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Comment by TBurette | Hacker News Reader

I remember that the introduction of the new WebExtension API to replace the existing extension system was heavily criticized. The old system gave extensions deep access to the browser and the new extension API (copied over from the Chrome browser) was seen as a limiting dumbing down.

It was a painful transition but very much needed. Now extensions don't clash with one another. The browser code can be modified more freely without impacting extensions and it is possible to implement features such as sandboxing.

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My two most important extensions were my adblocker, and Vimium (enable Vim-like control in Firefox). The new WebExtension API broke Vimium, with no replacement possible[1]. Meanwhile, I never had problems with extension clashes.

I appreciate that this improved the code base quality for Mozilla folks, but it was a significant step down in features for me. I even switched to Vivaldi (which has built-in Vim keybindings) for a while because of this.

[1]: There are some partial replacements, but they all fail if you try commands on a still-loading page, and they don't work at all on any browser page like New Tab or Settings. So even a simple hotkey for "go to left tab", or "close current tab", fails constantly. I didn't stick around to find out what else is broken.

I know you might not be interested in anything chromium-based since this thread is about firefox, but qutebrowser[1] is a great solution for anybody looking for vimium/pentadactyl-like experience.

[1] https://qutebrowser.org/

The only reason I switched away from Vivaldi was the sluggish UI (too many things on the main thread, I guess), but I hear there have been improvements in that area. I may give it another try.

qutebrowser on the other hand seems to have limited support for addons and the builtin features are good, but not on par with what addons can give you (https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/28).

I will very likely move to QTBrowser when it gets Tree Style Tabs.

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/927

There are workarounds for many of these things, to differing degrees. The genius of open source is that you can even fork the browser if your target audience is geeky enough, while not exposing your friends and family to malware in their standard browser.

Forking something as complex as a browser is doomed to fail unless you have a lot of money. Sooner rather than later you won't be able to port patches and shortly after your fork will be riddled with security issues and incompatibilities.

I feel your sentiment regarding Vimium - I was using Vimperator and it took quite a while to remap my fingers from gt to Ctrl-Tab while the page is loading.

But I really do love Tridactyl, even if only for the link hinting. I really suggest that you give it a few weeks. Remember, learning VIM took you longer than a few weeks.

I've been using Vimium since I use firefox (for around 3 years). It's annoying that Vimium can no longer control the browser UI and is limited on some pages (New Tab, mozilla.org) but this is necessary for security.

> this is necessary for security

Why? You can't read the source of this addon and evaluate whether or not it should have this access? This should be a permission that you can grant to an addon, we're not children that must at every juncture be managed so they don't burn their fingers.

No, almost nobody can read the source code of every addon. Even the people who can won't be able to spot malicious behavior unless it's very obvious.

Can you evaluate the source at every silent update?

Then maybe updates shouldn't be "silent" and it should be easier to install a zeitgeist-approved old version.

Or you can not update things silently, because it's a terrible idea.

Some browser users are literally children.

Children are everywhere. They shouldn't drive cars, so we don't let them. If they shouldn't manage browser plugins, we shouldn't let them. This is really incredibly immaterial to the point - which is that browsers treat everyone like they have some sort of mental handicap.

In a competitive market, which browser is going to win, the one that says "no one under the age of 16 can use this browser because they're too likely to fall victim to the security holes we intentionally didn't fix" or the one that says "we fixed that security hole"?

I actually use a vim-style plugin in Firefox and this seems obvious to me, how do you think the majority of users feel?

Clearly then, all tools must be designed to only support the least common denominator.

But still, the inability to modify the UI is a major drawback.

I used to rely on TabMixPlus to have multiple rows of tabs even the ability to mouse-wheel scroll them so get access to more rows and other things like lock them with a MMB press.

I often have so many tabs open that now I'm not able to read the title and am forced to drag them off to create a new window in order to get a new row of tabs.

There was also an extension where I could split the main pane into multiple tiles in order to view multiple pages at the same time.

I'm not saying that it was a bad move to move to the new extension model, but I think that an API should exist which allows developers to modify the UI in a secure way.

Maybe vertical tabs would work for you? If you want something simple and fast, Tab Center Reborn is nice. If you want something more with more features, Tree Style Tabs is good enough but it is somewhat slow and and hard to configure.

Yes. It's a shame that the firefox user base is so easy to outrage. Same with the more recent change ragrding tabs. I am using firefox for a very long time now, and I just don't see that firefox is massively going downhill so far, like many people seem to suggest. Of course I am bummed out that certain features could not be retained (such as installable PWAs on desktop). But these are just the realities of the fact that it is hard to compete with google.

> Yes. It's a shame that the firefox user base is so easy to outrage.

Firefox's user base was a third of all internet users a little over 10 years ago. Now it's as little as 5%.

The "the users are wrong" attitude might not have been the main cause of the decline but it has been a real factor, IMO.

> Same with the more recent change ragrding tabs. I am using firefox for a very long time now, and I just don't see that firefox is massively going downhill so far, like many people seem to suggest. Of course I am bummed out that certain features could not be retained (such as installable PWAs on desktop). But these are just the realities of the fact that it is hard to compete with google.

In Firefox's heyday when they were a scrappy underdog they took on King Kong on its home turf (the Windows desktop) and won (or at least took a huge chunk of market share). The idea that what has now become a big rich company that makes nearly half a billion dollars a year from their browser somehow doesn't have the resources to make that browser competitive is hard to believe.

Firefox was quality wise on a higher level than IE 4, and it didn't loose any of that. IE got better over the years, made a massive step forward with Edge and now again with Chromium based Edge. And finally MS is approaching Firefox in terms of quality. What kind of funding does MS have, compared to Firefox? And still they are outsourcing the hardest part of browser development, while Mozilla is still doing it on their own, as a much smaller company. Chrome gained on Firefox, not because FF got worse. It did, because it is a real competitor, made by a company with an unfair competetive advantage (an even larger competetive advantage than MS has).

What about Opera? Did FF decline quality wise against that? Or Safari? No, of course not. FF didn't decline, it now has a real formidable competitor.

I'm not quite sure how this addresses what I wrote. Three things:

Firefox got popular when they listened to users and made a product people wanted.

They did this despite fierce competition from a huge monopolistic company with quite a locked in and anticompetitive platform.

And today they make something crazy like a half billion dollars a year from firefox, they have enough resources to make a competitive browser.

What exactly did they do that is most accurately described as listen to their users? Maybe I don't know everything that happened. But from my understand they made the best browser they could given the resources and succeeded massively, because the competition was so much worse at the time.

Also, they still make a competetive browser, as I laid out. Just the fact that some of the competition has improved massively (but by no means all of it) doesn't change that.

Provided useful features and functionality that people wanted. Tabs and plugins are a couple of big ones off the top of my head that people loved. It was also adopting open standards and new technologies though, which was an uphill battle because Microsoft was fighting them with incompatibilities and closed extensions, but people actually did like those things. Good support for developer features as far as I know went a long way to getting around that and having content providers take up and support firefox as well although I'm not a web developer so I'm a bit less sure of that aspect of it.

Competition has improved but so has firefox. Why should the expectation be that they stood still while everybody else went ahead? And it absolutely has declined. You also did say that they don't have features you want and seemed to imply that was part of the realities of not having enough resources or struggling to compete with google. Just doesn't seem like the reason holds water.

I think you misunderstood me. How did they decide what to implement? Reacting to the outrage of individuals from their user base? I don't think so. Instead they innovated and did what nobody really asked for, because they knew it was good and had the capabilities to do it.

I don't know how their process worked exactly but if you're going to just claim they didn't listen to their users and therefore you win the argument that's pretty cheap.

They certainly listened to their users and potential users.

It's not cheap. I gave reasons why the world changed. You reasons (they used to listen, now they don't) don't hold water, because you can't point to anything concrete.

If youre not outraged, or at least don't understand why they're outraged, you must not understand what's happening.

> I remember that the introduction of the new WebExtension API to replace the existing extension system

Actually, the existing system is still alive and kicking, since the internal components of firefox, above a C++'ish core, are (more or less) like traditional extensions. It's just that you're not allowed to load your own anymore. In Thunderbird they've created a loophole of sorts, so we can still load normal extensions.

> It was a painful transition but very much needed.

On the contrary, it was the opposite of what was needed.

> Now extensions don't clash with one another.

1. Many important extensions simply aren't allowed to run now.

2. They don't interact, so in particular they don't clash.

> The browser code can be modified more freely without impacting extensions

1. It still impacts the internal extensions.

2. Since webextensions can do very little, they're not impacted by much.

> but very much needed

We've never recovered from there. Addon functionality is strictly worse, and nothing that was gained is something I feel is a net positive in my life. It's nice that the engineers feel better, but as a user it was absolutely a bad choice that was never recovered from. Honestly, for folks creating a product this attitude is unacceptable.

> Addon functionality is strictly worse

Security and convenience are often at odds. Imagine how much "better" things would be if we didn't have any security requirements.

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