It's time to port your extension to Firefox | Hacker News Reader

It's time to port your extension to Firefox

danielde.dev

66 pointsDanielDe35 comments

I wish more people would talk about the goods of Firefox!!!

It's becoming so un-loved and so neglected by users (and specially developers!) this days that I fear that tomorrow there won't be an alternative to chrome at all :(.

Those who lived the Internet Explorer 6 should be the ones to rise up first.

But everyone seems to have forget how bad it was and how hard it was to destroy that monopoly.

Developers should be the first to rise for Mozilla.

I think we own Firefox the good things we still have on the web. They fought for standards, for example...

Please, create a movement or something... Make noise... But don't neglect Firefox.

We need alternatives and we all are responsible for allowing projects like Firefox to exist (by using them)...

It's very sad to be ungrateful!!!

Everyone should take clues on the post from the OP...

i'm sympathetic to this philosophically, but firefox is so bad on linux (of all platforms) for my normal use it's crazy. slack chokes up constantly on it (maybe due to too much local data?) and when i lose internet, firefox will get stuck saying "can't connect" when chrome, ping, curl all do fine.

and tbh..using my google account to sync my bookmarks is gonna beat any value-add firefox can offer. i have chrome on my iphone just to open safari pages in it to bookmark-sync them for later.

Firefox offers an account (bookmarks, tabs, etc) sync functionality with between the desktop browsers and mobile apps.

> when i lose internet, firefox will get stuck saying "can't connect" when chrome, ping, curl all do fine.

When you lose Internet, how are Chrome, ping, and curl all connecting? Am I missing something?

Just an aside: I frequently see people say things like "X software is bad because [thing that makes it completely unusable]". This is always very surprising to me, because it's obviously a bug state, and not the expected operation of the program. Granted, the program being completely broken for you is a perfectly good reason to use a different program, but you can't really use it to call the program "bad", because almost by definition, it's something that very few other users are seeing. If a program instantly crashes whenever you try to launch it, it's a bit silly to rate it one star in your app store of choice, because (almost certainly) the failure state is both unexpected and fixable.

So, case in point, it's simply not true that "Firefox is so bad on Linux". Most users are not seeing absurdly slow websites, nor broken connections. This is obviously some kind of bug. I'm not going after you in particular, but this is a very common thought pattern on this site, and I want to highlight it.

oh sorry, i meant when i regain connection after losing internet

Firefox on Linux has consistently worked brilliantly for me for years - until a few months ago. I now find it really struggles with Zoom, and regularly becomes barely responsive with Slack.

But I don't know if this is because of changes to Firefox, Slack/Zoom, Linux, Nvidia drivers, or something else. And I have no way to find out, short of retraining as a desktop performance engineer.

Firefox Sync will synchronize your tabs and bookmarks. So, Chrome is about at the same level.

As far as apps choking on it, considering Slack can't be arsed to make their calls work on Firefox, I have an idea who to blame, and it's not Mozilla.

It works great for me on Linux. There are obviously some confounding factors here that happen to disproportionately impact Firefox on your system.

Setting all else aside, I'd use Firefox over Chrom{e|ium} browsers simply on technical and user-experience grounds. For general browsing, it simply works better, more quickly & smoothly.

Admittedly, I do keep Ungoogled Chromium & Brave around for the occasional Chrome-centric website, but I only end up using them a couple times a month.

I am only a causal Slack user, so while I haven't had any issues on Firefox using Slack, I could imagine there being issues.

I use it daily on Linux for years now!

I've used it under openSUSE (either Leap or Tumbleweed), under Lubuntu, under kubuntu, and now under KDE Neon and I never had any issue with it!

Naturally, there are lots of people that can't say the same! But my experience has been mostly a breeze :)

There are some decisions I don't agree with... But that's life...

I use Firefox all the time on Linux. Sounds like there's something else funny going on with your system.

I maintained a browser extension tha works on Chrome and Firefox, and it depends on a third party project that uses Angular 1.x. Publishing the extension on Chrome Store is easy, whereas Firefox's reviewer requires that only the latest version of Angular 1.x can be used. The third party project that I depend on uses a older version of Angular 1.x, and the author refused to update it. So it forced me to fork the project to update Angular. Although I think this reviewing process is better to user, but as a developer, it is more annoying to deal with.

This is really interesting, and I appreciate the opposing argument! I wasn't aware that Mozilla checked for stuff like this.

Yeah, it's very strict, but at the same time, I've never seen any "Mozilla killed my extension without explanation" rants, which seem to be very common with Google.

At least you were told why it was rejected. That’s often not the case on Chrome.

I must be in the minority, but I stopped using browser extensions many years ago. The amount of security and privacy issues of allowing 3rd party software to run on pages I visit makes me shudder. It's difficult enough to stop the pages themselves, their analytics and ad partners from tracking me and leaking my data, I don't want to voluntarily add to this problem.

The only extensions I would need are for ad blocking, which is solved with a DNS blocker on my router, avoiding the need to set it up on all my devices separately, and a password manager, which I find I don't actually need since copy/pasting from a terminal with pass works well enough. So now all my browsers run as vanilla as possible, with maybe a built-in dark theme.

In this specific case Keysmith can record any input on any page and play it back. While the functionality is undoubtedly useful, the keylogger aspect sounds like a huge privacy risk. Their privacy policy[1] "promises" they will never collect or sell any sensitive data, but frankly why should I trust it or trust that it won't change without my knowledge? Especially with a proprietary app I can't inspect the source code of.

The Chrome Web Store submission process sounds like a nightmare, but I'm more concerned that such an invasive extension was ultimately allowed on both platforms, and that it was approved on Firefox in just 24h.

[1]: https://www.keysmith.app/privacy-policy

I think there's a big difference between commercial web browser extensions that are basically turning into what toolbars used to be and (usually) open-source extensions that really are what they say - something that extends what your browser can do.

A well-made extension these days with no ulterior motives will be scoped tightly to only the site it's designed for or not even that, if it only modifies the browser chrome. I have like 20-30 extensions currently installed on my workstation, but only three of them have global content access (uBlock, Bitwarden, Dark Reader - all FOSS). The rest are highly site-specific and don't even see any other sites, so I'm not too worried about them.

> [Google] had rejected our extension 6 times with no detail because of a technicality.

Sounds like a good company to do business with.

Wow, I didn't know that porting to FF was so easy. Good to know!

As a FF user, yay! However, I am a tad confused if the comparison is indeed apples-to-apples. E.g is chrome and firefox app team running similar suite of tests? What if firefox app team only checks for typos in the title (contrived). Of course it feels good to get an immediate approval.

In any case, the process (both Chrome/FF) should be as transparent as possible so a dev knows what they are dealing with. I can't imagine the frustration to have to deal with unhelpful automated responses.

Yep, this is a great point. But as you say, it's hard to know if Chrome is actually doing anything substantively better or not since I don't actually know what they're doing. And from what I've observed through this process it seems like whatever they're doing isn't consistent.

For what it's worth, Firefox asks for an unminified source bundle during the submission process (including for all updates), and Chrome does not. This doesn't mean that anyone over at Mozilla is actually looking through that source, but it's an interesting difference.

It's not clear which version of the extension was initially submitted for Firefox approval: the one with the redundant permission or the one without. If the latter, even though I'm inclined to believe Mozilla probably do have a more developer-friendly process in place, it's not really a fair comparison.

> So we created a Firefox developer account, submitted our extension, and girded ourselves for another rough ride.

Again, if the permissions had been fixed by this point, and Google had accepted it, why would you assume a rough ride from Mozilla?

Yeah, this does make the comparison less fair. Mozilla might have been similarly unhelpful about this issue.

But some other points still stand, like how Firefox got back to us quickly about the "delay", and how they showed our position in a queue. Google, on the other hand, was worse than just opaque about the process.

Why were we worried about Mozilla? Because things were so bad with Google that we figured something had to go wrong with Mozilla. So we put our psychological guard up just in case.

I am personally using a lots of browser extensions because of my dev job. I have switched some years ago to Chrome when it was faster than Firefox for a short moment. Now i consider going back because Chrome eats so much RAM there is little left for node.js and vscode. Even more with every extension installed. I had to disable bunch of these for that reason.

I know it is off topic. However, can anyone share info if Firefox is better at this point considering memory usage?

It's not. I'm sorry. I'm regularly dumping 30GB into FF. There's nowhere else to go though. =/.

The frustrating thing about modern browsers is that none of them try to be good desktop citizens, for the lack of a better term. If you have 8 or 16 or 32 or 64 GB of memory, and you open enough tabs, your browser will eventually consume all of it, even though most browsers are perfectly capable of suspending unused tabs when they're under memory pressure. They simply don't register a problem until your memory is nearly gone.

If you have swap space, it's even worse, because there's not noticeable memory pressure until you've always consumed a good bit of your swap. So I frequently find myself in a situation where I start compiling something or launch a game, and have my computer immediately slow to a crawl. Check htop, and it's always the browser I have open, taking ~13 GB of memory and another 4 GB of swap. It's certainly true that "unused RAM is wasted RAM", but that only holds when you can reclaim low priority RAM when you need to launch something new. Browsers are really bad at doing that, so they sit rather uncomfortably next to the other programs on your desktop.

Bingo. You got it. `/salute`. Given sandboxing security features, it's too easy to balloon up too. I periodically have to restart the application (which incurs some costs on this external cognition process, unfortunately). Browsers aren't built for people like me (and the way standards maliciously churn qua Google doesn't inspire confidence in finding a long-term, meaningful solution), and I appreciate that it's seemingly a lot to ask. Btw, my name is h0p3. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for your charitable response.

I am extremely surprised at what the other poster is saying. I've had 400+ tabs running and my highest memory usage is 5GB. Some things like Slack will of course be horrible, but it's the same as Chrome.

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I can only wonder if the experience has been similar for Brook Hong, the developer of Surfingkeys[0], which is the only extension I've experience with that works on both Firefox and Chrome.

[0] https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys

Wait, so the reason why google is evil in this case is because the extension was requesting multiple overlapping permissions, some of which were subsets of others?

The reason google is evil in this case is they wouldn't deign to provide any information when it was requested to resolve the problem.

My point with this post isn't that Google is being evil, it's that what they're doing is frustrating. And the most frustrating part isn't even that they rejected our extension on a technicality, but rather that they weren't consistent with this policy, as demonstrated by the fact that they accepted the exact same extension with the exact same permissions a couple months earlier.

Firefox is a dead browser. #ChangeMyMind

“BSD is dead, happynacho confirms it”

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