Web Extension equivalents to legacy Firefox add-ons | Hacker News Reader

Web Extension equivalents to legacy Firefox add-ons

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37 pointsvinchuco13 comments

I was skeptical, but one month in, I have to admit the speed and stability gains are worth the lost addons. Fortunately for me, I only had to give up very small conveniences.

I did lose a few hours over XMarks' inability to sync Firefox search keywords correctly anymore (it's not solved, but you can input the keywords yourself on all your machines and they won't be erased) but that's it.

I was skeptical, and one month in, I still sort of hate it, but there isn't really anywhere else to go.

Firefox 1.0 arguably had better UI, or at least the option to make it better.

Also, I remember running it on a 32MB machine. Today, with only this single HN tab open, memory consumption is reported at somewhere above half a gigabyte.

This pains me too. It's hard to believe that all the new "browser technology" is responsible for this bloat.

On the other hand, I will trade memory use for many things. One thing that is infuriating to me is that despite the memory hog, a single tab can still crash the whole browser. All the memory use doesn't even buy you failure isolation.

Originally via: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6i1fu2/webext_equi...

The main thing I miss is "It's All Text!", which the creator / maintainer indicated was impossible to port away from Legacy, in no small part due to the security aspects of it.

I really, truly, hate inputting anything more than a couple of lines in to websites. Worse when you're fighting WYSIWYG editors, fixed box widths. Even worse than that is when you spend 20 minutes filling in the box, hit submit and find your session timed out.

"It's All Text" allowed me to just click an "edit" button beside the text box, go edit the thing in my favourite text editor, hit save and then go click submit in the browser. If the site screwed up somehow, the text was still open in my text editor.

It's not precisely impossible to port, but it's a lot more complicated; in practice it requires a separate platform-specific executable, registered with the browser, to marshal between the browser and the editor.

I miss it, too. But not enough to reimplement it, at least not yet.

I was a heavy It's All Text! user, too, and fortunately, an alternative exists, implemented just as you describe. See: https://github.com/jlebon/textern

Why not just type in your editor of choice, copy, paste? I started doing this when I got stuck using Outlook online (worst editing and reading experience ever or worst IMAP experience ever, hard to choose). Is saving a keystroke or 2, maybe even losing a few when things go wrong, worth the extra dependency and attack surface in your browser?

I just want to be able to scroll through open tabs. I don't know why they'd disable this when even chrome has it.

It interferes with the tab overflow scrolling, which Chrome doesn't have.

So, in Firefox, if you open enough tabs, it will eventually overflow them and then you can scroll the tab list either with those little scroll buttons to the left and right or with the scrollwheel.

That makes sense but I'd have expected a configurable option from Firefox.

A much more helpful title would be "Webext equivalents to legacy Firefox add-ons" instead of "Firefox Stuff".

Thanks! We've updated the title from “Firefox Stuff”.

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