Sadly no news on the Web-extensions front. Several of my extensions continue broken.
I never really understood this argument, you gave up Firefox since you could no longer have your XUL/XPCOM extensions in favor of serious browsers who have less WebExt APIs than Firefox and don't have those same extensions?
And lets not ignore the fact that most sites are designed with Chrome as their intended target. FF simply doesn't work as well on many sites.
I don't want to go back to one browser dominating the web.
Did you try out the Firefox Nightly with WebRender enabled?
You're talking about GPU-accelerating complicated page renders.
I'm talking about things like regularly seeing flashes of unstyled content on page load, which I thought we'd left behind somewhere in the last millennium.
Never seen on my end for quiet some time, maybe worth a bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org
I don't want to make excuses if you're having a bad experience though. But I'm hopeful about the future of Firefox.
OK, but surely it should at least isolate buggy extensions so they can't compromise the browser itself? Wasn't better security and stability in the presence of bad extensions a key selling point of the new extension model? In practice, Firefox was failing to shut down and restart cleanly for me perhaps one time in three since Quantum, having been solid as a rock until that point. (I say "was" because I haven't yet seen this problem since updating to 59 the other day, so it's possible that that particular bug has now been fixed.)
Likewise, if it makes better extensions possible, how come the only observable difference so far seems to be that various things that extensions used to be able to do are no longer possible? It's looking like a classic case of going all-in on a big software rewrite, but finding that a lot of little details have been overlooked and useful functionality has been lost as a result.
The advantages are speed, security, ease of installation, ease of development since more thought was put into the APIs, compatibility with Chrome extensions, and better compatibility across platforms since extensions now use less native code. Those benefits are "observable". The downside is that you have to wait for Firefox devs to think though the security, performance, and usability aspects of every bit of functionality an extension dev wants, and then wait for the new or updated extension to exist.
Not yet, they aren't. In fact, the exact opposite has been observed here, many times already. This is my point.
As you say, I'm sure we all hope that the situation will improve in the future, and then maybe the sales pitch for Quantum will start to look a bit more realistic. Until then, sad as it makes me, Firefox will remain relegated to primarily a testing tool on my system, because today other browsers are simply better in every way that matters.
I still use it as my main browser at home, but with the extensions that used to set Firefox apart gone and forced to reset my workflow and expectations to the minimum common functionality, I find myself using Safari more and more at work simply because the battery usage is better and has out of the box support for SPNEGO. As an added bonus, I can watch HD videos smoothly without killing my processor and draining my battery.
Did you actually read the release notes? Quoting:
> Enhanced WebExtensions API including better support for decentralized protocols and the ability to dynamically register content scripts.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/01/26/extensions-firefo...
Some of those are coming or pretty much ready (tab hiding, addressbar focus), and others I've almost given up on, given how Mozilla seems to have changed their philosophy.