5 ms·

Reading these recurring discussions, there is a bunch of Firefox users that used FF's extensions to change everything about the browser. You could change Firefo

by DCKing 9y ago

Reading these recurring discussions, there is a bunch of Firefox users that used FF's extensions to change everything about the browser. You could change Firefox to be a different user experience entirely. But this has become way more limited. For users that are okay with the common way browsers work, all this new stuff is great though. Firefox Quantum is so fast and it still delivers all of the mainstream add-on functionality. I'm firmly in the second camp. Give me any browser that I can install uBlock in (and hide most buttons except back and forward), and I'm good to go. With Quantum, I switched over all my browsing to Firefox. Including on Android, which hasn't even had most the Quantum improvements yet (its UI has just gotten a much needed update).

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
There's at least a third camp. Those who used extensions and have a degraded performance now too - I'm wondering if all the speed increases people are talking about are only available on the most modern hardware? It takes 12s after launch for my newtab to populate with icons -- which incidentally I dislike compared to the previous page thumbnails -- there's regular stalling when it fails to respond. I'm prepared to give some space to get acclimated to new versions, there were font problems on lots of pages (including newtab) for me which I've worked through. But I'm failing to see any benefit yet - even then turning the icon super bright has annoyed me ...
- Sean1708 9y ago
  > only available on the most modern hardware? Obviously there's something slowing down your Firefox, but it's definitely not to do with how modern your hardware is because 57 is noticeably faster than the previous version on my 2011 MacBook.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    There is something slowing it down, but it wasn't under 56. Might be a localised issue, that's always possible.
    - jhatax 9y ago
      You can also restore the New Tab behavior you liked pre-Quantum by clicking on the gear in the top right-hand corner.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Actually you can't, you can cut down most things but you can't get previews in preference to icons and you can't get more than two rows (from that menu, you have to go to about:config and browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesCount [for some reason the browser.newtabpage.rows and ..columns settings are still present but appear to be unused]).
        weaksauce 9y ago
        if you turn off the new activity stream you can get the old behavior back. browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled = false browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories = false browser.newtabpage.enhanced = false browser.newtabpage.enabled = true seems to respect my 5 columns and 3 rows with large preview icons.
        pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        I have all those already; it respects my setting 24 icons (4 rows of 6) rather than giving my prior 3 rows x 5 of page previews.
        weaksauce 9y ago
        well I must have some other setting going on because i have 3 rows of 5 and the other setting is at 24 which both can't be true... 15 vs. 24 total.
    - dblohm7 9y ago
      What does your about:support say about accessibility?
pm215 9y ago
I'm in a middle ground -- I did have 'Classic Theme Restorer' installed, but I can live without it. But I have a few extensions which haven't updated yet (most notably 'rikaichan' which provides dictionary-lookup on hover for Japanese text), and some like Greasemonkey seem to have only managed to get an update at the last second. So I can live with the situation but the transition seems to have been poorly handled -- why did the FF which marked extensions needing update as "legacy" only arrive a week before the one which killed them off? Marking legacy extensions a year or so before the deadline might have helped in increasing user pressure on extension authors to convert earlier... There will always be a long tail of "extension author vanished years ago but it's still used by 10 people", but if widely used things like Greasemonkey are only just sliding in under the deadline then something seems to have gone wrong with the transition plan. And on the "improvements" side -- I have to say I've never felt the browser was too slow. Sometimes the network is lousy, sometimes stupid websites are terrible, but the browser itself has been just fine for me for years. So I'd rather have had a less painful and abrupt transition, which maybe took a bit longer.
ConfucianNardin 9y ago
The problem is that Firefox was the last well supported browser that allowed for power user features. With this change, Firefox targets the lowest common denominator just like every other major browser (tracing the footsteps of Chrome). In the progress, it too, is becoming just like Chrome. This whole saga begun back when Opera dropped support for their 12.x browser, and became just another Blink-based browser. At that point, the only way to get a usable browser (with vertical tabs, MRU tab switching, gestures) was Firefox with a number of addons (Tree Style Tab, Tab Mix Plus, Firegestures). One may argue that users like this should just use a fringe browser with such features built-in, but that's not viable because they're either unstable or lack timely security updates. You may also argue that you can get all those features, even in Firefox 57, but that's only true with caveats: Tree Style Tab still exists, but if you use either the history or bookmark sidebars, you better get ready to switch back and forth all the time (since only one sidebar can be active at a time). The about:config setting browser.ctrlTab.previews (now also exposed in preferences as "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order") is mostly useless, since it is limited to the 6 most recent tabs (probably even fewer on lower resolution screens). There are several mouse gesture addons for Firefox 57, but none of them currently work on Linux/Mac. Even on Windows (and the others when they're fixed), gestures will work neither on internal pages nor on addons.mozilla.org.
- DCKing 9y ago
  Well, true. You can be a power user without all of those things though. It's a shame tradeoffs are necessary, but I think it's worth highlighting that it's a tradeoff that also brings substantial advantages. For all users, including the power users.
- shock 9y ago
  On Linux I use the EasyGestures application which I've configured to send XF86Back and XF86Forward keys for the respective gestures. The added benefit is that the back and forward gestures work in the other apps too, not just in Firefox.
  - ConfucianNardin 9y ago
lqdc13 9y ago
Firefox keeps getting less and less usable for me. I'm considering switching to chrome for the first time in a while. Things that bother me on desktop developer edition: * no usable mouse gestures extension * constantly changing UI * hid really useful things like file/edit/history/bookmarks/tools menu behind holding alt button on Ubuntu. Pretty sure that whole menu will be gone soon. * it's impossible to clear for example last week, last month etc of browsing data (not sure if you could do it before). In fact, I'm not sure if I can clear cookies but not site history anymore after spending 5 minutes in the settings. * tree-style tabs turned into something unusable * getting rid of all the rare extensions that worked previously and are no longer supported by the original author * tons of greasemonkey userscripts broken * greasemonkey a lot less usable now (still can't figure out how to write a custom script from scratch) Android (Mobile) Quantum takes forever to load pages. As in 5x-10x longer than Android Chrome. Some things like videos from twitter simply don't load at all. Some websites no longer load. Cannot enter data into some text boxes. But don't take my word for it: https://www.androidauthority.com/mozilla-firefox-quantum-android-814876/ https://www.androidauthority.com/mozilla-firefox-quantum-and... Unfortunately, on desktop I'm stuck between this new FFX and Vivaldi. On mobile, I already switched to Brave even though it's terrible because you can't easily google for selected text or select a part of a paragraph easily.
- DiThi 9y ago
  I don't think they will remove the menu bar any time soon. I always put it back to always visible, just click view->toolbars->menu bar. What's unusable about the new tree style tabs? I use it constantly. If you want old greasemonkey scripts to work without changes, use violentmonkey. There must be a bug with the new greasemonkey that I can't find the editor either. Use violentmonkey for that too for now.
  - CWuestefeld 9y ago
    What's unusable about the new tree style tabs? I'll grant that the new responsiveness of FF makes TST feel much better. But there's one thing that's constantly giving me headaches. I don't feel like the highlighting given to the currently-selected tab is in-your-face enough, so that I'm always scanning up and down the tree trying to see which one it is. The other formatting options it used have were nice, but being able to at least make the selected tab's title bold was a big deal for me. I realize that this is technically possible in the new regime via userChrome.css. However, the element classes are completely undocumented so I have no idea how to accomplish it.

by DCKing 9y ago

pbhjpbhj 9y ago

There's at least a third camp. Those who used extensions and have a degraded performance now too - I'm wondering if all the speed increases people are talking about are only available on the most modern hardware? It takes 12s after launch for my newtab to populate with icons -- which incidentally I dislike compared to the previous page thumbnails -- there's regular stalling when it fails to respond. I'm prepared to give some space to get acclimated to new versions, there were font problems on lots of pages (including newtab) for me which I've worked through. But I'm failing to see any benefit yet - even then turning the icon super bright has annoyed me ...

Sean1708 9y ago
> only available on the most modern hardware? Obviously there's something slowing down your Firefox, but it's definitely not to do with how modern your hardware is because 57 is noticeably faster than the previous version on my 2011 MacBook.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  There is something slowing it down, but it wasn't under 56. Might be a localised issue, that's always possible.
  - jhatax 9y ago
    You can also restore the New Tab behavior you liked pre-Quantum by clicking on the gear in the top right-hand corner.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Actually you can't, you can cut down most things but you can't get previews in preference to icons and you can't get more than two rows (from that menu, you have to go to about:config and browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesCount [for some reason the browser.newtabpage.rows and ..columns settings are still present but appear to be unused]).
      - weaksauce 9y ago
        if you turn off the new activity stream you can get the old behavior back. browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled = false browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories = false browser.newtabpage.enhanced = false browser.newtabpage.enabled = true seems to respect my 5 columns and 3 rows with large preview icons.
        pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        I have all those already; it respects my setting 24 icons (4 rows of 6) rather than giving my prior 3 rows x 5 of page previews.
        weaksauce 9y ago
        well I must have some other setting going on because i have 3 rows of 5 and the other setting is at 24 which both can't be true... 15 vs. 24 total.
  - dblohm7 9y ago
    What does your about:support say about accessibility?

pm215 9y ago

I'm in a middle ground -- I did have 'Classic Theme Restorer' installed, but I can live without it. But I have a few extensions which haven't updated yet (most notably 'rikaichan' which provides dictionary-lookup on hover for Japanese text), and some like Greasemonkey seem to have only managed to get an update at the last second. So I can live with the situation but the transition seems to have been poorly handled -- why did the FF which marked extensions needing update as "legacy" only arrive a week before the one which killed them off? Marking legacy extensions a year or so before the deadline might have helped in increasing user pressure on extension authors to convert earlier... There will always be a long tail of "extension author vanished years ago but it's still used by 10 people", but if widely used things like Greasemonkey are only just sliding in under the deadline then something seems to have gone wrong with the transition plan. And on the "improvements" side -- I have to say I've never felt the browser was too slow. Sometimes the network is lousy, sometimes stupid websites are terrible, but the browser itself has been just fine for me for years. So I'd rather have had a less painful and abrupt transition, which maybe took a bit longer.

ConfucianNardin 9y ago

The problem is that Firefox was the last well supported browser that allowed for power user features. With this change, Firefox targets the lowest common denominator just like every other major browser (tracing the footsteps of Chrome). In the progress, it too, is becoming just like Chrome. This whole saga begun back when Opera dropped support for their 12.x browser, and became just another Blink-based browser. At that point, the only way to get a usable browser (with vertical tabs, MRU tab switching, gestures) was Firefox with a number of addons (Tree Style Tab, Tab Mix Plus, Firegestures). One may argue that users like this should just use a fringe browser with such features built-in, but that's not viable because they're either unstable or lack timely security updates. You may also argue that you can get all those features, even in Firefox 57, but that's only true with caveats: Tree Style Tab still exists, but if you use either the history or bookmark sidebars, you better get ready to switch back and forth all the time (since only one sidebar can be active at a time). The about:config setting browser.ctrlTab.previews (now also exposed in preferences as "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order") is mostly useless, since it is limited to the 6 most recent tabs (probably even fewer on lower resolution screens). There are several mouse gesture addons for Firefox 57, but none of them currently work on Linux/Mac. Even on Windows (and the others when they're fixed), gestures will work neither on internal pages nor on addons.mozilla.org.

DCKing 9y ago
Well, true. You can be a power user without all of those things though. It's a shame tradeoffs are necessary, but I think it's worth highlighting that it's a tradeoff that also brings substantial advantages. For all users, including the power users.
shock 9y ago
On Linux I use the EasyGestures application which I've configured to send XF86Back and XF86Forward keys for the respective gestures. The added benefit is that the back and forward gestures work in the other apps too, not just in Firefox.
- ConfucianNardin 9y ago

lqdc13 9y ago

Firefox keeps getting less and less usable for me. I'm considering switching to chrome for the first time in a while. Things that bother me on desktop developer edition: * no usable mouse gestures extension * constantly changing UI * hid really useful things like file/edit/history/bookmarks/tools menu behind holding alt button on Ubuntu. Pretty sure that whole menu will be gone soon. * it's impossible to clear for example last week, last month etc of browsing data (not sure if you could do it before). In fact, I'm not sure if I can clear cookies but not site history anymore after spending 5 minutes in the settings. * tree-style tabs turned into something unusable * getting rid of all the rare extensions that worked previously and are no longer supported by the original author * tons of greasemonkey userscripts broken * greasemonkey a lot less usable now (still can't figure out how to write a custom script from scratch) Android (Mobile) Quantum takes forever to load pages. As in 5x-10x longer than Android Chrome. Some things like videos from twitter simply don't load at all. Some websites no longer load. Cannot enter data into some text boxes. But don't take my word for it: https://www.androidauthority.com/mozilla-firefox-quantum-android-814876/ https://www.androidauthority.com/mozilla-firefox-quantum-and... Unfortunately, on desktop I'm stuck between this new FFX and Vivaldi. On mobile, I already switched to Brave even though it's terrible because you can't easily google for selected text or select a part of a paragraph easily.

DiThi 9y ago
I don't think they will remove the menu bar any time soon. I always put it back to always visible, just click view->toolbars->menu bar. What's unusable about the new tree style tabs? I use it constantly. If you want old greasemonkey scripts to work without changes, use violentmonkey. There must be a bug with the new greasemonkey that I can't find the editor either. Use violentmonkey for that too for now.
- CWuestefeld 9y ago
  What's unusable about the new tree style tabs? I'll grant that the new responsiveness of FF makes TST feel much better. But there's one thing that's constantly giving me headaches. I don't feel like the highlighting given to the currently-selected tab is in-your-face enough, so that I'm always scanning up and down the tree trying to see which one it is. The other formatting options it used have were nice, but being able to at least make the selected tab's title bold was a big deal for me. I realize that this is technically possible in the new regime via userChrome.css. However, the element classes are completely undocumented so I have no idea how to accomplish it.