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Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

Firefox was never away, at least for me. Therefore the expression "Firefox is back" sounds a little odd to me.

I have been using it since 2006 (Firefox 2.0). Back then, the presence of the Firebug extension for Firefox made me switch to Firefox as my primary browser.

Two years later, Chrome arrived but Firefox remained as my primary browser because I wanted to continue using the Vimperator extension for Firefox that allowed mouseless browsing with Vim-like key bindings and commands.

Firefox still remains as my primary browser with Chrome being an additional browser that I use sometimes. These days, I use the Vimium extension for both to use Vim-like key bindings. I occasionally use Safari and qutebrowser too.

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I have a very similar background with Firefox / Firebug and Vimperator, but there was a period where - despite all JS benchmarks seemingly proving otherwise - Chrome's real / perceived performance completely blew FF out of the water. Specifically things like startup time, opening a new window or tearing a tab off one, time to first content displayed when clicking a link, etc. As a result from about 2011 to 2017, I kept periodically checking back with FF, but was effectively a Chrome convert (Vimium was a good enough replacement for Vimperator). Once Servo hit the FF mainstream, it immediately felt faster, and I switched back. I still find myself switching back to Chrome for web dev debugging, probably for familiarity reasons. In this sense though, I'm sure I'm not the only one for whom "Firefox is back".

Do you mean "Quantum hit the mainstream"? Most of Servo itself it still a research project at this stage.

Yepp, you're right.

It’s for your average NY Times reader that doesn’t keep up with the day-to-day tech news world.

And don't forget about those thousands (millions?) of users who suddenly found Chrome installed on their computer because they updated their Virus Scanner or installed some Freeware where it was bundled with Chrome.

Still an upgrade from IE8 the same group would be using. I'm not advocating bundled installs, but installing secure (compared to old IE) browser alongside antivirus software is one of the very few cases where it makes sense.

From my private IT support perspective: I hate it! My "customers" have FF installed and are every time utterly confused missing their favorites on their "Internet Program".

There is so much wrong with this bundling but yes, it's probably still better then IE...

Same here, but I think we're in a bubble.

Looking at the past market share we're clearly the minority

The same for me, but with the recent Firefox they broke the old addons and the current ones cannot do the same.

I hope they fix that regression.

WebExtensions (aka new generation addons) are getting more powerful with each version :)

Thanks for the info. :) Great work so far!

High on my list is for the extensions to work on about:* and addons.mozilla.org pages.

I like to use Vimium everywhere and 'Dark Background and Light Text' to also work on the preferences.

Also I really miss DownThemAll... I tried a couple of replacements, but they didn't for instance download all books from a Humble Book Bundle.

Oh really ... Not having DownThemAll just breaks my entire workflow, and there's no replacement. They should have at least considered the "most popular add-ons" to be in working condition before even releasing WebExtensions to all.

> High on my list is for the extensions to work on [...] addons.mozilla.org pages.

There's actually an about:config setting that fixes this already. I put a helper in Tridactyl for it called `:fixamo` [1], but you can easily do it manually by setting

"privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" = true

and

"extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" = ""

(Unfortunately, this does nothing about about: pages or the PDF viewer which used to work but was "fixed" :( ).

[1] https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/blob/8c49d26340cdc0db3c...

privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager does not exist in my about:config.

Just changing "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" is apparently not enough.

I also tried :fixamo in tridactyl, but it just returns: "# Error: Attempt to postMessage on disconnected port"

I was using version 1.13.1pre1454 with FF 60.0.2.

Have you tried adding the setting that doesn't exist manually? There's a little + button you can click on about:config.

---

That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?

> That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?

I did not, but now I have.

:fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work.

Adding "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" manually and setting it to true did the job. Thanks!

So far I like Tridactyl, especially the useful commands, but since it seems to be incompatible with other addons that overwrite the NewTab page. I think I will have to disable it.

I also miss the smooth scrolling experience with j,k from VimiumFF, jumping lines like Tridactyl does makes me loose the point were I left of. I might check back how the progress is going tough.

> :fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work.

You need to restart the browser afterwards. Sorry, people usually find the command through the help page where it has all of these caveats.

We have smooth scrolling, you just need to do `set smoothscroll true`. It's a bit rubbish, though.

You can often fix the new tab page by disabling and re-enabling the new tab add-on you want. Every time Tridactyl is updated it will steal the page back, so I'd suggest that you don't use the beta releases and instead use the normal ones.

We could reasonably easily provide a build that didn't use the new tab page (we occasionally get people who feel very strongly about this) but I'm afraid it's quite low down my list of priorities. If you're feeling up to it there's an issue open: https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/issues/534

But I won't hold it against you if you use Vimium. It's very well polished : )

> You need to restart the browser afterwards. Sorry, people usually find the command through the help page where it has all of these caveats.

:help fixamo

Does not state that I need to restart firefox afterwards. [1]

I did restart firefox after I installed `native` and before I run :fixamo. :native also returned that the it was installed correctly before I run :fixamo.

[1]: fixamo

    fixamo(): Promise<void>

        Defined in src/excmds.ts:290

    Simply sets

     "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager":true
     "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains":""

in about:config via user.js so that Tridactyl (and other extensions!) can be used on addons.mozilla.org and other sites.

    Requires native.
    Returns Promise<void>

Ah, good spot. I've added that to the documentation now.

If you're saying that a restart didn't make fixamo work, would you mind filing an issue so we can try to fix it?

Edit: sorry, I should have been clearer: fixamo edits a file which is only read at Firefox startup, so you need to run fixamo and then restart.

> If you're saying that a restart didn't make fixamo work, would you mind filing an issue so we can try to fix it?

No I haven't tried that. After I run :fixamo and that didn't work I just opened about:config and change those settings myself without restarting firefox.

Edit: Since I now continued to test tridactyl I found that this newtab overwriting function gets pretty annoying from a usability perspective. When I start a new Tab with [Ctrl]+[t] and immediately type my desired address part of it will be overwritten when 'about:blank' is inserted. I guess you want people to use just a binding to :tabopen, but I do like my options. Also since :tabopen do not contain my bookmarks I prefer using the address line.

Ok, great. That means the only bug is bad documentation and feedback to users. Thanks for your time!

> Since I now continued to test tridactyl I found that this newtab overwriting function gets pretty annoying from a usability perspective. When I start a new Tab with [Ctrl]+[t] and immediately type my desired address part of it will be overwritten when 'about:blank' is inserted. I guess you want people to use just a binding to :tabopen, but I do like my options. Also since :tabopen do not contain my bookmarks I prefer using the address line.

Huh, that is annoying. I hadn't noticed that. There's not much we can do about it though, short of just disabling the new tab page.

The lack of bookmarks in tabopen is annoying, I agree. We rushed to get the completions out with Tridactyl, and did it shoddily and haven't bothered to rewrite it yet.

There is bmarks which just completes from bookmarks, but that opens things in the current tab.

Breaking "old" add-ons with no working replacement and no way to implement quite a few of them killed FF for me. What those idiots at Mozilla don't get is that without the add-ons their stock browser is no better than any other.

Yes to me too.

I can also use it on android with ublock etc. Chrome hasn't even been installed in my main computer in maybe a year, firefox works for everything I need, including google apps for business mail and youtube.

My biggest reason for using it is the fact that it is open source, the other is that ad-block software actually block calls to adds not just the display of them as in chrome.

I personally was never impressed by firebug. I haven't checked it out in a while but it was incredibly clunky.

Isn’t it essentially the prototype for all modern browser dev tools though? As in, they are all substantially similar to what Firebug was like, and Firebug existed before any of the others?

I could be getting my history wrong, but from what I remember Firebug was absolutely mind-blowing.

I remember the first time I found the firebug JavaScript snippet, I could finally use a decent debugger when testing other browsers.

That was equally kind blowing to me.

Firefox since at least 2004!

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