that essentially any browser meets your needs, why do you find it strange that others might have different needs?

I never understood why people have such a hard time with choice. And why saying something no longer meets your needs evokes such reactions.

Because safety. Mozilla and others are just making the Web browsers safer.

It was necessary the Internet and explosion of security exploits to realize that although plugins in-process are easier to implement, the older out-of-process architecture was safer and harder to exploit.

> Because safety. Mozilla and others are just making the Web browsers safer.

And yet they broke things like NoScript, which provided security/privacy features missing from plain Firefox and unavailable on any other browser no matter what extensions you installed. If safety was really such a high priority, they would have waited until after a full-featured NoScript WebExtension was possible to implement before deliberately breaking XUL extensions.

Vimperator/Pentadactyl are mostly useful for plain HTML/CSS pages, not webapps :)

They're mostly a way to use the regular browser functions, only with the keyboard rather than the mouse. But this works best for regular sites, and poorly for webapps that use JS-activated links and such.

This is unfortunately true, though it doesn’t have to be. The problem with webapps generated with JavaScript is that it’s tempting to create a custom implementation of built-in functionality. Good old anchor tags are “visible” to screen readers that visually impaired people use to browse the web. Chances are your JavaScript Link hack isn’t because you forgot to include the role=“link” attribute. Keybinding extensions are similarly blind when developers write inaccessible markup.

The solution is for developers to spend a day learning about accessibility. A good starting point is https://webaim.org/intro/.

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