Web extensions are probably a small part of it but I have switched back to FF after ~5 years of Chrome. I also like the redesign but the killer feature was the noticeable speed up.
I consider myself a fan again!
There's talk that some API's will be built back, and hopefully with the increase in new users it should be worth it.
For example, on Xubuntu, a low resource friendly Linux distribution run by many on devices with small screens, Firefox 57 now is unable to hide the title window bar and unable to customise the size of tabs, reducing available screen estate by about an inch. In development versions of Firefox, they are enabling CSD for Firefox windows, so in a few months this might be better for the title bar, and in the article it seems as if theming tabs are being addressed.
A particular bug for me is the second time they removed being able to change to the next tab by mouse wheeling over the tab bar. They removed it in Firefox 34 or so (it was default, in built function) and pointed to using Extensions as the workaround. Now they have removed these very extensions that enabled that.
If only an extension could change userChrome.css! That would solve many people's problems.
This! Even if extensions were very restricted to only toggle pre-defined css rules or something, this could go a long way.
But they're clearly working on improving what you can do with extensions, only now they're doing it in a coherent manner rather than just letting people have access to the browser chrome to hack about whatever they fancied. And that feels much more stable and architecturally stable as something to build on for the future. I'm prepared to give them a few releases to build on that and make it both fast and extensible.
This should also enable them to keep the extensions that use supported apis working between releases much easier. I remember the early days of firefox where any update meant that some random subset of your extensions would break because they were doing something to the UI that the devs didn't expect.
There are hundreds of people tweeting about how Firefox 57 has ruined their browser experience, and they are representative Firefox users -- the kind who have been using it all along, and relying on all the software Mozilla just broke. I don't think Firefox will gain market share by alienating all these people, while attempting to beat Chrome at its own game.
I wonder if there is any set of circumstances that would cause Mozilla to realize that making a new browser and calling it Firefox was a bad idea. If market share still continues to tank -- like were they realize for every person like the parent commenters, there may be many pre-existing users who have no reason to use Firefox anymore -- would they then admit it was a mistake? My guess is there is no such set of circumstances... witness the fact that Mozilla originally cited declining market share as a motivating factor for this big change, but then recently we have stories like this https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/new_war_for_mozilla...
While they could have split the product into two (like they did with Firefox & Seamonkey) and let the former product languish, I'm not that would have made many users much happier. For what it's worth, you can still use Firefox 56 (or even Seamonkey).
>I also like the redesign but the killer feature was the noticeable speed up.
FYI, it was faster when NoScript worked. Tabs didn't crash constantly either.
I do have some empathy for your parent comment: I'm not particularly fond of NoScript v10's UI either, if that's their chief complaint. It's different and somewhat cartoonish, but I don't know if my reaction is because of the stylistic changes or the fact that it just changed.
Regardless, Raymond Hill released a version of uMatrix for Firefox 57 which I feel has somewhat more power than NoScript in certain areas (selectively blocking cookies is a nice addition), and I like the UI better. It's not as intuitive, arguably, as the original NoScript, but it's information-dense and provides a fantastic picture of what's going on--better than NoScript ever did.
NoScript 10 caught me on a good week, if I had been busier this week I wouldn't have had the patience either because it's definitely not doing things in a way I would expect.
Can I ask do you run it with ublock or other ad blockers?
So here are my notes for the previous version, I literally went to type this up only to find NoScript updated itself in the past day or two.
You have Default, Trusted, Untrusted and Custom.
Double-Clicking on either of those will give you more granular control ranging from scripts to media to fonts and webgl, which is nice. Untrusted has everything unchecked by default, Default seems to have scripting and most other things turned off by default, and Trusted and Custom you have to set yourself, with Trusted I think having Scripting on by default.
Now if you change the settings for any of these, at least on the previous version, your changes will apply to all domains under that category, so if you have scripting on for Custom, you'll have Scripting on for all domains you've set to Custom. Now whether this is still the case for the latest version, I couldn't tell you at this exact moment, but hopefully that's enough to get you started.
"Temporarily allow" also seems to have been replaced with a clock icon which you can find next to the Trusted and Custom category markers, which I only knew about from reading the blog updates. The latest update added three icons to the top right which are fairly self explanatory, one is options, one is for temporarily allowing all of the page and one is for revoking temporary permissions.
All in all I wouldn't say it is the most intuitive UI, particularly after having used NoScript for about 10 or 11 years. That said, if you're willing to allow yourself a bit of time to get used to it, most of the core functionality is retained, and is in fact a little bit more granular than before. When I have a little bit more free time, I intend to test out Custom a little bit and see if I can use it to allow some websites to render custom typography without having to run JavaScript. Theoretically that should be done completely in CSS, but I haven't kept on top of web standards since deciding not to be a web developer about 10 years ago so I'm not sure to what extent websites still depend on JavaScript for typography.
Anyway, Mozilla's history is such that I am not convinced they will do this.
https://hackademix.net/2017/11/21/noscript-1011-quantum-powe...
edit: I see it's there. Released yesterday. Yay! Now if only Firefox could add a "Add to desktop" option, I could really switch!
No, it isn't. uMatrix is a replacement only for the shallowest feature of NoScript. There's a ton of stuff that classic NoScript does that nothing else provides (including the new WebExtensions NoScript, so far).
Agreed, I plan to remove this. See: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/771#issuecomment-2...
NoScript classic has a lot of functionality that helps you keep sites usable when scripts are blocked, or to help you stay secure when you have to allow some scripts. Some of the latter features are protections that will occasionally get in the way of sites that are fucked up in non-malicious ways, but that doesn't make them misfeatures. In my experience, the only XSS filter false positive has been Wolfram Alpha, and I've only encountered the clickjacking protection with advertisements that are getting in the way of the content I'm trying to interact with.
Sounds good, but have you looked at the code behind this? The XSS filter is the same way – a giant mess that only protects against the most trivial of XSS anyway.
I forgot about its clickjacking feature, though. You’re right, that one is valuable.
Can't do that with UMatrix.
FYI you can actually use both NoScript and UMatrix at the same time.
NoScript ("allow first-party scripts" and block everything in "Embeddings" tab) + FlashBlock seem to be the only way to block all autoplaying crap in Firefox for me.
You can also add uMatrix, uBlock & RequestPolicy and surprisingly they don't conflict with each other!
This is the best Firefox , but I have lost a ton of extensions including my Vim extensions. So right now I use Qutebrowser and know that the new plugins will get added.
The other issues regarding limited control over the browsing experience may be resolved with future API expansion, but the previously mentioned hobbling is something with which we are most likely permanently stuck.
If Firefox provides the correct API's we might have the power of vimperiator back. Off the top of my head it needs:
1. A way to load config from the filesystem so I can keep its config with my other dotfiles
2. To be able to work on about:addons etc
3. To work in reader mode
4. Vim keybindings in textareas/inputs (although for modularity this could be a separate addon).
5. A way to open textareas etc in an editor - again for modularity this could be a separate addon.
6. Be able to open file://
7. A way to focus on the page content (away from e.g. url bar) - this could be a FF level hotkey though.
EDITED - I'm adding things as they come up.
But a few days before upgrading I found vim-vixen. It does 95% of the job. The performance improvements of FF 57 are well worth these 5% missing.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/
I've been using Firefox since way back in the day when I stopped using Opera 12 (and I had been using it even before that, I just had really crap hardware for a long time so I had to use Opera).
The devs obviously care about the product and its users and sometimes have to make tough decisions.
I think Firefox 57 is a good thing for Firefox's future. It's basically what the Mozilla rewrite or Firefox's being spun off from Mozilla did, but this time with less of a big-bang. And 1 year from now 99% of the current extensions will work.
And no, for the obvious question, they couldn't have done it the other way. I've been part of several migrations of this kind and people don't really move voluntarily 100% during migrations. Yes, the nice folks do it in time (say, 40%) but the rest have to be dragged along kicking and screaming.
Every change breaks someones workflow [1]. It sucks, but it happens because we need to acknowledge a point when the current system holds back progress more than the headaches introduced by a new system.
[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
No it hasn't: Firefox still doesn't ship an API capable of supporting many existing extensions. The developers of those extensions haven't had three years to port; they still can't port.
I really like how fast the new Firefox is, but I won't use it until Keysnail works.
JS-based (crippled IMHO) vertical tabs are also in Chrome. Why would someone switch from Chrome to Firefox to use a crippled extension?
I hope I am wrong but I don't think Firefox will be able to increase their market share. They may be able to stop losing their market share, which is not really a huge achievement.
And I doubt they're ever going to.
It's the Design Disease: Once a company has it in its head that it Knows Better, anyone who ditches their way for a different one is Wrong, just... Wrong in some way the company thinks is objective, based on whatever Design it has in its head, and must be brought back into the fold.
How tabs work is Design. Design must not be questioned. If you want your tabs to open such that you get a new tab right beside your current tab, instead of over a dozen tabs away at the end of the tab bar, you're Wrong, and having more than three or four tabs is Wrong, too.
They can say that Firefox is faster. I say it's easy to be faster when you're not solving the whole problem.
NoScript, Session manager and Self destructing cookies are the hurdles to clear for me - the rest I'll miss but can probably get by without. Note that both the session and cookie manager are in fact features that should already be part of Firefox and are not. And when I say 'clear', I mean functionally equivalent in all regards to pre 57 (NoScript fails that test).
Many people are unhappy with the extension situation. Mozilla have to take that into account and provide equivalent functionality fairly sharpish or face just being a chrome-clone.
By doing so, Mozilla shows that it cares about his user. Letting use old stuff that are not maintained anymore (if they are, a compatible version will shows up) lead you to situations like win32
By completely trashing a tool I'd spent years customizing without anything resembling feature parity ready by release? It's not really on the devs to port something when the new system is missing APIs. The "They had 5 years!" argument directed at the addon devs could just as easily be directed back at Mozilla...
Or perhaps by ignoring the loud negative feedback when I and many others said we didn't want paternalistic "thou shalt not install unless we say okay" controls on add-ons like Chrome has?
Or was it instead by ignoring my repeated questions on how to fix a ten-year-old SSL handling bug that causes a great deal of pain for sysadmins? (Vendors have a poor habit of reusing SSL certs - Firefox will flat out tell you to pound sand and not allow you to visit a site with a dupe cert. Chrome, IE, Opera, and I believe Edge will warn you that this is abnormal, but otherwise continue)
If this is how Mozilla cares for its users, I'd hate to see what they consider neglect.
It's not a zero-sum either: those of you who always used Firefox will surely benefit from it not dwindling into obscurity.
FF57 is absolutely the greatest version of Firefox to date. I have yet to hear a single legitimate complaint against it that actually holds up to scrutiny.
It breaks about 2/3 of the extensions I was using, and many of them don't currently have similar replacements available. That's a big loss in some of the functionality that made Firefox attractive as my default browser.
I understand the desire to fix fundamental architectural limitations. In the medium term some of those extensions will probably be updated or replaced. In the long term, the improvements may well pay off in terms of better security and better performance and easier development allowing faster progress. As a software developer I can see that the move was rational even if it is also somewhat controversial.
But in the short term, the loss is still significant for some users. That's a perfectly legitimate concern, and it's apparently sufficient that some people are not upgrading this time.
I tried to think forward, and proactively convert my greasemonkey scripts to new style FF extensions a few months back, to avoid dependency on GM. But abandoned that after it became clear that I'm not allowed to install my own extensions on regular Firefox, because of forced thir-party signing requirement. I have no need for signing. I could create an extension by zipping a directory. Now the workflow is 1000x more complex with all the crap loaded from npm required to sign it.
My web experience is s*it, ATM.
Firefox is great anyway. But it is power user hostile in some aspects too. Personal extensions/userscripts are central to my use of the web. So this is all quite annoying, since signing was enforced. And now even my userscripts broke with 57, as expected.
But Mozilla doesn‘t owe every single user his own build with their pet features.
> It's my computer, not Mozilla's.
Then you'll be overjoyed to hear about the unbranded builds! The exact same code, except it's yours, so it allows all extensions and doesn't say "Firefox" on it.
Sorry to hear this; but I think it's arguably more important for Mozilla to improve the web experience for a hundred million users who may never "write userscripts / extensions" for any website than to hamstring their development in order to avoid inconvenience to a single user who feels the need to customize every point of their web experience.
Also mandatory signing doesn't improve web experience for anyone. It's a security feature. Security is always inconvenient, almost by definition. So your point is invalid.
I don't mind change, I like new Firefox features, what I dislike is imposition of stupid lockdowns, and pointless control. One valid point, I might concede, is that there are innocent third parties affected if someone clueless confirms installation of some malevolent extension. So restricting it is somewhat justified.
Anyway, it's all still a sham. Anyone can still disable mandatory signing with a simple 10 line script patching omni.ja in any Firefox. So it's still no security against people who can be persuaded to enbale something in about:config, or run firefox with a command switch, or add some file to /etc/firefox/, or run a simple 10 line script "to make firfox compatible with our great extension".
To all those claiming that Mozilla doesn't owe this to their users, you are technically correct. But why piss off users when you can easily satisfy them with a simple option. I shouldn't have to use a patched browser for something so basic.
I think that the issue was that they were worried about people who don't understand the security implications turning verification off and getting themselves into trouble.
1. Video performance. Even something as simple as opening a video in reddit spikes my CPU to 100%, and before reluctantly installing Adblock Plus I ran into multiple kernel panics from opening articles on mainstream news sites and blogs.
2. Pinch-to-zoom isn't supported (closest alternative I could find is some about:config settings to make the pinch gesture equivalent to cmd++/-, which isn't useful).
I'm still using Firefox, and there's a lot that I like about it more than Chrome, but I'm seriously considering switching back because of those and some other minor issues.
Is it that easy to panic the macOS kernel?
At one point the whole browser crashed. So right now got Chrome and FF open and am switching depending on the site. Might just end up back in Chrome if this isn't resolved.
But then Mozilla management has been "weird" ever since they decided to chase Google's tail with rapid fire releases.
And frankly i fear that it, like some other big name FOSS projects, have attracted managerial types that are there more to pad their resume with "social" projects than actually caring for what they are dealing with.
And those in turn have introduced a "push to prod" culture of development...
SeaMonkey isn't a good role model here. Even before 57, the SeaMonkey release interval had lenghtened to multiple months. That is, evidently it hasn't been tracking Gecko security updates at Firefox's pace.
I understand getting salty about losing extensions, but sometimes a company has to make decisions that will get them back on track and recording some growth again. Sometimes a company has to overhaul their product to make it work for _more_ people and not their "minority but vocal core."
You run arguably the most "free" and "open" internet browser in the business. You are constantly pushing for standardization in the face of competing browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Edge; all of which are trying to establish a walled garden powered by browser specific features. Your browser is consistently losing market share to Chrome because you don't have the cash to spend on marketing partnerships and pre-installs like Google does. Your browser is a means to an end, not the end itself. Your browser exists purely to push forward the tenets of the open internet and open source software. You need market share to push further standardization and improvements to the web experience. To get this market share you need to ensure that your browser offers at least the same performance and security as other browsers. In order to do this, you need to make some backwards incompatible changes or risk falling into obscurity. It's a sacrific you have no choice but to make.