16 ms·

Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

209 points by Tree1993 10y ago

cosarara97 10y ago
IMO Firefox has just 2 things to beat Chrome: better add-ons (like treestyle tabs) and politics (made by Mozilla instead of an ads company). They are burning the first one.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  Mozilla may not be an ads company, but they make the vast majority of their money from giving space to ads companies.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - gkya 10y ago
    Where's that space?
    - TAForObvReasons 10y ago
      Search companies -- formerly Google, now Yahoo and others -- pay Mozilla so that the browser defaults to their search engine. While it may not be a display ad, it's effectively funded by advertising.
    - sp332 10y ago
      From November 2014 to December 2015, they had ads in the new tab page.
- darkengine 10y ago
  If Firefox 56 is the last release to support Tree Style Tabs, it will be the last release of Firefox before I begrudgingly switch to Chromium.
  - richardboegli 10y ago
    Try Pale Moon. It has Tree Style Tabs and will continue to even after Firefox gets rid of XUL
    - vocatus_gate 10y ago
      Been a happy Pale Moon user for a while. I hope the project keeps ticking on.
      - richardboegli 10y ago
        It is going strong and with Firefox removing XUL it is going to get stronger.
  - sveme 10y ago
    Why? Does Chromium support Tree Style Tabs despite using WebExtensions? If that's the case, why would that not be possible for Firefox? Or would you switch to make a statement?
    - Spivak 10y ago
      It wouldn't really be to make a statement. Chromium is a better browser but because of the powerful add-ons Firefox's overall experience is better. Take that away and there's no real reason to stay with Firefox unless you like their license and Mozilla as a company.
      - eveningcoffee 10y ago
        There is still one major reason to stay with Firefox - it is not Chrome.
        nine_k 10y ago
        Chromium isn't, either. But the extension flexibility was one of the major points for me. I'll have to pin Firefox to 56.x in my package manager.
- acjohnson55 10y ago
  +1 to Treestyle tabs (buggy though it may be), and also Tab Mix Pro, which lets me clone tabs.
  - chrismorgan 10y ago
    You can duplicate a tab in stock Firefox by Ctrl-clicking the reload button.
    - kibwen 10y ago
      Alternatively, you can duplicate a tab in stock Firefox by Ctrl+dragging the tab in the tab bar.
- veeti 10y ago
  https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/ https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/
  - keehun 10y ago
    Tab Center has been my favorite tree-style tab add-on/plugin ever. None of the previous implementations come close to this for me.
    - hokkos 10y ago
      But this is not a tree, only a list, there is no nesting, they should really do an expert mode of tab center.
  - Grue3 10y ago
    It's not a web extension and will not work with Firefox 57.
- smnscu 10y ago
  Firefox also seems slightly faster for me than Chrome (and Safari feels _a lot_ faster), but that's not enough to switch, since I'm so used to Chrome's sane UX and sync (and with a passphrase I'm pretty comfortable having that on Google's servers).
  - beerbaron23 10y ago
    You are correct with your experiences, Firefox and Safari are now quite quick compared to Chrome, sometimes 3x as fast. If you are on a Macbook using battery power I highly suggest using Safari due to it's power consumption profile, your battery will last way longer. My latest benchmarks: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
- JohnTHaller 10y ago
  Only about 250,000 users use the tab modification extensions that people keep claiming is Firefox's only advantage out of 10s of millions of Firefox users. Addons that greatly alter Firefox's behavior are the main reason for crashes. And maintaining XUL is hampering Firefox future development.
  - VoxPelli 10y ago
    There are plenty of add-ons that extend or alter the UI of tabs. There's eg. 780,000 users of Tab Mix Plus according to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
    - JohnTHaller 10y ago
      I forgot about TMP. Even so, that's still not a ton of users in terms of the total Firefox users. Plus, I'd wager a large percentage of those are TMP legacy users. Way back in the day, TMP was the only way to properly manage sessions and tabs. Firefox now has full session management and you can reload, pin, undo close, close other tabs, and move tabs around to your heart's content. Heck, the most recent review of the extension even says as much.
  - sp332 10y ago
    But tabs-on-the-side is important enough that they are running an experiment with a first-party extension right now. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center It's gong to be a priority for the new extension model to support this kind of thing before FF57.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    What Percentage of users is that? I can't seem to find it, atm. If 250,000 = 1%, then sure, who cares. But if 250,000 = 50%, then that's a big deal
    - sp332 10y ago
      https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ says it's near 500,000,000. But while Firefox tries to keep the core browser lean, they have always catered to power users through the extension APIs.
- Larrikin 10y ago
  I'm extremely worried about Rikai-chan/sama. Rikaichan allows translation of Japanese words simply by hovering your mouse over. It works much better than entering words into an online dictionary, since nearly every free JE-EJ dictionary uses the same source, and if a conjugation isn't translatable it will cut the word off giving the meaning and then letting you easily highlight the conjugation to figure out the meaning of the two together. Its just much faster than using something like jisho.org if theres a lot of words in a text you don't know. Rikaisama makes Rikaichan even more powerful with a lot of extra features Everytime I've ever tried the similar plug-ins on Chrome they've all been terrible, missing words, missing conjugation, or just being slow in general. Its the first check I do every time I think about switching browsers. However with the new Electrolysis on Firefox its completely broken and it seems like the dev might not want to do a rewrite since the plugin works exactly how you would want it and has for a few years now, but especially not if the sandbox changes make the plugin impossible to work.
  - delroth 10y ago
    I've been using Rikai-kun[1] on Chrome. It claims to be a port of Rikai-chan, I'm curious in which ways it's inferior (I have not tried the original Firefox addon). [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rikaikun/jipdnfibhldikgcjhfnomkfpcebammhp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rikaikun/jipdnfibh...
  - ytugiuyghvk 10y ago
    Same here. Is the Lookupbar (Alt+Del) possible to do with WebExtensions? I think it would have to be recreated in the DOM and inserted into the web page.
    - ripdog 10y ago
      There's nothing difficult or complex (or unsupported) about inserting content into web pages. The main limitation of webextensions is that free-form UI modification is no longer possible, the UI can only be modded in specific, allowed ways.
      - 10y ago
- ReverseCold 10y ago
  Still waiting for a lightweight browser that works on Windows (Linux has bad battery life even after very very aggressive power optimization) and doesn't use 4gb RAM and 89% of my battery. If anyone can do that then I'll switch. We need "Safari" for Windows, but not edge.
imron 10y ago
I use Firefox because of 2 things: 1) vimperator 2) single process handling multiple tabs (I typically have upwards of 40 tabs open at a time) Firefox is in the process of removing plugins like 1) so that it makes it possible to remove 2). Wonderful.
- Tree1993 10y ago
  Is there a way we can continue use these classic addon?
  - richardboegli 10y ago
    Pale Moon
    - sychophant 10y ago
      Thanks for the tip on this - installing.
    - fuzzy2 10y ago
      However, that’s pretty much the other extreme. It doesn’t support Web Extensions or even Add-on SDK extensions.
      - sychophant 10y ago
        Do you use any indispensable add-ons that are Web Extension based?
        fuzzy2 10y ago
        No. However, I am the developer of "Download Cleaner", which is made using Add-on SDK. I think it's a great solution to get started without learning XUL. I'm sure they had their reasons for deciding what they did. I still think it's a bad decision.
  - darklajid 10y ago
MiddleEndian 10y ago
Why?
leesalminen 10y ago
Is it just me or are Chrome's dev tools superior in every way to FF?
- to3m 10y ago
  My recollection is that both are as bad as each other: spiteful UI with 1 watch window and a fixed window layout. Dear people - start demanding more from your tools. Going back on topic, I've stuck with Firefox for years because of DownThemAll and Firefox Sync. But I stopped using sync a couple of years ago, so that just left DownThemAll... which won't work after this change. So I'll probably leave Firefox behind. Safari supopsedly gives you better battery life on OS X, and Chrome is more popular (i.e., people probably test their stuff on it).
  - richardboegli 10y ago
    DownloadThemAll will work now and into the future with Pale Moon.
- risyasin 10y ago
  Almost every day I use both of them. They both have pros and cons. It's all about having practice and spending time on any of them. But one thing for sure is a game changer that is FF dev tools can show you the events bound on element right next to it, unlike chrome's list of events.
Jerry2 10y ago
According to NetMarketShare stats [0], Firefox is now at under 12% of desktop marketshare... and falling. I've switched over to Chromium (and Safari on OSX) because I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore. I've also noticed it used a lot more CPU than alternative browsers... which is an issue if you're using a laptop. Once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons [1], there won't be any real reasons left to use Firefox. Lots of Firefox die-hard users I know have already moved to Palemoon which will support XPCOM/XUL addons for the foreseeable future [2]. It's amazing to me how badly managed Mozilla is these days. They've been on a downward slope for the last two years and they still haven't done much to improve their position. Last week I checked Mozilla's homepage and couldn't even figure out what their guiding purpose is anymore. They seem to care more about social issues than about browsers and technology [3]. Unfortunately, they don't have much future. [0] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... [2] https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml [3] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/
- veeti 10y ago
  > I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore... once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons, there won't be any real reasons left to use Firefox. Now, make an enlightened guess as to why they're getting rid of XUL.
- beerbaron23 10y ago
  > I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore... once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons, there won't be any real reasons left to use Firefox. Well now you don't have to, Firefox is now faster than Chrome by a huge margin with the 51.0.1 Electrolysis update. Proof: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
dagenleg 10y ago
I am honestly starting to believe that Mozilla is trying to run Firefox into the ground. I am not sure if it's just bad decision making or if the decision makers themselves had been bought off by competition, but it sure does feel like this. Why do we need one more Chrome like browser out there? I specifically use Firefox because it's a) not chrome, b) has better addons. If you hamstring the addons and make everything chrome/chromium like, what's the reasons to use FF then?
- bastawhiz 10y ago
  > has better addons The add-ons might be better, but XUL-based Firefox add-ons are not better. They essentially give full control of your computer to the developer of the add-on. There's no permission model. The "APIs" are mostly the internals of Firefox itself, and when Firefox updates, lots of add-ons break. Most add-ons can be ported to webextensions. The ones that can't probably shouldn't have ever been add-ons to begin with. Lots of other browsers used to do the same thing Firefox does, and chose to use a webextension-like model instead. Why? Because those screenshots of folks with half their screen consumed by toolbars, weird popups, overlays in the browser viewport, extensions that sneakily inject ads into pages, and track user behavior _still exist_. And there's really nothing Mozilla can do to stop them. Do you know how Firefox add-ons get approved? A human sits down and sifts through the obfuscated source code. I helped build these tools years ago, I can tell you it's hell. Beyond being error-prone, it causes months-long delays in add-ons getting approved. Firefox will be better off for only supporting webextensions.
  - fjdlwlv 10y ago
    Firefox isn't a webextension. Why should I trust it and nobody else?
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Lots of other browsers used to do the same thing Firefox does, and chose to use a webextension-like model instead. Really? Name three. Your arguments may be true, yet they fail to answer the question: "If you hamstring the addons and make everything chrome/chromium like, what's the reasons to use FF then?" If Chrome made all the right decisions, we might as well kill off the Firefox project.
exceptione 10y ago
Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of less-then-smartª people using Chrome. I blame Mozilla for not doing any smart marketing at all. ____ ª Its fair to call it that way. You use a browser more than a car. Yet people do research before buying a car and carefully weigh the downsides versus the upsides. But not for their most important software application in their lifes.
- hasenj 10y ago
  Implying people who use Chrome are stupid is .. not a very nice thing to say.
  - exceptione 10y ago
    You are right. I did and do not say every chrome user is stupid, there might be legitimate use-cases. But the vast amount of people just install chrome or get it side-loaded with some freeware and don't even think about their options and the impact of their choice. Now that is less than smart.
    - pvg 10y ago
      It's the most secure browser available. That's a not a 'might be legitimate' use case.
      - smnscu 10y ago
        Citation needed. I found this [0] but maybe you have a better source. This was interesting though: > In the most recent Pwn2Own hacking competition, Chrome came out ahead of every other browser with only one exploit being successfully executed. 0: https://tiptopsecurity.com/what-is-the-most-secure-web-browser/ https://tiptopsecurity.com/what-is-the-most-secure-web-brows...
detaro 10y ago
November 14th. I really hope they get the promised additional APIs in order until then, but it seems like a really short time (given how they are not 1:1 Chrome yet last I checked). I personally don't mind the switch to much (since I really want better performance, and the beginning of e10s has helped, and I don't care much about non-trivial add-ons), but it's clear the promise of "We'll make new APIs for add-ons that need them" was important.
- mook 10y ago
  Getting the APIs in place isn't enough, though; there needs to be time for the addons to adapt too (or for new addons to show up to replace the old ones). I'm not sure they have planned enough time for that to happen, but time will tell.
  - Kubuxu 10y ago
    The change was first announced in August 2015 [0]. Some developers decided to ignore all warnings and now the Mozilla is the bad guy. [0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
    - stewbrew 10y ago
      Because the required APIs don't exist maybe?
      - Kubuxu 10y ago
        Then they should work with FF team to get those APIs. Many developers just ignored it.
sychophant 10y ago
I use Vimperator. I have not upgraded Firefox since 43.0.4 in order to continue to use Vimperator. I will not upgrade Firefox past the point where it does not support Vimperator.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  > Note: Firefox 51 requires Vimperator 3.16 which is being reviewed by Mozilla and coming soon. For now, you can get the release on GitHub. However, in order to install unsigned add-ons (like releases on GitHub), you must use the Developer Edition of Firefox and after that open about:config and change the xpinstall.signatures.required property to false.
- Tree1993 10y ago
  VimFX works very well in FF51.
  - sirn 10y ago
    It's a very different experience. Some of us who use Vimperator use it not only because of the key binding, but also for the command-line, ability to modify the UI (e.g. :set gui=none), ability to put .vimperatorrc in .dotfiles and use it across multiple systems, and such. As far as I know, VimFX still not capable of all these functionalities (some due to difference in mission, e.g. not modifying the UI.) That said, WebExtensions at its current state still couldn't support all of VimFX's current feature either.[1] [1]: https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860 https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860
    - hammerandtongs 10y ago
      I use this all day long on Chromium - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojhcghmfjfneahoeklbjjh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojh... I also use this in Chromium - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoilgiofhhhodbodcfgomelhe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoil... Note that they do very different things from each other AND that they are running Chromium which is a SUBSET of the plugin features that will be available in Firefox (if all goes well).
yabatopia 10y ago
My first reaction was to disable automatic updates of Firefox. I'm not against change, but the whole controversy around this issue makes me a bit wary of blindly trusting Mozilla. I want to make sure my browser experience doesn't get ruined because of this shift. I don't have the time or patience to clean up a messy first release with webextensions only, breaking my trusted browser add-ons. First seeing, then believing.
- sp332 10y ago
  You can upgrade to FF52 ESR in March. It will support current add-ons and get security updates until mid-2018.
tormeh 10y ago
I recently disabled all add-ons in Firefox. It's a lot more stable and it's faster as well.
jacquesm 10y ago
Is there a quick way to check whether or not specific add-ons are supported in the new version? I'm addicted to tree based tabs (100's of them open at the same time) and Scrapbook. Without those two I would have a very hard time to get through my workday.
- wila 10y ago
  I do not know, but can tell you that scrapbook works fine in Pale moon.
- ordinary 10y ago
  Here's a list: https://arewee10syet.com/ https://arewee10syet.com/
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Scrapbook: unknown :(. Thank you!
lisivka 10y ago
> And the theatre analogy is just silly. It's not like shutting down a theatre because someone got shot in it, it's like enacting a "no guns in this theatre" policy instead. "No guns here" means "Shooters, you will have zero resistance here. Enjoy!".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- untog 10y ago
  This is a perfect example of why using hot button issues as an analogy is always a bad idea. A browser add-on is not a gun. A limited API is not a sign in a window telling you you can't do something, it's a hard restriction that makes breaking rules impossible. So can we please, please, not turn this into a conversation about gun control? We don't even need an analogy. Everyone here understands browser add-ons.
- dang 10y ago
  No flamewars on HN, please. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675485 and marked it off-topic.
baby 10y ago
I'm really hopping for Firefox to implement something like Tree Style Tabs by default. It's time for tabs to take their natural side place.
jrcii 10y ago
That's it, I'm going back to lynx! :P
chrisper 10y ago
I installed Firefox a month ago, but it's just so sluggish and laggy. I only have one extension installed. Well, today I just switched back to Chromium (but went with Vivaldi this time).
- jdlshore 10y ago
  Legacy extensions prevent multiprocess support, which causes Firefox to be sluggish and laggy. If you disable the extension you installed, you'll probably see a big difference in Firefox performance. This is why they're disabling those extensions.
  - chrisper 10y ago
    The extension I was using was ublock:origin. When I went to about:support, it showed e10 as enabled.
    - beerbaron23 10y ago
      in about:support is your GPU composting enabled under graphics? I would recommend to refresh Firefox on that screen as well. Also you can check "about:performance" to see which extension is fucking you over. I would recommend using adblock plus instead, as it is many leagues faster than UBlock Origin in Firefox since version 48 I believe (They optimized their code with Mozilla a couple months ago). Just make sure you go into the adblock plus filter preferences and uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" problem solved.
tomkat0789 10y ago
+1 Firefox user for the better add-ons. The ones in Chrome/Chromium just haven't seemed as effective for me. Reading people's comments here, I'm actually learning about some add-ons I might add to Firefox! (tree style tabs, Vimperator) And thanks to Debian, I appear to be using Firefox 45, so I guess the changes people are talking about won't hit me for awhile?
anotheryou 10y ago
Ugh, I thought we had another year
throwanem 10y ago
I get that there are a lot of people here who are really concerned that, without XUL and XPCOM, there will no longer be a reason to choose Firefox over Chrome. What I think they overlook is that, right now, it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome that no one will take such a recommendation seriously. I've been using Firefox since back when it was still called Phoenix. I intend to go on using Firefox for as long as it still exists. But it's been a struggle, these last few years. Having to kick over a primary application platform, losing effectively all state save what programs are running, and reboot it every day or two, because otherwise it gets so slow that it's entirely unusable, gets real old real fast. People like to make jokes about Emacs, but even it doesn't do this! My Emacs sessions last months, and die only when the machine loses power or I hose up the environment so badly while experimenting that it becomes unrecoverable without a reboot. And Emacs is thirty years old. I don't want to switch to Chrome. Its UI sucks and I'm no fan of Google. But if Firefox keeps getting worse, I'll have to. So I am absolutely delighted to see Mozilla making real and tangible progress toward solving that problem. If doing so means deprecating an ancient plugin API that's in any case dangerous and hard to use, I'm fine with that, especially since there is no reason in the world to believe that its replacement will not eventually gain back most of the relatively few capabilities we're losing in the deprecation. Maybe I won't be able to customize context menus for a while. That's fine, if the browser regains the usability it's lost over the last ten or so years. I understand not everyone agrees with this point of view. That's not a problem. But I should not like this point of view entirely overlooked by those currently proclaiming the imminent death of Firefox.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome ... I understand that this is your experience, but what is the basis for saying this is generally true? It's not my experience; theoretically, can't I also say my experience is generally true?
  - throwanem 10y ago
    The experience of Firefox getting slow over time is hardly unique to me. In any case, if it weren't a relatively common problem, it seems unlikely Mozilla would rearchitect the browser to alleviate it, especially given that some users are very distressed by the side effects of the change.
stewbrew 10y ago
They should conduct a survey how many add-ons will stop working, won't be ported to web extensions, and thus how many users they'll lose -- probably not that many because the majority most likely doesn't use add-ons but those people will most likely use anything other people recommend to them. I personally don't know if I'll continue recommending FF.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > They should conduct a survey ... They have; I've seen the data on some Mozilla blog but I can't remember where.
  - stewbrew 10y ago
    There is https://arewee10syet.com/ https://arewee10syet.com/ ... ~ 85% unknown (and that's compatibility with e10s, not with web extensions).
necessity 10y ago
Good, SJWs imploding as usual. Killing XUL is killing the only thing Firefox had to offer. Forks and Chrome will get more and more traffic.
- dang 10y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675097 and marked it off-topic.
anotheryou 10y ago
Is there any usage-statistic they base this on? I assume 90% have nothing more than an adblocker at most installed? What about the rest? What about users that are switching to firefox from another browser?
Animats 10y ago
Firefox has 6.6% market share in browsers.[1] By the time Firefox 57 comes out, Firefox may not matter. Supporting Yahoo Search as the default didn't help. Mozilla is dropping not only the old XUL interface, but the new Jetpack/Add-on SDK interface that's only worked right for about four years. Dropping XUL make sense; the mobile version of Firefox never supported XUL anyway. But there's no reason to drop Jetpack. That's essentially the same as the WebExtensions API, but with different names for the API calls. I'll probably convert my one remaining add-on, but it's not really worth it. [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...
- choward 10y ago
  Yep. Having Yahoo as the default search has left a bad taste in my mouth. I accidentally used it once and it was all ads above the fold. I had to scroll to see actual search results. Never again.
- hackuser 10y ago
  I've read it is about twice that. How does one know what numbers to believe?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Animats 10y ago
    Compare [1] and [2] and see if you can figure out why they are so different. [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... [2] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...
    - hackuser 10y ago
      Thanks, but you'll understand if I'm not taking the test. What is the difference?
aharju 10y ago
KeySnail[1] extension, which brings customizable Emacs and vi keys to Firefox, is the "killer app" I use Firefox for and it doesn't have a Chrome counterpart. Without this particular extension I wouldn't have a reason to keep using Firefox. [1] https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki
stonogo 10y ago
This is what a fast release cycle gets you: insufficient feedback and a snowball effect as project managers double-down on bad decisions. See also: Ubuntu.
taivare 10y ago
At least Firefox supports older computers like the old Pentium, I submitted this comment with. Chrome doesn't ; its my back-up ; win 10 has gone down on me twice this month.
- yuhong 10y ago
  Firefox now also requires SSE2.
hackuser 10y ago
An hypothesis about much of the criticism for this change, and similar movements of outrage on the Internet. It's amateur social theory and goodness knows we don't need more of that, but I haven't seen it said like this: People naturally feel anger in their lives (about home, work, politics, health, etc.) that is not socially acceptable to act on; to varying degrees, they need an outlet. It's not a new phenomenon; some go to the gym or play video games (where some act out on audio channels); some people drink heavily; some abuse people close to them, or the waitress, or get in a fight at the bar, or join an angry mob and lynch someone in the streets. When there is a socially acceptable target, indicated by lots of other people acting out, they act out too. Changes like Firefox's attract outrage not because they are wrong but because they create a social attack surface: People can see that the change isn't socially secure (e.g., messages about inclusiveness are relatively secure right now[0]) and thus know that it will be a target for attacks; again, it's socially acceptable. They attack because it's a vulnerable target; there is chum in the social waters. Consider how much of such outrage completely disregards the facts and betrays a lack of interest in learning the facts. They make no effort to learn about the facts - I see almost no discussion of the merits or facts on this page - and you can put the information in front of their eyes and they will ignore it and attack you: by not joining them you expose your own social vulnerability. It's very dangerous socially; mass bullying campaigns have serious, real effects on their victims. Whole nations embrace bad policies, from discrimination against their own to war, that can kill in the hundreds of thousands or more and ruin generations. Evil leaders manipulate this phenomenon. But also consider the affect it has on innovation, something we should be very concerned about at HN. It stops innovators from getting too far ahead of what's already accepted; they will be judged by their social security not its merits. It kills innovations from those who are socially acceptable; for example, the Blackberry Passport was the most innovative phone in years, but it was trashed, including on HN, because Blackberry Inc. was socially vulnerable, an outcast. If you read this far, thanks for listening! [0] To be clear, I'm not disparaging them - I strongly support them.
- nonbel 10y ago
  I don't think so, I think its that Firefox used to be awesome. Now people who advocated for them feel betrayed when the search is "updated" to yahoo, the homepage is "improved" to have ads, the menus are "modernized" so you can't find the settings you used to, the add-on system is "secured" so you have to modify your workflow, etc.
panoptispeech 10y ago
Mozilla doesn't pay nearly as well as the top tech companies out there do. Maybe the people who are left after all the best people leave end up making bad decisions. Human capital matters. Of course Mozilla's decisions look foolish to us. We (for the most part) are not the ones who couldn't move on to greener pastures.
- jdlshore 10y ago
  You disagreeing with the decision doesn't make it a bad decision. You go one step further, though, and passively-aggressively call the people making the decision incompetent. That's just rude.
  - RyanZAG 10y ago
    Sure, but sometimes being rude is what it takes to be truthful. You can quote a lot of Firefox users who are saying this - follow this path, and they will no longer use Firefox. This isn't some idle threat, it's just what people will do. It's not a secret, it's not going to be some surprise. So when you look back in a year's time on why Mozilla has now failed, this decision will be the obvious one. And at that point, it might sound less rude to you.
ravenstine 10y ago
XUL has always been pretty terrible, IMO. But it has advantages over Chrome-style addons. Should Firefox support WebExtensions? I'd say absolutely yes. Should Mozilla remove XUL support? I'd say probably not. Or at least it should be optional, as there are clearly some people who want full control of their browser. I'm not one of those people, but I understand where they're coming from, and it would be like a food company deciding that they're getting rid of their other flavors and are just going to sell the one flavor that the competitor is selling out. Unless Firefox has an edge over Chrome, or even Chromium, there's very little reason for me to use it. This is coming from someone who was a Firefox evangelist for years since 2005. Also, the Electrolysis project taking forever is one reason I ditched Firefox for Chrome, and I suspect I'm not the only one. It was only late last year that it finally got released(I think?), and that was a project being talked about at least since 2010. Chrome had process-per-tab a few years before that, and there was even word that Chrome was being developed in that direction long before its release. Firefox took nearly a decade to compete.
- sp332 10y ago
  That's because chrome was built that way from the beginning, and Firefox had to break their browser into pieces. And while it did stall out for a while, remember they were completely changing their JS garbage collector at the same time, which was also a huge amount of work. And both projects kept compatibility with most addons.
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  The Electrolysis project took forever in large part because of the attempt to support XUL addons with it. It's hard to take seriously complaints that "Electrolysis took forever" given in the same breath as "oh, but you should keep XUL addons and just pay whatever complexity and development time penalties are involved in keeping them". Pick one or the other, please....
jdlshore 10y ago
Okay, I read through the entire comment tree and I didn't see a single top-level comment explaining why they're doing this. So I'm going to give it a shot. If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up. This is because Firefox's UI uses the same single-threaded JavaScript engine that web pages do. Ads tend not to be good web citizens, so they cause that single-threaded engine to run poorly, which causes the whole browser, even UI elements like scrolling, to run poorly. To fix this, Firefox has moved to a multi-process model. I believe it's called Electrolysis (e10s). The UI uses a different JavaScript process than web pages. Electrolysis is enabled today. And yet, if you read the comments in this thread, you'll see a lot of people complaining about Firefox being slow and janky. What's up with that? Electrolysis was supposed to fix it! Well, legacy extensions dig into the internals of Firefox. If you've built multi-process code, you know that it's very sensitive to race conditions. Third-party extensions running arbitrary code make it impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult, for Firefox to run e10s. So e10s is disabled if you have a legacy extension. This causes Firefox to be slow and janky. To fix this problem, Firefox is removing support for legacy extensions. To be clear, the engineering tradeoff being made here is this: A) Allow legacy extensions to run arbitrary code. See performance get steadily worse in comparison to other browsers. B) Have a fast, smooth, multi-process browser. Hope that the new extension mechanism is "good enough" and that important extensions are migrated. You can't have both. Mozilla has chosen B). You may disagree with this choice. Personally, I think it was the right one. (You might say that the correct answer is C) run single-threaded when legacy extensions exist, and e10s otherwise. This is the situation that exists today. Look at all the people complaining about Firefox's performance. I don't think this is a viable solution, as people blame Firefox even when it's their extensions that are to blame. Also, option B) gives extension developers a reason to migrate and help Mozilla identify needed APIs.) Apologies if I got some of these details wrong. I've been following Firefox's migration to a multiprocess model with interest, but I'm hardly an expert.
- Royalaid 10y ago
  This seems to have been poorly communicated by the Mozilla team and it is a shame bevause e10s is a a real improvement
Grue3 10y ago
Coincidentally it's also the first release that I'm not going to be updating to.
spooterspooter 10y ago
So is a big evil corporation now in charge of a significant portion of Firefox? My fear is that web extensions provides yet another way for google to track Firefox users.
replete 10y ago
This is terrible! One of Firefox great features are the add-ons that change the _browser_ experience itself. I NEED TileTabs, ColorTabs, and a few others that would stop working after this change. Yes, I understand the ideology of browsers being invisible to the content, but what about our users? I don't think people understand that these add-ons are really productivity tools that aren't otherwise available.
- replete 10y ago
  Power users*. I guess we're gonna have a fork of Firefox. Pointless. Would be better to just deprecate it by default and enable via a flag.
FractalNerve 10y ago
Solution: • Mozilla Sponsored Add-On Migrator/Converter that transpiles to equivalent WebExtension code • Separate lightweight container hosts with DTrace for Core and Extensions (not sure if that makes sense, can you help?) In fact a friend of mine pursues his Dr. degree on Model-Driven "API-Transpilation" (that's how I call it, albeit limited to CMSs), such that API-breaks caused by CMS upgrades don't result in high integration costs for add-on migrations. Having a complete model for the CMS allows him to support convert add-ons to other CMS too. Why all the anger? Because API-Breaks cause friction, are avoidable and are commonly known as the biggest "cost-centers & risk-factors" in the software industry. Software-Architects should instead try to find a composable architecture that supports the transition, instead of moving migration costs to the developers. That would allow everyone else to move over more easily. The anger caused by the limitations of WebExtentions, are they in fact unavoidable? HN, you've a collection of the most clever engineers of the World! Can we find a solution to this? My question to HN: Do you know an example or show-case of any complex software that reached similar goals in a way that is transferable or at least advisable to Mozilla? I am really interested, if there is a way to migrate from old to new platforms without "API hiccups". Moving (avoidable?) architecture-debts to a huge fellowship of developers doesn't sound like the way to go. I hope you know about guidelines that removes such frictions for us HN devs that we can just follow suit. PS: I'm a n00b, but incrementally recreating kernel-level APIs on user-land, then writing an abstraction layer ontop, then exposing a limited set of it via Java-Script doesn't sound elegant and counter-productive. Why not reuse an existing kernel and create drivers and bridges or DSLs ontop of that? Happy Monday and thanks for your time! :)
yuhong 10y ago
I just submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693705 . This article has more technical details on how XUL add-on works in multiprocess Firefox.

209 points by Tree1993 10y ago

IMO Firefox has just 2 things to beat Chrome: better add-ons (like treestyle tabs) and politics (made by Mozilla instead of an ads company). They are burning the first one.

moron4hire 10y ago
Mozilla may not be an ads company, but they make the vast majority of their money from giving space to ads companies.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gkya 10y ago
  Where's that space?
  - TAForObvReasons 10y ago
    Search companies -- formerly Google, now Yahoo and others -- pay Mozilla so that the browser defaults to their search engine. While it may not be a display ad, it's effectively funded by advertising.
  - sp332 10y ago
    From November 2014 to December 2015, they had ads in the new tab page.
darkengine 10y ago
If Firefox 56 is the last release to support Tree Style Tabs, it will be the last release of Firefox before I begrudgingly switch to Chromium.
- richardboegli 10y ago
  Try Pale Moon. It has Tree Style Tabs and will continue to even after Firefox gets rid of XUL
  - vocatus_gate 10y ago
    Been a happy Pale Moon user for a while. I hope the project keeps ticking on.
    - richardboegli 10y ago
      It is going strong and with Firefox removing XUL it is going to get stronger.
- sveme 10y ago
  Why? Does Chromium support Tree Style Tabs despite using WebExtensions? If that's the case, why would that not be possible for Firefox? Or would you switch to make a statement?
  - Spivak 10y ago
    It wouldn't really be to make a statement. Chromium is a better browser but because of the powerful add-ons Firefox's overall experience is better. Take that away and there's no real reason to stay with Firefox unless you like their license and Mozilla as a company.
    - eveningcoffee 10y ago
      There is still one major reason to stay with Firefox - it is not Chrome.
      - nine_k 10y ago
        Chromium isn't, either. But the extension flexibility was one of the major points for me. I'll have to pin Firefox to 56.x in my package manager.
acjohnson55 10y ago
+1 to Treestyle tabs (buggy though it may be), and also Tab Mix Pro, which lets me clone tabs.
- chrismorgan 10y ago
  You can duplicate a tab in stock Firefox by Ctrl-clicking the reload button.
  - kibwen 10y ago
    Alternatively, you can duplicate a tab in stock Firefox by Ctrl+dragging the tab in the tab bar.
veeti 10y ago
https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/ https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/
- keehun 10y ago
  Tab Center has been my favorite tree-style tab add-on/plugin ever. None of the previous implementations come close to this for me.
  - hokkos 10y ago
    But this is not a tree, only a list, there is no nesting, they should really do an expert mode of tab center.
- Grue3 10y ago
  It's not a web extension and will not work with Firefox 57.
smnscu 10y ago
Firefox also seems slightly faster for me than Chrome (and Safari feels _a lot_ faster), but that's not enough to switch, since I'm so used to Chrome's sane UX and sync (and with a passphrase I'm pretty comfortable having that on Google's servers).
- beerbaron23 10y ago
  You are correct with your experiences, Firefox and Safari are now quite quick compared to Chrome, sometimes 3x as fast. If you are on a Macbook using battery power I highly suggest using Safari due to it's power consumption profile, your battery will last way longer. My latest benchmarks: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
JohnTHaller 10y ago
Only about 250,000 users use the tab modification extensions that people keep claiming is Firefox's only advantage out of 10s of millions of Firefox users. Addons that greatly alter Firefox's behavior are the main reason for crashes. And maintaining XUL is hampering Firefox future development.
- VoxPelli 10y ago
  There are plenty of add-ons that extend or alter the UI of tabs. There's eg. 780,000 users of Tab Mix Plus according to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
  - JohnTHaller 10y ago
    I forgot about TMP. Even so, that's still not a ton of users in terms of the total Firefox users. Plus, I'd wager a large percentage of those are TMP legacy users. Way back in the day, TMP was the only way to properly manage sessions and tabs. Firefox now has full session management and you can reload, pin, undo close, close other tabs, and move tabs around to your heart's content. Heck, the most recent review of the extension even says as much.
- sp332 10y ago
  But tabs-on-the-side is important enough that they are running an experiment with a first-party extension right now. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center It's gong to be a priority for the new extension model to support this kind of thing before FF57.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  What Percentage of users is that? I can't seem to find it, atm. If 250,000 = 1%, then sure, who cares. But if 250,000 = 50%, then that's a big deal
  - sp332 10y ago
    https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ says it's near 500,000,000. But while Firefox tries to keep the core browser lean, they have always catered to power users through the extension APIs.
Larrikin 10y ago
I'm extremely worried about Rikai-chan/sama. Rikaichan allows translation of Japanese words simply by hovering your mouse over. It works much better than entering words into an online dictionary, since nearly every free JE-EJ dictionary uses the same source, and if a conjugation isn't translatable it will cut the word off giving the meaning and then letting you easily highlight the conjugation to figure out the meaning of the two together. Its just much faster than using something like jisho.org if theres a lot of words in a text you don't know. Rikaisama makes Rikaichan even more powerful with a lot of extra features Everytime I've ever tried the similar plug-ins on Chrome they've all been terrible, missing words, missing conjugation, or just being slow in general. Its the first check I do every time I think about switching browsers. However with the new Electrolysis on Firefox its completely broken and it seems like the dev might not want to do a rewrite since the plugin works exactly how you would want it and has for a few years now, but especially not if the sandbox changes make the plugin impossible to work.
- delroth 10y ago
  I've been using Rikai-kun[1] on Chrome. It claims to be a port of Rikai-chan, I'm curious in which ways it's inferior (I have not tried the original Firefox addon). [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rikaikun/jipdnfibhldikgcjhfnomkfpcebammhp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rikaikun/jipdnfibh...
- ytugiuyghvk 10y ago
  Same here. Is the Lookupbar (Alt+Del) possible to do with WebExtensions? I think it would have to be recreated in the DOM and inserted into the web page.
  - ripdog 10y ago
    There's nothing difficult or complex (or unsupported) about inserting content into web pages. The main limitation of webextensions is that free-form UI modification is no longer possible, the UI can only be modded in specific, allowed ways.
    - 10y ago
ReverseCold 10y ago
Still waiting for a lightweight browser that works on Windows (Linux has bad battery life even after very very aggressive power optimization) and doesn't use 4gb RAM and 89% of my battery. If anyone can do that then I'll switch. We need "Safari" for Windows, but not edge.

imron 10y ago

I use Firefox because of 2 things: 1) vimperator 2) single process handling multiple tabs (I typically have upwards of 40 tabs open at a time) Firefox is in the process of removing plugins like 1) so that it makes it possible to remove 2). Wonderful.

Tree1993 10y ago
Is there a way we can continue use these classic addon?
- richardboegli 10y ago
  Pale Moon
  - sychophant 10y ago
    Thanks for the tip on this - installing.
  - fuzzy2 10y ago
    However, that’s pretty much the other extreme. It doesn’t support Web Extensions or even Add-on SDK extensions.
    - sychophant 10y ago
      Do you use any indispensable add-ons that are Web Extension based?
      - fuzzy2 10y ago
        No. However, I am the developer of "Download Cleaner", which is made using Add-on SDK. I think it's a great solution to get started without learning XUL. I'm sure they had their reasons for deciding what they did. I still think it's a bad decision.
- darklajid 10y ago

MiddleEndian 10y ago

Why?

leesalminen 10y ago

Is it just me or are Chrome's dev tools superior in every way to FF?

to3m 10y ago
My recollection is that both are as bad as each other: spiteful UI with 1 watch window and a fixed window layout. Dear people - start demanding more from your tools. Going back on topic, I've stuck with Firefox for years because of DownThemAll and Firefox Sync. But I stopped using sync a couple of years ago, so that just left DownThemAll... which won't work after this change. So I'll probably leave Firefox behind. Safari supopsedly gives you better battery life on OS X, and Chrome is more popular (i.e., people probably test their stuff on it).
- richardboegli 10y ago
  DownloadThemAll will work now and into the future with Pale Moon.
risyasin 10y ago
Almost every day I use both of them. They both have pros and cons. It's all about having practice and spending time on any of them. But one thing for sure is a game changer that is FF dev tools can show you the events bound on element right next to it, unlike chrome's list of events.

Jerry2 10y ago

According to NetMarketShare stats [0], Firefox is now at under 12% of desktop marketshare... and falling. I've switched over to Chromium (and Safari on OSX) because I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore. I've also noticed it used a lot more CPU than alternative browsers... which is an issue if you're using a laptop. Once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons [1], there won't be any real reasons left to use Firefox. Lots of Firefox die-hard users I know have already moved to Palemoon which will support XPCOM/XUL addons for the foreseeable future [2]. It's amazing to me how badly managed Mozilla is these days. They've been on a downward slope for the last two years and they still haven't done much to improve their position. Last week I checked Mozilla's homepage and couldn't even figure out what their guiding purpose is anymore. They seem to care more about social issues than about browsers and technology [3]. Unfortunately, they don't have much future. [0] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... [2] https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml [3] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/

veeti 10y ago
> I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore... once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons, there won't be any real reasons left to use Firefox. Now, make an enlightened guess as to why they're getting rid of XUL.
beerbaron23 10y ago
> I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore... once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons, there won't be any real reasons left to use Firefox. Well now you don't have to, Firefox is now faster than Chrome by a huge margin with the 51.0.1 Electrolysis update. Proof: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0

dagenleg 10y ago

I am honestly starting to believe that Mozilla is trying to run Firefox into the ground. I am not sure if it's just bad decision making or if the decision makers themselves had been bought off by competition, but it sure does feel like this. Why do we need one more Chrome like browser out there? I specifically use Firefox because it's a) not chrome, b) has better addons. If you hamstring the addons and make everything chrome/chromium like, what's the reasons to use FF then?

bastawhiz 10y ago
> has better addons The add-ons might be better, but XUL-based Firefox add-ons are not better. They essentially give full control of your computer to the developer of the add-on. There's no permission model. The "APIs" are mostly the internals of Firefox itself, and when Firefox updates, lots of add-ons break. Most add-ons can be ported to webextensions. The ones that can't probably shouldn't have ever been add-ons to begin with. Lots of other browsers used to do the same thing Firefox does, and chose to use a webextension-like model instead. Why? Because those screenshots of folks with half their screen consumed by toolbars, weird popups, overlays in the browser viewport, extensions that sneakily inject ads into pages, and track user behavior _still exist_. And there's really nothing Mozilla can do to stop them. Do you know how Firefox add-ons get approved? A human sits down and sifts through the obfuscated source code. I helped build these tools years ago, I can tell you it's hell. Beyond being error-prone, it causes months-long delays in add-ons getting approved. Firefox will be better off for only supporting webextensions.
- fjdlwlv 10y ago
  Firefox isn't a webextension. Why should I trust it and nobody else?
- icebraining 10y ago
  Lots of other browsers used to do the same thing Firefox does, and chose to use a webextension-like model instead. Really? Name three. Your arguments may be true, yet they fail to answer the question: "If you hamstring the addons and make everything chrome/chromium like, what's the reasons to use FF then?" If Chrome made all the right decisions, we might as well kill off the Firefox project.

exceptione 10y ago

Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of less-then-smartª people using Chrome. I blame Mozilla for not doing any smart marketing at all. ____ ª Its fair to call it that way. You use a browser more than a car. Yet people do research before buying a car and carefully weigh the downsides versus the upsides. But not for their most important software application in their lifes.

hasenj 10y ago
Implying people who use Chrome are stupid is .. not a very nice thing to say.
- exceptione 10y ago
  You are right. I did and do not say every chrome user is stupid, there might be legitimate use-cases. But the vast amount of people just install chrome or get it side-loaded with some freeware and don't even think about their options and the impact of their choice. Now that is less than smart.
  - pvg 10y ago
    It's the most secure browser available. That's a not a 'might be legitimate' use case.
    - smnscu 10y ago
      Citation needed. I found this [0] but maybe you have a better source. This was interesting though: > In the most recent Pwn2Own hacking competition, Chrome came out ahead of every other browser with only one exploit being successfully executed. 0: https://tiptopsecurity.com/what-is-the-most-secure-web-browser/ https://tiptopsecurity.com/what-is-the-most-secure-web-brows...

detaro 10y ago

November 14th. I really hope they get the promised additional APIs in order until then, but it seems like a really short time (given how they are not 1:1 Chrome yet last I checked). I personally don't mind the switch to much (since I really want better performance, and the beginning of e10s has helped, and I don't care much about non-trivial add-ons), but it's clear the promise of "We'll make new APIs for add-ons that need them" was important.

mook 10y ago
Getting the APIs in place isn't enough, though; there needs to be time for the addons to adapt too (or for new addons to show up to replace the old ones). I'm not sure they have planned enough time for that to happen, but time will tell.
- Kubuxu 10y ago
  The change was first announced in August 2015 [0]. Some developers decided to ignore all warnings and now the Mozilla is the bad guy. [0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
  - stewbrew 10y ago
    Because the required APIs don't exist maybe?
    - Kubuxu 10y ago
      Then they should work with FF team to get those APIs. Many developers just ignored it.

sychophant 10y ago

I use Vimperator. I have not upgraded Firefox since 43.0.4 in order to continue to use Vimperator. I will not upgrade Firefox past the point where it does not support Vimperator.

ekianjo 10y ago
> Note: Firefox 51 requires Vimperator 3.16 which is being reviewed by Mozilla and coming soon. For now, you can get the release on GitHub. However, in order to install unsigned add-ons (like releases on GitHub), you must use the Developer Edition of Firefox and after that open about:config and change the xpinstall.signatures.required property to false.
Tree1993 10y ago
VimFX works very well in FF51.
- sirn 10y ago
  It's a very different experience. Some of us who use Vimperator use it not only because of the key binding, but also for the command-line, ability to modify the UI (e.g. :set gui=none), ability to put .vimperatorrc in .dotfiles and use it across multiple systems, and such. As far as I know, VimFX still not capable of all these functionalities (some due to difference in mission, e.g. not modifying the UI.) That said, WebExtensions at its current state still couldn't support all of VimFX's current feature either.[1] [1]: https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860 https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860
  - hammerandtongs 10y ago
    I use this all day long on Chromium - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojhcghmfjfneahoeklbjjh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojh... I also use this in Chromium - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoilgiofhhhodbodcfgomelhe https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoil... Note that they do very different things from each other AND that they are running Chromium which is a SUBSET of the plugin features that will be available in Firefox (if all goes well).

yabatopia 10y ago

My first reaction was to disable automatic updates of Firefox. I'm not against change, but the whole controversy around this issue makes me a bit wary of blindly trusting Mozilla. I want to make sure my browser experience doesn't get ruined because of this shift. I don't have the time or patience to clean up a messy first release with webextensions only, breaking my trusted browser add-ons. First seeing, then believing.

sp332 10y ago
You can upgrade to FF52 ESR in March. It will support current add-ons and get security updates until mid-2018.

tormeh 10y ago

I recently disabled all add-ons in Firefox. It's a lot more stable and it's faster as well.

jacquesm 10y ago

Is there a quick way to check whether or not specific add-ons are supported in the new version? I'm addicted to tree based tabs (100's of them open at the same time) and Scrapbook. Without those two I would have a very hard time to get through my workday.

wila 10y ago
I do not know, but can tell you that scrapbook works fine in Pale moon.
ordinary 10y ago
Here's a list: https://arewee10syet.com/ https://arewee10syet.com/
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Scrapbook: unknown :(. Thank you!

lisivka 10y ago

> And the theatre analogy is just silly. It's not like shutting down a theatre because someone got shot in it, it's like enacting a "no guns in this theatre" policy instead. "No guns here" means "Shooters, you will have zero resistance here. Enjoy!".

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
untog 10y ago
This is a perfect example of why using hot button issues as an analogy is always a bad idea. A browser add-on is not a gun. A limited API is not a sign in a window telling you you can't do something, it's a hard restriction that makes breaking rules impossible. So can we please, please, not turn this into a conversation about gun control? We don't even need an analogy. Everyone here understands browser add-ons.
dang 10y ago
No flamewars on HN, please. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675485 and marked it off-topic.

baby 10y ago

I'm really hopping for Firefox to implement something like Tree Style Tabs by default. It's time for tabs to take their natural side place.

jrcii 10y ago

That's it, I'm going back to lynx! :P

chrisper 10y ago

I installed Firefox a month ago, but it's just so sluggish and laggy. I only have one extension installed. Well, today I just switched back to Chromium (but went with Vivaldi this time).

jdlshore 10y ago
Legacy extensions prevent multiprocess support, which causes Firefox to be sluggish and laggy. If you disable the extension you installed, you'll probably see a big difference in Firefox performance. This is why they're disabling those extensions.
- chrisper 10y ago
  The extension I was using was ublock:origin. When I went to about:support, it showed e10 as enabled.
  - beerbaron23 10y ago
    in about:support is your GPU composting enabled under graphics? I would recommend to refresh Firefox on that screen as well. Also you can check "about:performance" to see which extension is fucking you over. I would recommend using adblock plus instead, as it is many leagues faster than UBlock Origin in Firefox since version 48 I believe (They optimized their code with Mozilla a couple months ago). Just make sure you go into the adblock plus filter preferences and uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" problem solved.

tomkat0789 10y ago

+1 Firefox user for the better add-ons. The ones in Chrome/Chromium just haven't seemed as effective for me. Reading people's comments here, I'm actually learning about some add-ons I might add to Firefox! (tree style tabs, Vimperator) And thanks to Debian, I appear to be using Firefox 45, so I guess the changes people are talking about won't hit me for awhile?

anotheryou 10y ago

Ugh, I thought we had another year

throwanem 10y ago

I get that there are a lot of people here who are really concerned that, without XUL and XPCOM, there will no longer be a reason to choose Firefox over Chrome. What I think they overlook is that, right now, it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome that no one will take such a recommendation seriously. I've been using Firefox since back when it was still called Phoenix. I intend to go on using Firefox for as long as it still exists. But it's been a struggle, these last few years. Having to kick over a primary application platform, losing effectively all state save what programs are running, and reboot it every day or two, because otherwise it gets so slow that it's entirely unusable, gets real old real fast. People like to make jokes about Emacs, but even it doesn't do this! My Emacs sessions last months, and die only when the machine loses power or I hose up the environment so badly while experimenting that it becomes unrecoverable without a reboot. And Emacs is thirty years old. I don't want to switch to Chrome. Its UI sucks and I'm no fan of Google. But if Firefox keeps getting worse, I'll have to. So I am absolutely delighted to see Mozilla making real and tangible progress toward solving that problem. If doing so means deprecating an ancient plugin API that's in any case dangerous and hard to use, I'm fine with that, especially since there is no reason in the world to believe that its replacement will not eventually gain back most of the relatively few capabilities we're losing in the deprecation. Maybe I won't be able to customize context menus for a while. That's fine, if the browser regains the usability it's lost over the last ten or so years. I understand not everyone agrees with this point of view. That's not a problem. But I should not like this point of view entirely overlooked by those currently proclaiming the imminent death of Firefox.

hackuser 10y ago
> it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome ... I understand that this is your experience, but what is the basis for saying this is generally true? It's not my experience; theoretically, can't I also say my experience is generally true?
- throwanem 10y ago
  The experience of Firefox getting slow over time is hardly unique to me. In any case, if it weren't a relatively common problem, it seems unlikely Mozilla would rearchitect the browser to alleviate it, especially given that some users are very distressed by the side effects of the change.

stewbrew 10y ago

They should conduct a survey how many add-ons will stop working, won't be ported to web extensions, and thus how many users they'll lose -- probably not that many because the majority most likely doesn't use add-ons but those people will most likely use anything other people recommend to them. I personally don't know if I'll continue recommending FF.

hackuser 10y ago
> They should conduct a survey ... They have; I've seen the data on some Mozilla blog but I can't remember where.
- stewbrew 10y ago
  There is https://arewee10syet.com/ https://arewee10syet.com/ ... ~ 85% unknown (and that's compatibility with e10s, not with web extensions).

necessity 10y ago

Good, SJWs imploding as usual. Killing XUL is killing the only thing Firefox had to offer. Forks and Chrome will get more and more traffic.

dang 10y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675097 and marked it off-topic.

anotheryou 10y ago

Is there any usage-statistic they base this on? I assume 90% have nothing more than an adblocker at most installed? What about the rest? What about users that are switching to firefox from another browser?

Animats 10y ago

Firefox has 6.6% market share in browsers.[1] By the time Firefox 57 comes out, Firefox may not matter. Supporting Yahoo Search as the default didn't help. Mozilla is dropping not only the old XUL interface, but the new Jetpack/Add-on SDK interface that's only worked right for about four years. Dropping XUL make sense; the mobile version of Firefox never supported XUL anyway. But there's no reason to drop Jetpack. That's essentially the same as the WebExtensions API, but with different names for the API calls. I'll probably convert my one remaining add-on, but it's not really worth it. [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...

choward 10y ago
Yep. Having Yahoo as the default search has left a bad taste in my mouth. I accidentally used it once and it was all ads above the fold. I had to scroll to see actual search results. Never again.
hackuser 10y ago
I've read it is about twice that. How does one know what numbers to believe?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 10y ago
  Compare [1] and [2] and see if you can figure out why they are so different. [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... [2] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...
  - hackuser 10y ago
    Thanks, but you'll understand if I'm not taking the test. What is the difference?

aharju 10y ago

KeySnail[1] extension, which brings customizable Emacs and vi keys to Firefox, is the "killer app" I use Firefox for and it doesn't have a Chrome counterpart. Without this particular extension I wouldn't have a reason to keep using Firefox. [1] https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki

stonogo 10y ago

This is what a fast release cycle gets you: insufficient feedback and a snowball effect as project managers double-down on bad decisions. See also: Ubuntu.

taivare 10y ago

At least Firefox supports older computers like the old Pentium, I submitted this comment with. Chrome doesn't ; its my back-up ; win 10 has gone down on me twice this month.

yuhong 10y ago
Firefox now also requires SSE2.

hackuser 10y ago

An hypothesis about much of the criticism for this change, and similar movements of outrage on the Internet. It's amateur social theory and goodness knows we don't need more of that, but I haven't seen it said like this: People naturally feel anger in their lives (about home, work, politics, health, etc.) that is not socially acceptable to act on; to varying degrees, they need an outlet. It's not a new phenomenon; some go to the gym or play video games (where some act out on audio channels); some people drink heavily; some abuse people close to them, or the waitress, or get in a fight at the bar, or join an angry mob and lynch someone in the streets. When there is a socially acceptable target, indicated by lots of other people acting out, they act out too. Changes like Firefox's attract outrage not because they are wrong but because they create a social attack surface: People can see that the change isn't socially secure (e.g., messages about inclusiveness are relatively secure right now[0]) and thus know that it will be a target for attacks; again, it's socially acceptable. They attack because it's a vulnerable target; there is chum in the social waters. Consider how much of such outrage completely disregards the facts and betrays a lack of interest in learning the facts. They make no effort to learn about the facts - I see almost no discussion of the merits or facts on this page - and you can put the information in front of their eyes and they will ignore it and attack you: by not joining them you expose your own social vulnerability. It's very dangerous socially; mass bullying campaigns have serious, real effects on their victims. Whole nations embrace bad policies, from discrimination against their own to war, that can kill in the hundreds of thousands or more and ruin generations. Evil leaders manipulate this phenomenon. But also consider the affect it has on innovation, something we should be very concerned about at HN. It stops innovators from getting too far ahead of what's already accepted; they will be judged by their social security not its merits. It kills innovations from those who are socially acceptable; for example, the Blackberry Passport was the most innovative phone in years, but it was trashed, including on HN, because Blackberry Inc. was socially vulnerable, an outcast. If you read this far, thanks for listening! [0] To be clear, I'm not disparaging them - I strongly support them.

nonbel 10y ago
I don't think so, I think its that Firefox used to be awesome. Now people who advocated for them feel betrayed when the search is "updated" to yahoo, the homepage is "improved" to have ads, the menus are "modernized" so you can't find the settings you used to, the add-on system is "secured" so you have to modify your workflow, etc.

panoptispeech 10y ago

Mozilla doesn't pay nearly as well as the top tech companies out there do. Maybe the people who are left after all the best people leave end up making bad decisions. Human capital matters. Of course Mozilla's decisions look foolish to us. We (for the most part) are not the ones who couldn't move on to greener pastures.

jdlshore 10y ago
You disagreeing with the decision doesn't make it a bad decision. You go one step further, though, and passively-aggressively call the people making the decision incompetent. That's just rude.
- RyanZAG 10y ago
  Sure, but sometimes being rude is what it takes to be truthful. You can quote a lot of Firefox users who are saying this - follow this path, and they will no longer use Firefox. This isn't some idle threat, it's just what people will do. It's not a secret, it's not going to be some surprise. So when you look back in a year's time on why Mozilla has now failed, this decision will be the obvious one. And at that point, it might sound less rude to you.

ravenstine 10y ago

XUL has always been pretty terrible, IMO. But it has advantages over Chrome-style addons. Should Firefox support WebExtensions? I'd say absolutely yes. Should Mozilla remove XUL support? I'd say probably not. Or at least it should be optional, as there are clearly some people who want full control of their browser. I'm not one of those people, but I understand where they're coming from, and it would be like a food company deciding that they're getting rid of their other flavors and are just going to sell the one flavor that the competitor is selling out. Unless Firefox has an edge over Chrome, or even Chromium, there's very little reason for me to use it. This is coming from someone who was a Firefox evangelist for years since 2005. Also, the Electrolysis project taking forever is one reason I ditched Firefox for Chrome, and I suspect I'm not the only one. It was only late last year that it finally got released(I think?), and that was a project being talked about at least since 2010. Chrome had process-per-tab a few years before that, and there was even word that Chrome was being developed in that direction long before its release. Firefox took nearly a decade to compete.

sp332 10y ago
That's because chrome was built that way from the beginning, and Firefox had to break their browser into pieces. And while it did stall out for a while, remember they were completely changing their JS garbage collector at the same time, which was also a huge amount of work. And both projects kept compatibility with most addons.
bzbarsky 10y ago
The Electrolysis project took forever in large part because of the attempt to support XUL addons with it. It's hard to take seriously complaints that "Electrolysis took forever" given in the same breath as "oh, but you should keep XUL addons and just pay whatever complexity and development time penalties are involved in keeping them". Pick one or the other, please....

jdlshore 10y ago

Okay, I read through the entire comment tree and I didn't see a single top-level comment explaining why they're doing this. So I'm going to give it a shot. If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up. This is because Firefox's UI uses the same single-threaded JavaScript engine that web pages do. Ads tend not to be good web citizens, so they cause that single-threaded engine to run poorly, which causes the whole browser, even UI elements like scrolling, to run poorly. To fix this, Firefox has moved to a multi-process model. I believe it's called Electrolysis (e10s). The UI uses a different JavaScript process than web pages. Electrolysis is enabled today. And yet, if you read the comments in this thread, you'll see a lot of people complaining about Firefox being slow and janky. What's up with that? Electrolysis was supposed to fix it! Well, legacy extensions dig into the internals of Firefox. If you've built multi-process code, you know that it's very sensitive to race conditions. Third-party extensions running arbitrary code make it impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult, for Firefox to run e10s. So e10s is disabled if you have a legacy extension. This causes Firefox to be slow and janky. To fix this problem, Firefox is removing support for legacy extensions. To be clear, the engineering tradeoff being made here is this: A) Allow legacy extensions to run arbitrary code. See performance get steadily worse in comparison to other browsers. B) Have a fast, smooth, multi-process browser. Hope that the new extension mechanism is "good enough" and that important extensions are migrated. You can't have both. Mozilla has chosen B). You may disagree with this choice. Personally, I think it was the right one. (You might say that the correct answer is C) run single-threaded when legacy extensions exist, and e10s otherwise. This is the situation that exists today. Look at all the people complaining about Firefox's performance. I don't think this is a viable solution, as people blame Firefox even when it's their extensions that are to blame. Also, option B) gives extension developers a reason to migrate and help Mozilla identify needed APIs.) Apologies if I got some of these details wrong. I've been following Firefox's migration to a multiprocess model with interest, but I'm hardly an expert.

Royalaid 10y ago
This seems to have been poorly communicated by the Mozilla team and it is a shame bevause e10s is a a real improvement

Grue3 10y ago

Coincidentally it's also the first release that I'm not going to be updating to.

spooterspooter 10y ago

So is a big evil corporation now in charge of a significant portion of Firefox? My fear is that web extensions provides yet another way for google to track Firefox users.

replete 10y ago

This is terrible! One of Firefox great features are the add-ons that change the _browser_ experience itself. I NEED TileTabs, ColorTabs, and a few others that would stop working after this change. Yes, I understand the ideology of browsers being invisible to the content, but what about our users? I don't think people understand that these add-ons are really productivity tools that aren't otherwise available.

replete 10y ago
Power users*. I guess we're gonna have a fork of Firefox. Pointless. Would be better to just deprecate it by default and enable via a flag.

FractalNerve 10y ago

Solution: • Mozilla Sponsored Add-On Migrator/Converter that transpiles to equivalent WebExtension code • Separate lightweight container hosts with DTrace for Core and Extensions (not sure if that makes sense, can you help?) In fact a friend of mine pursues his Dr. degree on Model-Driven "API-Transpilation" (that's how I call it, albeit limited to CMSs), such that API-breaks caused by CMS upgrades don't result in high integration costs for add-on migrations. Having a complete model for the CMS allows him to support convert add-ons to other CMS too. Why all the anger? Because API-Breaks cause friction, are avoidable and are commonly known as the biggest "cost-centers & risk-factors" in the software industry. Software-Architects should instead try to find a composable architecture that supports the transition, instead of moving migration costs to the developers. That would allow everyone else to move over more easily. The anger caused by the limitations of WebExtentions, are they in fact unavoidable? HN, you've a collection of the most clever engineers of the World! Can we find a solution to this? My question to HN: Do you know an example or show-case of any complex software that reached similar goals in a way that is transferable or at least advisable to Mozilla? I am really interested, if there is a way to migrate from old to new platforms without "API hiccups". Moving (avoidable?) architecture-debts to a huge fellowship of developers doesn't sound like the way to go. I hope you know about guidelines that removes such frictions for us HN devs that we can just follow suit. PS: I'm a n00b, but incrementally recreating kernel-level APIs on user-land, then writing an abstraction layer ontop, then exposing a limited set of it via Java-Script doesn't sound elegant and counter-productive. Why not reuse an existing kernel and create drivers and bridges or DSLs ontop of that? Happy Monday and thanks for your time! :)

yuhong 10y ago

I just submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693705 . This article has more technical details on how XUL add-on works in multiprocess Firefox.