I want nothing more now from Firefox than iterative performance improvements across all platforms and adherence to web standards. That’s it. Let extensions handle all the other crap.
After opening FF while previously using Arc for a while I was super happy with the usability improvements (that don’t seem to have impacted older workflows fortunately… big fan of how FF makes it easy to customize the toolbar etc)
For example, I sometimes run with hundreds of tabs and my wife has many thousands, at all times. My needs and hers are very different from typical users who have single digits numbers of tabs open, heavily biased toward the low end.
Of course I would prefer TST or Sideberry, but I'm not like most users. For most users, the Firefox experience is superior to Sideberry for its ease of use and fewer failure modes.
To me, what they shipped seemed lacking in features to both, with no real improvements.
One other feature that is nice for me is the ability to collapse the sidebar to just the tab icons. It's a nice middle ground between being able to see what I have open and getting a full screen experience.
TST and Sidebery are both fantastic extensions, I don't think they do anything wrong. For whatever reason though, the FF native implementation worked for me where they didn't
cd $FIREFOX_PROFILE_DIR
cd chrome
git clone https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks
touch userChrome.css
@import url('firefox-csshacks/chrome/hide_tabs_toolbar.css');
@import url('firefox-csshacks/chrome/window_control_placeholder_support.css');
I’d even go so far as to say that extensions should have full control over Firefox again. They shouldn’t have to wait 20 years for a tray icon on minimize feature to be added or require external apps to add that feature on certain operating systems. Min2Tray existed. They should have the ability to completely alter the UI to make it function however you want. For example, the old search was great for keyboard users. A couple of strokes and you could switch search engines to site specific ones. Now it takes dozens. And when they all have the same icon, it is a painful experience. There was even at one point an add-on to restore that functionality. All this should be exposed.
The extension and plugin infrastructure didn’t die. It was killed! If security is a concern, just add more warning cones and blood red messages.
Compatibility: these addons could be broken very easily because they could depend on almost anything, and with the monthly release cycle, it is very difficult for mod authors to keep up. For instance, some addons would work by taking a core browser function written in JS, convert it to a string, run a regular expression to edit the string, then use eval to create a new function to replace the old one. In some release, the syntax of the "convert a function to a string" output changed slightly and it broke these addons, because it broke the regexp they were using.
Performance: XUL addons could do all sorts of things that are horrible for performance, and there was no real way for a user to tell what was causing it, because the addon wasn't isolated in any way. I ran into somebody who was having severe performance issues because the browser was generating colossal amounts of garbage for no reason. It eventually turned out that on a whim they'd installed a "LaTeX the World" addon, which would look for LaTeX typesetting instructions on pages and replace it with the nice looking output. The problem was, the way it worked was that every 10 seconds or so it would convert the entire contents of every single tab you had open into a zillion strings, search those strings, then throw them out.
(Also we know from long experience that "warning cones and blood red messages" don't in practice suffice to prevent end users from being exploited, but that's a separate issue.)
They also spent tons of effort explaining the background of these choices and why they felt they had no choice and this was the only path forward. It's disappointing people are still coming up with this "oh, why don't they just [..]?!" type stuff.
Several proposals backed by "the primary competitor" failed to get through the process, or were radically changed to make other implementors happy.
I think if you are extremely narrowly scoping well-trusted ad blockers, you may be okay, as long as you understand you are trusting the ad blocker with your banking info. But it would be far better for a browser to include capabilities in first-party and eradicate extensions altogether.
A Pihole is also far safer than an adblock extension, because it can't see your decrypted your web traffic the way a browser extension can.
Installing PB is easier (and more powerful) than configuring the browser for better protection. For example, Firefox doesn't block much by default.
https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
Any extension with post-decryption ability to read and modify everything on all websites could, if they choose, see any sensitive info you do, and subtly even change it without your knowledge.
And I'm not saying uBlock would, or that as a super popular extension it likely wouldn't be discovered quickly, but arguably they can because you've given the extension the ability to see and rewrite your entire reality.