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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Happy to see that Mozilla was serious about their intentions to extend the WebExtensions API in post-57 Firefox. I'm also happily surprised at the section about user notification of extension overrides; having a nice UI for this sort of thing is a difficult yet worthwhile problem (and I'm also a big fan of the new Preferences tab in general, it works far better than the old popup window). Hopefully some of this will make it in time for the next ESR so that people who are still on Firefox 52 ESR due to unsupported extensions will have the option to upgrade (though I don't see anything that will satisfy the vimperator users, I'm encouraged by the new mouse gesture APIs). Kudos to Mozilla for conducting this process with an eye towards keeping the security threat of addons reasonably manageable, even if the overall process is slower than we'd otherwise like.

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I discovered tridactyl (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim...) a couple months ago. While it doesn't have total parity with vimperator, it's much closer than vimium and vimFX, and unlike for those projects, parity seems to be the actual goal.

YMMV, but as someone who was stuck on ESR for a long time for this reason I am now completely satisfied on 57.

It's decent, but there are some major shortcomings caused by the WebExtensions API. For example if you somehow get caught in address bar, you can only leave it by pressing Enter or reaching for the mouse and clicking somewhere else. Another inconvenient feature is the time it takes for the extension to be loaded. On bloated and slow pages, I have to wait for a second or two while pressing the shortcuts to switch to another tab or anything. Basically the whole extension-driven keyboard UI locks up waiting for the page to finally load. And this is not because these extensions are slow, but because they get initialized only some time after the webpage has already begun loading.

Yeah, it's really annoying.

I find that :reloadall helps my sanity a lot if I'm navigating through lots of already open tabs, and I've just about got used to using <C-Tab> rather than gT.

We're trying to extend web-extensions to get around the limitations [1], but progress is slow.

[1] https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api

It's funny that vimperator is mentioned every single time Firefox extensions are brought up on HN even though it only has about 11,000 users out of the hundreds of millions that use Firefox.

In my defense, one of my own housemates is one of those who has refused to update for want of vimperator. :P

Same here.

I've tried alternatives like Waterfox and Pale Moon, but Waterfox is incompatible with some sites, and Pale Moon is dog slow, so I reverted back to Firefox 56.

Not upgrading a browser is a scary situation to be in, but I just can't sacrifice the usability of Vimperator.

> I've tried alternatives like Waterfox and Pale Moon, but Waterfox is incompatible with some sites

Oh, I haven't experienced that in a few months of usage. What kind of incompatibilities did you come across?

I was initially reluctant about trying Waterfox and made several backups of my then-Firefox profile, but it's been a smooth sail and an easy switch so far.

In Waterfox, Slack shows a message that it doesn't support the browser and refuses to load. This could possibly be bypassed by changing the UA, but I don't agree with that workaround. Although, if hard pressed, I might have to.

And I mistakenly wrote Pale Moon above, when I meant IceCat. I've yet to try Pale Moon, but it's on my list.

I use Slack at work as a requirement. I tried going into its video chat feature and it said that it's not supported on Firefox, please use Chrome.

So that's where Slack is w.r.t. Firefox; never mind FF derivatives.

Please consider using ESR 52 instead of 56. ESR 52 gets security patches until June 2018.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/10/04/firefox-s...

I'm posting this comment using FF 56 also. I don't agree with the decisions they made. I think that the old extension mechanism is fine; add-ons should be able to integrate deeply into browser internals.

(a) It's dispoprotionately used among the tech audience.

(b) Users went back and forth between than and pentadactyl for a while, and both have the same issues in a webextension world

11,000 users (if true) isn't disproportionate among the tech audience, just HN commenters.

Well, 1) it's a legitimate use-case and 2) certainly the amount of Vimperator / Pentadactyl / Vimium etc users are a much higher percentage of HN users than among the population at large.

I used to be one of the users, but after the millionth time that an upgrade broke the extension I gave up on being able to use it.

I don't think about it often but even though I am mostly over it I get a little sad thinking about it. But only a little.

I've also stopped using tiling window managers.

Most of my time is spent either reading in the browser, writing code or typing in the terminal. I have sufficiently few windows most of the time that alt + tab does the job just fine. I prefer tabbing between windows now because it gives me bigger windows and more flexibility.

I think the scroll wheel is better for web browsing than hjkl.

But my code I will still often edit with Vim, though I sometimes use an IDE also.

For me, macros alone are worth installing Vimperator. Just record a series of steps once, then you can effortlessly play them back how many times you want. I just used it today to skip 20 pages in a dumb interface that only offers previous/next links.

  qafnextq20@a

I think its largely a showcase of an ideal: it changes the entirety of the interaction model, and this is ideally what the extension system should be capable of, even if relatively few people want such a significant change.

And, ideally, we should see extensions upturning the interaction model as users experiment with alternatives; that this is no longer possible, that the fundamental model is defined and hardcoded (with minor flavour differences), is, I think, a significant loss.

Its a shame there are few extensions like vimperator; its a greater shame there are none.

> though I don't see anything that will satisfy the vimperator users, I'm encouraged by the new mouse gesture APIs

Yep, me too. I switched to Waterfox for the time being because of how important FireGestures is to me. If full-fledged mouse gestures extensions become available in Fx again, that would be a big step towards making the new Firefox usable for me.

Since you mentioned vimperator, another major issue for me is the lack of a VimFx style extension - that one is much simpler than vimperator or pentadactyl, and has other new attempts at alternatives, but 'Saka keys' is the one that seems to come closest (and makes this less of an issue than the mouse gestures one) and that's still kinda buggy and years behind VimFx in terms of features.

I would have missed Tab groups though it's not that big of a deal to me, but I'm glad we'd have that feature again. And another minor issue in that league is the lack of a good Speed Dial extension with a decent UI and set of features (which none of the "replacements" had last time I tried them out).

Firefox 60 will be the next ESR version, so all of the Firefox 59 extension APIs described in this blog post should be available.

At least some of the mentioned APIs appear to be experimental and unstable, so it's still worth being measured in our optimism. :P

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