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Comment by the_grue | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why you are being downvoted. I have the same problem. I'm still stuck with Firefox 56 and no upgrade path in sight. I wish Mozilla declared FF 56 a LTS release for those of us who value their addons more than performance benefits of Quantum. Right now I'm still using an out-of-date release that doesn't receive critical security updates, and I have to choose between either downgrading 4 releases down to FF 52 (bad) or upgrading beyond FF 57 and losing addons that I came to rely on (unacceptable).

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Maintaining a LTS release while focusing on an entirely new technology with a limited number of devs available is an engineering nightmare. They have to choose their battles. The performance of the old Firefox was really bad compared to competitors and this technical debt wasn't sustainable on the long term. I'm happy that they've made this bold move (on the big risk of frustrating some users (rightfully so)), and happy that they rebuild a better browser for all of us (and I'm sure they will come back in the future with the same flexibility for addons).

>and I'm sure they will come back in the future with the same flexibility for addons

No they won't, they have been very clear on this matter. Web Extensions are crippled compared to NPAPI. You can't even disable javascript with them.

They are already maintaining FF 52 LTS (actually, in Mozilla terminology it's called ESR) They should've calculated this in advance and made FF 56 LTS. They could still do it now if they wanted...

He's being downvoted because of his choice of wording. It's perfectly legitimate to prefer Firefox prior to Firefox 57. It's not legitimate to:

- act like Mozilla just killed their extensions lightly. They gave lots of warning in advance and took many extra steps to ease the transition. They also had lots of really good reasons for doing it.

- blame Mozilla for marketing things based on what their market looks like. Most users were not affected at all by the extension ecosystem change, but were positively affected by the newfound performance, security and stability. They also would not have done it in the first place, if they did not think it was a necessary and good step. I really don't know what you'd expect them to market it as.

- in general, speak like you're the only user whose interests are worth considering.

Well, he's upset. After all, when you support a project for years, you convince your friends to switch, participate in the community, maybe write some extensions, and then it removes one of the main reasons you have ever been using it, you get upset. It's understandable... I used to have strong feelings about it as well. You say that Mozilla didn't kill their extensions lightly, etc. But still they didn't think to make 56 a LTS release to allow us a breathing space of at least a year of security updates until we decide what to do next. Going 4 releases back for someone who's used to be on the bleeding edge is quite daunting.

The thing that kept me from upgrading was TreeStyleTabs, but there is a non-XUL version of it which works fairly well.

While it is a pain, it's not as if Mozilla removed XUL support with no warning. What addons are you missing? Perhaps we can find updates or replacements?

Session manager is the main one that's missing for me. Nothing else can reliably selectively restore a session with full history and unloaded tabs on startup after a crash for me.

Interesting. I've never had an issue with the built-in session restore functionality. I'm not dismissing you, but asking what issues you've had with it (so that I can watch out for them.)

the add on can make multiple dated session stores and you can pick which to restore from.

Sometimes, usually after a crash, firefox will restore an empty session. Session manager has a working backup in those cases.

Likewise, I will not go further with firefox until there is a working session manager. The one supposed alternative that is compatible has poor reviews and appears unreliable.

I might add that I was a nightly user for over 30 prior versions.

For me it's EdgeWise, Session Manager, DownThemAll, Status-4-Evar.

Classic Theme Restorer, Tab Mix Plus, Session Manager, Status-4-Evar.

I've looked for replacements but haven't found anything that comes close. From what I can gather, much of the functionality that allowed these extensions is now removed from Firefox. I thought equivalent APIs were going to be made available so they could be ported but that didn't happen.

Which are the addons you're missing?

Do they have a GitHub site?

I miss Tab Groups, FWIW.

Why does it matter if they're on GitHub? Firefox no longer has the APIs for many of these extensions to be possible.

Why does it matter if they're on GitHub?

I'm not OP, but usually the conversation goes like this:

Person 1: <describes problem with open source software>

Person 2: It's open source. Have you submitted a patch yet?

I don't have an example handy, but when FF 57 was first released, I actually took the effort to check what are the prospects of extensions I use in future FF versions. I found at least one extension which required a feature that FF developers refused to fix because it would expose APIs they didn't want to expose, end of story. So it's not just a matter of "scratching your own itch", a lot of it is politics.

So it's not just a matter of "scratching your own itch", a lot of it is politics.

Absolutely. I don't personally believe that open source projects are above criticism - just explaining why the question was likely asked.

Everybody has their thing, but Tile Tabs was a killer app for me, and had no real equivalent in any other browser platform.

Bug 1318532 had a patch submitted which provided a WebExtensions-compatible API which would allow the original implementation to work, but this was spiked permanently because of :reasons: The developer, DW-dev has been gamely trying to provide similar functionality via implementing a browser-managed tiling window manager, but this seems doomed to failure since it is at the mercy of the display rendering on the target OS. For example, on MacOS, a massive shadow is rendered around an active window, which thus renders over the top of a neighboring tiled window.

Doubt this one will get fixed ... unless Chrome implements it. Right now the objective seems to be full Chrome "compatibility" and Chrome doesn't have it.

After I gave up on Classic Theme Restorer, 4 most useful addons remain: EdgeWise, Session Manager, DownThemAll, Status-4-Evar.

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