Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Some browser users are literally children.

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

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?

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com