9 ms·

Waterfox – Firefox fork retaining XUL support

146 points by twobyfour 9y ago

Multicomp 9y ago
I use Waterfox every day. Mozilla may want Firefox to be a Chrome clone, but I still use my 'old fashioned' extensions and don't need new (pardon the pun) chrome all over the place.
- sverige 9y ago
  I've been using it too, especially since FF 57 for some reason breaks images on some websites. I've also been using Qutebrowser some, which I love for the keybindings.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I find it hilarious that while they took the time to give FF57 a new "touch" UI, the zoom gesture is still only enlarge the font size.
  - maciekmm 9y ago
    go to about:config and set browser.zoom.full to true this will cause the whole page to get zoomed.
mmastrac 9y ago
Developers are free to spend their time on whatever projects they wish, but I suspect that Waterfox users will quickly run into the tradeoffs between customizability and performance that the Firefox team made. It's a noble effort but I suspect there just isn't a big enough community to keep a XUL-based browser (plus the extensions themselves) moving forward while being as secure, web-standard-current and fast as Firefox proper.
- moosingin3space 9y ago
  I'm not sure that there will be many XUL extensions left maintained after a while -- since no major browser supports them and the fact that WebExtensions is a much easier framework for development. As a result, I don't see much of a future in Firefox pre-Quantum forks.
  - bkdbkd 9y ago
    Yes, in time there won't be any XUL extenions. But what do they say we are all supposed do with that tiny nagging:'it worked yesterday, but not today' problem?
    - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
      Firefox's Extended Support Release, which will keep getting updates for almost a year, certainly helps. I've been on ESR because of vimperator/pentadactyl not being portable, plus some other extensions like FoxyProxy, Tree Style Tabs etc. But today I discovered tridactyl works well enough on latest FF to suit my vim-ish needs, while the other two have been fairly completely ported.
      - kibwen 9y ago
        Thanks for the tip about tridactyl, I've only seen Saka Key so far in this space.
      - michaelmrose 9y ago
        Neat saka tridactyl and vim vixen several interesting choices
        Elvewyn 9y ago
        I did not like Saka Key (some weird behavior sometimes), but Vim Vixen comes close to VimFx.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  Plus, there's already Pale Moon, which shares a lot of the same goals that this one seems to.
pnikosis 9y ago
I used Waterfox long time ago, as a fast 64bit alternative to Firefox (although never noticed a significant speed difference). Now I think the only reason I'd still use it is because add-ons such as Vimperator, but I already switched to the less powerful Vim-fx. I love the idea that projects such as this one or Pale Moon exist, but I find it hard for me to use them as a regular user, apart from sentimental reasons.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  FWIW, I've had much better luck with vim-vixen than I did with vim-fx. Obviously ymmv
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    Have you tried tridactyl?
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      I don't believe I have, I'll give it a shot sometime
    - pnikosis 9y ago
      I'm going to give it a shot now, thanks for the suggestion
  - pnikosis 9y ago
    You are right, and in fact is vim-vixen what I'm using right now, I guess after trying so many alternatives after updating to FF57 I just got confused about what I finally had installed.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      I've been trying a few of them out. I had to look at which one I had installed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any plans to put in the proper APIs to make anything nearly as useful as vimperator.
Aardwolf 9y ago
There is also SeaMonkey, how do waterfox and seamonkey compare?
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Seamonkey is much older, and not really a fork as it follows current day Firefox development quite closely. Hell, one may well call Firefox a fork of the browser part of Seamonkey. A more interesting comparison to Waterfox would be Pale Moon. And there is also Basilisk, a more recent project by the Pale Moon people.
  - twobyfour 9y ago
    Sadly, Pale Moon is still not available on Mac. I wasn't aware of Basilisk, though! It appears that that one too is Windows/Linux only.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  I thought SeaMonkey was still the entire suite (email client, HTML editor, etc). It seems to be further behind in keeping up with Firefox.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  SeaMonkey is a different code base in the sense that the point of divergence was long, long ago. Waterfox on the other hand is very close of recent Firefox versions. SeaMonkey is descended from the Mozilla Suite, from which also Firefox descends, but SeaMonkey retains components that Firefox didn't like email, Composer, IRC chat etc. BTW, I hope SeaMonkey gets a few more devs and love... from what I can see it's struggling badly. I hope to be wrong on this...
- jcranmer 9y ago
  When the decision was made to make a browser-only version of the Mozilla suite, a separate front-end was built on Gecko eventually called Firefox. The legacy suite was renamed SeaMonkey, and it still uses the same repository. The trunk version of SeaMonkey uses the trunk version of Gecko, and it doesn't fork or modify the stock Gecko in anyway.
majewsky 9y ago
Well, if this allows people to bridge the gap until the WebExtensions API in Firefox is comprehensive enough for their needs, then I'm all for it.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Or for those of us who find the new UI problematic.
- Sylos 9y ago
  Firefox 52 ESR would probably be the safer alternative. It will receive security updates until June 26, 2018. And I honestly just can't imagine Waterfox or other forks trying to keep XUL compatibility to stay secure long after that, as XUL extensions used to be a major maintenance burden for Mozilla and these forks have only a fraction of the size of Mozilla.
minitech 9y ago
Using forks of unsupported Firefox versions/features (this, Pale Moon, etc.) is a good way to introduce vulnerabilities into your daily browsing. Firefox ESR should be the addons stopgap of choice while they’re ported.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Pale Moon reportedly backports security patches.
  - minitech 9y ago
    Sure – not trying would be obscenely irresponsible. But: 1. I don’t trust them to do that right 2. You’re later to get the same patches 3. You can’t backport patches for removed features
    - superkuh 9y ago
      It's funny that you say these things with such confidence when you're demonstrably wrong (ie, 3) by simply looking at the Pale Moon update logs and the 'Defense in Depth' "fixes" for vulnerabilities that don't exist in PM but do in FF which are changed anyway just to be sure. http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml
      - minitech 9y ago
        #3 is a weird one to take issue with. Unless by “demonstrably wrong” you mean “objectively right”? You can’t backport a patch from a fork for a feature that doesn’t exist in that fork. You can make your own patch. XUL ones can come from ESR… except when you don’t fork ESR. Oops! A fork has to be able to maintain the browser as well or better than the Firefox community does right now, and again, I don’t trust any of the fork teams to do that. You’re also misrepresenting what “Defense in Depth” changelog entries in Pale Moon mean. For two of the five on the current page: CVE-2017-7809 was fixed by Firefox; NPAPI plugins aren’t supported anymore. The other three aren’t specific and don’t link to an issue tracker or patch, so it’s hard to say.
yuhong 9y ago
For a while I was thinking of the idea of Gecko for legacy XUL support and Servo being WebExtensions only.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I become more and more convinced that Mozilla could have saved themselves a lot of pain by giving FF57 a completely new name and version number, rather than suggest it is a continuation of the venerable Firefox lineage.
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    Idunno, that'd be an uphill battle in terms of branding, and you'd split the userbase even more than with a simple update
croisillon 9y ago
from time to time i lose firefox extensions because they are not updated anymore; with firefox 57 i am losing my beloved fireftp, which is still available on waterfox... but there's no way i would get rid of firefox, even for fireftp
- myspoonistoobig 9y ago
  I don’t know exactly what your situation is, but I had hundreds of sites saved in FireFTP. It won’t get you FireFTP in Firefox 57 but I wrote a utility to help move them over to FileZilla. Maybe it can help you too. https://github.com/myspoonistoobig/AtomicFire https://github.com/myspoonistoobig/AtomicFire
  - croisillon 9y ago
    Oh thank you, that's great! No, I used to use at most 2 or 3 different logins, mainly one. And I indeed switched to FileZilla
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tomc1985 9y ago
Why not Pale Moon?
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Because Mac? Also, Pale Moon forked much longer ago and has diverged more significantly from Firefox, AFAICT.
- slphil 9y ago
  Pale Moon is a 3.5 fork, it's ancient, although it's gotten a lot of independent development.
  - unethical_ban 9y ago
    Do you not wonder that this fork will suffer the same fate?
    - slphil 9y ago
      Waterfox has been around for a while. What fate are you talking about? Pale Moon is still in active development and use as well. I use it on some older machines for performance reasons.
  - kasabali 9y ago
    AFAIK it's rebased onto Firefox 38 and there will be another rebase in the future based on Basilisk release (should be similar to Firefox 53-54)
- jccalhoun 9y ago
  when the first firefox 57 beta came out I tried pale moon and too many of the extensions I used wouldn't work on it. They worked with Waterfox. I use firefox as my main browser but there are a couple extensions that won't be ported over that I keep waterfox installed to use.
tomc1985 9y ago
On another note, XULRunner was a JS runtime with XUL for UI markup, like an early Electron. It's a shame the project was scrapped, I really enjoyed writing XUL+ES5 and seeing XML become native widgetry. (It's the platform that Firefox was initially built on, I don't know how much of it is still there now) Bring back XULRunner :'( That project was way ahead of its time
- MrAlex94 9y ago
  XULRunner was a great piece of tech! > (It's the platform that Firefox was initially built on, I don't know how much of it is still there now) Looks like it was completely removed in this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1221724 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1221724 Although I suppose some form of it is used in Firefox now (although I imagine XUL will get removed some time after XBL has been replaced with WebComponents).
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    I wonder what kind of effort would be required to port it to node/V8? IIRC XULRunner's main handicap was relying on Moz's older-gen JS engine
    - dom96 9y ago
      I would personally be interested in using XULRunner's innards to create a dependency-less cross-platform GUI framework (as a C library ala libui). Does anyone know how easy that would be and where I should start looking?
      - tomc1985 9y ago
        I don't have any answers for you, but it's worth noting that Moz worked around the JS speed limitations with bespoke C++ via XPCOM.
      - johnny22 9y ago
        why XULRunner instead of Graphene (i think it's called that)?
Shywim 9y ago
If only people would put their efforts toward making WebExtensions support better, with features they liked from XUL, like they do with their XUL forks...
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Only to be denied by Mozilla over "security"?
- contravariant 9y ago
  That's kind of hard when this requires changing the WebExtension API, which Mozilla seems to be very hesitant in doing.
pmoriarty 9y ago
Apart from retaining XUL support, it also: * Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) * Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015) * Removed Pocket * Removed Telemetry * Removed data collection * Removed startup profiling * Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins * Allow running of unsigned extensions * Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page * Addition of Duplicate Tab option * Locale selector in about:preferences > General Judging by that feature list alone, this seems like a browser that respects user privacy, is against DRM and advertising to its users, and gives the user the power to run any extension they want instead of limiting them to running only signed extensions.
- Spivak 9y ago
  > limiting them to running only signed extensions. Surely you recognize that we are part of an extreme minority of users. For everyone else this change is extremely positive. Gone are the days of malwares installing themselves as browser extensions. Requiring power users to switch to Dev/Nightly to run unsigned extensions is a pretty small ask for a change that will stop friends and family from having horribly infected browsers.
  - johnny22 9y ago
    isn't there also an unbranded version that's the exact same as the release, but does support unsigned extensions?
    - teddyh 9y ago
      Maybe GNU IceCat?
    - rhelmer 9y ago
      Yes, it was announced in https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/07/29/extension-signing-availability-of-unbranded-builds/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/07/29/extension-signing...
- LeoPanthera 9y ago
  Are there any forks of Firefox that do all/most of the above but keep the new Firefox UI? Or alternatively is there a one-click way of doing all/most of the above to regular Firefox?
piotrkubisa 9y ago
> "Addition of Duplicate Tab option" As a user of both Chromium and Firefox browser, I miss this option in tab's context menu in "stock" Firefox browser.
- MrAlex94 9y ago
  I believe Mozilla added it back in with the Photon work.
  - piotrkubisa 9y ago
    Yeah, they implemented it in Firefox 57.
- kibwen 9y ago
  When did you last test? For me, using Firefox 59, there's a "Duplicate Tab" entry when I right-click on a tab. Also, I know for a fact that you've been able to Ctrl+drag to duplicate a tab in Firefox for years and years now, because I do it every week. :)
  - mastax 9y ago
    It's in 57 for me.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- KwanEsq 9y ago
  If you have a mouse with a middle button (or just one with a left button and a keyboard with a CTRL key) you've been able to do this since probably Firefox 1.0 by clicking thusly on the refresh button in the target tab.
- gruez 9y ago
  or middle-click the reload button?
MrAlex94 9y ago
Huh, didn't expect to see this on here again! Just before I continue I'd like everyone to know I have complete respect for Mozilla and everything they have achieved with Firefox in v57! It really is awesome and a testament to their engineering talent. I used to submit patches to them to get the code base compiled with Intel's C++ compiler and they really are great in communicating with you and even going out of their way to fix obscure issues. I hope to return to submitting more helpful patches and I'm excited to see where Firefox goes from here on out! Now on to some other points: * v56 with security patches from v57 is available to test here if anyone is interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/7ed9sf/waterfox_56_test_build_download_plans_please/ https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/7ed9sf/waterfox_5... * v56 will stay here with security patches remaining until the end of v59 ESR (I'll be using it to track security issues and patch them). * In the spirit of YCombinator and HN, my next step after the release of v56 is to go to VCs (or other funding sources) and show that open source projects can be successful business ventures without having to sell out the user. Then hopefully set up a team and create a power-user focused browser based on all the exciting technology out there - (servo would definitely be a fun base). Of course I'm young and Waterfox was a side-project that I thought made me a real programmer at 16 because I managed to set the 64-bit flags on MSVC (oh dear). I never thought it'd basically become a full time job, get me into prestigious universities and even land me job contracts because of all the years I spent working on it! If anyone has advice I certainly wouldn't knock it and it would be much appreciated. If you think I'm crazy go ahead and let me know as well haha!
- bad_user 9y ago
  I have a lot of respect for open-source contributors and for OSS project maintainers. However in order for a fork to be sustainable it means that it needs to be more than a rebranding, otherwise it cannot survive. In particular, if Waterfox is retaining the XUL support, then it's going to get harder and harder to merge upstream Firefox into it, which means a bigger and bigger burden on you. > my next step after the release of v56 is to go to VCs (or other funding sources) and show that open source projects can be successful business ventures without having to sell out the user If you succeed, that's going to be great, since it means more funding for open-source. However the elephant in the room is that you're dependent on Mozilla's developers for continued development. That's much like greenwashing, you know, how some companies claim to be "green" by outsourcing pollution to other countries. And implicit in this claim is that Mozilla is selling the user out and I don't see how. I understand the reticence for Google being the default search engine, but as a DuckDuckGo user and as an European I can tell you that the difference can be night and day. And it's easy to change the search engine, there's no other browser that makes it easier, desktop or mobile. Speaking of which, Ecosia might be cool for having trees planted from its revenue, but it kind of has the same problem — being dependent on Bing and thus Microsoft. And I'm going to guess that the results are at least as poor as DDG and the problem for users is that most users will apply the "three strikes you're out" rule, because you don't want to second-guess your search engine on every search, unless you really, really care so much about privacy that you can take that pain and most people don't.
darklajid 9y ago
I just completed my first Firefox for Android build and I have to say that Mozilla makes it really easy to get started [1] - I plan to run a personal fork/modified Android version from now on if this works this smooth. Ignoring the huge download, this has been one of the easiest open source projects to build so far. I'm impressed. 1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Simple_Firefox_for_Android_build https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
- Santosh83 9y ago
  What's your reason for building your own FF for Android may I ask? Just curious...
  - darklajid 9y ago
    Firefox improves greatly in speed and features - I like that and don't want a long term release thing or a radical fork like the one discussed here. I can live with some plugin issues on the desktop (web extensions being less powerful). But I refuse to use Firefox on Android without 'Share To Bottom' [1]. Feel free to link to xkcd's "you broke my workflow", but without this feature my blood pressure is constantly too high. Whenever I long-press on a link I want either (80% of the time) 'Open in new tab' or (the rest of the time. No exception. Never anything but these two things) 'Copy link'. I never ever want 'Share', but some time in the past Fennec/Firefox for Android moved that option to the top of the menu. I filed bugs for that, got shot down rather quickly and stumbled upon the addon [1] as a workaround. The workaround is now broken and so is literally nearly every single (I rarely just click links, always long-press them. I have sometimes more than 90 tabs open on my Android phone) interaction with a link on the internet. The menu is annoying me with a prominent button that I never want, but press in error again and again (probably adding to Mozilla's heatmap, so that they'll conclude in the future that this was a very good change indeed! Lots of people click "Share"!). So right now I created my own Firefox build and I'm trying to do this the nasty way (still searching my way around in this codebase, but I plan to completely remove the 'Share' menu item. A hardcoded 'Share To Trash' modification, if you will). I'll happily rebuild the browser for this change, for all eternity. (Note that I never understood the 'Share' option in that menu in the first place. Everyone I see around me uses 'Share' from the page menu, i.e. the top-right … thing. To share the page you're _actually_ looking at. Instead of sharing a link to a page (via a popup menu) that you cannot see right now. So the version I envision still allows you to share stuff, just not from the context menu of a link) 1: https://github.com/miraks/ShareToBottom/ https://github.com/miraks/ShareToBottom/
ak39 9y ago
Has anyone here done any line of business/crud type of app with XUL that they feel has been successful? I'd be interested in hearing any short description of the ups/downs of your efforts.
- johannes1234321 9y ago
  About 15 years ago German car rental company Sixt migrated some mainframe based console UIs to XUL, while keeping the backend in COBOL. They focused a lot on reaction time and keyboard shortcuts as the tool was used in the call center to capture damage reports. I have no idea how much of this is still used. Slides from an old talk about this: https://blog.mayflower.de/uploads/XUL_xtech2.pdf https://blog.mayflower.de/uploads/XUL_xtech2.pdf
  - ak39 9y ago
    Thanks for this. I played around with XUL in 2004 for the first time - and last time. Being totally blown away by its native controls then, I suggested it for an in-house insurance app my client was developing. My recommendation did not receive much respect! They ended up developing an ASP app.

146 points by twobyfour 9y ago

I use Waterfox every day. Mozilla may want Firefox to be a Chrome clone, but I still use my 'old fashioned' extensions and don't need new (pardon the pun) chrome all over the place.

sverige 9y ago
I've been using it too, especially since FF 57 for some reason breaks images on some websites. I've also been using Qutebrowser some, which I love for the keybindings.
digi_owl 9y ago
I find it hilarious that while they took the time to give FF57 a new "touch" UI, the zoom gesture is still only enlarge the font size.
- maciekmm 9y ago
  go to about:config and set browser.zoom.full to true this will cause the whole page to get zoomed.

mmastrac 9y ago

Developers are free to spend their time on whatever projects they wish, but I suspect that Waterfox users will quickly run into the tradeoffs between customizability and performance that the Firefox team made. It's a noble effort but I suspect there just isn't a big enough community to keep a XUL-based browser (plus the extensions themselves) moving forward while being as secure, web-standard-current and fast as Firefox proper.

moosingin3space 9y ago
I'm not sure that there will be many XUL extensions left maintained after a while -- since no major browser supports them and the fact that WebExtensions is a much easier framework for development. As a result, I don't see much of a future in Firefox pre-Quantum forks.
- bkdbkd 9y ago
  Yes, in time there won't be any XUL extenions. But what do they say we are all supposed do with that tiny nagging:'it worked yesterday, but not today' problem?
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    Firefox's Extended Support Release, which will keep getting updates for almost a year, certainly helps. I've been on ESR because of vimperator/pentadactyl not being portable, plus some other extensions like FoxyProxy, Tree Style Tabs etc. But today I discovered tridactyl works well enough on latest FF to suit my vim-ish needs, while the other two have been fairly completely ported.
    - kibwen 9y ago
      Thanks for the tip about tridactyl, I've only seen Saka Key so far in this space.
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      Neat saka tridactyl and vim vixen several interesting choices
      - Elvewyn 9y ago
        I did not like Saka Key (some weird behavior sometimes), but Vim Vixen comes close to VimFx.
khedoros1 9y ago
Plus, there's already Pale Moon, which shares a lot of the same goals that this one seems to.

pnikosis 9y ago

I used Waterfox long time ago, as a fast 64bit alternative to Firefox (although never noticed a significant speed difference). Now I think the only reason I'd still use it is because add-ons such as Vimperator, but I already switched to the less powerful Vim-fx. I love the idea that projects such as this one or Pale Moon exist, but I find it hard for me to use them as a regular user, apart from sentimental reasons.

CaptSpify 9y ago
FWIW, I've had much better luck with vim-vixen than I did with vim-fx. Obviously ymmv
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  Have you tried tridactyl?
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    I don't believe I have, I'll give it a shot sometime
  - pnikosis 9y ago
    I'm going to give it a shot now, thanks for the suggestion
- pnikosis 9y ago
  You are right, and in fact is vim-vixen what I'm using right now, I guess after trying so many alternatives after updating to FF57 I just got confused about what I finally had installed.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    I've been trying a few of them out. I had to look at which one I had installed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any plans to put in the proper APIs to make anything nearly as useful as vimperator.

Aardwolf 9y ago

There is also SeaMonkey, how do waterfox and seamonkey compare?

digi_owl 9y ago
Seamonkey is much older, and not really a fork as it follows current day Firefox development quite closely. Hell, one may well call Firefox a fork of the browser part of Seamonkey. A more interesting comparison to Waterfox would be Pale Moon. And there is also Basilisk, a more recent project by the Pale Moon people.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Sadly, Pale Moon is still not available on Mac. I wasn't aware of Basilisk, though! It appears that that one too is Windows/Linux only.
twobyfour 9y ago
I thought SeaMonkey was still the entire suite (email client, HTML editor, etc). It seems to be further behind in keeping up with Firefox.
Santosh83 9y ago
SeaMonkey is a different code base in the sense that the point of divergence was long, long ago. Waterfox on the other hand is very close of recent Firefox versions. SeaMonkey is descended from the Mozilla Suite, from which also Firefox descends, but SeaMonkey retains components that Firefox didn't like email, Composer, IRC chat etc. BTW, I hope SeaMonkey gets a few more devs and love... from what I can see it's struggling badly. I hope to be wrong on this...
jcranmer 9y ago
When the decision was made to make a browser-only version of the Mozilla suite, a separate front-end was built on Gecko eventually called Firefox. The legacy suite was renamed SeaMonkey, and it still uses the same repository. The trunk version of SeaMonkey uses the trunk version of Gecko, and it doesn't fork or modify the stock Gecko in anyway.

majewsky 9y ago

Well, if this allows people to bridge the gap until the WebExtensions API in Firefox is comprehensive enough for their needs, then I'm all for it.

twobyfour 9y ago
Or for those of us who find the new UI problematic.
Sylos 9y ago
Firefox 52 ESR would probably be the safer alternative. It will receive security updates until June 26, 2018. And I honestly just can't imagine Waterfox or other forks trying to keep XUL compatibility to stay secure long after that, as XUL extensions used to be a major maintenance burden for Mozilla and these forks have only a fraction of the size of Mozilla.

minitech 9y ago

Using forks of unsupported Firefox versions/features (this, Pale Moon, etc.) is a good way to introduce vulnerabilities into your daily browsing. Firefox ESR should be the addons stopgap of choice while they’re ported.

Santosh83 9y ago
Pale Moon reportedly backports security patches.
- minitech 9y ago
  Sure – not trying would be obscenely irresponsible. But: 1. I don’t trust them to do that right 2. You’re later to get the same patches 3. You can’t backport patches for removed features
  - superkuh 9y ago
    It's funny that you say these things with such confidence when you're demonstrably wrong (ie, 3) by simply looking at the Pale Moon update logs and the 'Defense in Depth' "fixes" for vulnerabilities that don't exist in PM but do in FF which are changed anyway just to be sure. http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml
    - minitech 9y ago
      #3 is a weird one to take issue with. Unless by “demonstrably wrong” you mean “objectively right”? You can’t backport a patch from a fork for a feature that doesn’t exist in that fork. You can make your own patch. XUL ones can come from ESR… except when you don’t fork ESR. Oops! A fork has to be able to maintain the browser as well or better than the Firefox community does right now, and again, I don’t trust any of the fork teams to do that. You’re also misrepresenting what “Defense in Depth” changelog entries in Pale Moon mean. For two of the five on the current page: CVE-2017-7809 was fixed by Firefox; NPAPI plugins aren’t supported anymore. The other three aren’t specific and don’t link to an issue tracker or patch, so it’s hard to say.

yuhong 9y ago

For a while I was thinking of the idea of Gecko for legacy XUL support and Servo being WebExtensions only.

digi_owl 9y ago
I become more and more convinced that Mozilla could have saved themselves a lot of pain by giving FF57 a completely new name and version number, rather than suggest it is a continuation of the venerable Firefox lineage.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  Idunno, that'd be an uphill battle in terms of branding, and you'd split the userbase even more than with a simple update

croisillon 9y ago

from time to time i lose firefox extensions because they are not updated anymore; with firefox 57 i am losing my beloved fireftp, which is still available on waterfox... but there's no way i would get rid of firefox, even for fireftp

myspoonistoobig 9y ago
I don’t know exactly what your situation is, but I had hundreds of sites saved in FireFTP. It won’t get you FireFTP in Firefox 57 but I wrote a utility to help move them over to FileZilla. Maybe it can help you too. https://github.com/myspoonistoobig/AtomicFire https://github.com/myspoonistoobig/AtomicFire
- croisillon 9y ago
  Oh thank you, that's great! No, I used to use at most 2 or 3 different logins, mainly one. And I indeed switched to FileZilla

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tomc1985 9y ago

Why not Pale Moon?

twobyfour 9y ago
Because Mac? Also, Pale Moon forked much longer ago and has diverged more significantly from Firefox, AFAICT.
slphil 9y ago
Pale Moon is a 3.5 fork, it's ancient, although it's gotten a lot of independent development.
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  Do you not wonder that this fork will suffer the same fate?
  - slphil 9y ago
    Waterfox has been around for a while. What fate are you talking about? Pale Moon is still in active development and use as well. I use it on some older machines for performance reasons.
- kasabali 9y ago
  AFAIK it's rebased onto Firefox 38 and there will be another rebase in the future based on Basilisk release (should be similar to Firefox 53-54)
jccalhoun 9y ago
when the first firefox 57 beta came out I tried pale moon and too many of the extensions I used wouldn't work on it. They worked with Waterfox. I use firefox as my main browser but there are a couple extensions that won't be ported over that I keep waterfox installed to use.

tomc1985 9y ago

On another note, XULRunner was a JS runtime with XUL for UI markup, like an early Electron. It's a shame the project was scrapped, I really enjoyed writing XUL+ES5 and seeing XML become native widgetry. (It's the platform that Firefox was initially built on, I don't know how much of it is still there now) Bring back XULRunner :'( That project was way ahead of its time

MrAlex94 9y ago
XULRunner was a great piece of tech! > (It's the platform that Firefox was initially built on, I don't know how much of it is still there now) Looks like it was completely removed in this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1221724 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1221724 Although I suppose some form of it is used in Firefox now (although I imagine XUL will get removed some time after XBL has been replaced with WebComponents).
- tomc1985 9y ago
  I wonder what kind of effort would be required to port it to node/V8? IIRC XULRunner's main handicap was relying on Moz's older-gen JS engine
  - dom96 9y ago
    I would personally be interested in using XULRunner's innards to create a dependency-less cross-platform GUI framework (as a C library ala libui). Does anyone know how easy that would be and where I should start looking?
    - tomc1985 9y ago
      I don't have any answers for you, but it's worth noting that Moz worked around the JS speed limitations with bespoke C++ via XPCOM.
    - johnny22 9y ago
      why XULRunner instead of Graphene (i think it's called that)?

Shywim 9y ago

If only people would put their efforts toward making WebExtensions support better, with features they liked from XUL, like they do with their XUL forks...

digi_owl 9y ago
Only to be denied by Mozilla over "security"?
contravariant 9y ago
That's kind of hard when this requires changing the WebExtension API, which Mozilla seems to be very hesitant in doing.

pmoriarty 9y ago

Apart from retaining XUL support, it also: * Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) * Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015) * Removed Pocket * Removed Telemetry * Removed data collection * Removed startup profiling * Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins * Allow running of unsigned extensions * Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page * Addition of Duplicate Tab option * Locale selector in about:preferences > General Judging by that feature list alone, this seems like a browser that respects user privacy, is against DRM and advertising to its users, and gives the user the power to run any extension they want instead of limiting them to running only signed extensions.

Spivak 9y ago
> limiting them to running only signed extensions. Surely you recognize that we are part of an extreme minority of users. For everyone else this change is extremely positive. Gone are the days of malwares installing themselves as browser extensions. Requiring power users to switch to Dev/Nightly to run unsigned extensions is a pretty small ask for a change that will stop friends and family from having horribly infected browsers.
- johnny22 9y ago
  isn't there also an unbranded version that's the exact same as the release, but does support unsigned extensions?
  - teddyh 9y ago
    Maybe GNU IceCat?
  - rhelmer 9y ago
    Yes, it was announced in https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/07/29/extension-signing-availability-of-unbranded-builds/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/07/29/extension-signing...
LeoPanthera 9y ago
Are there any forks of Firefox that do all/most of the above but keep the new Firefox UI? Or alternatively is there a one-click way of doing all/most of the above to regular Firefox?

piotrkubisa 9y ago

> "Addition of Duplicate Tab option" As a user of both Chromium and Firefox browser, I miss this option in tab's context menu in "stock" Firefox browser.

MrAlex94 9y ago
I believe Mozilla added it back in with the Photon work.
- piotrkubisa 9y ago
  Yeah, they implemented it in Firefox 57.
kibwen 9y ago
When did you last test? For me, using Firefox 59, there's a "Duplicate Tab" entry when I right-click on a tab. Also, I know for a fact that you've been able to Ctrl+drag to duplicate a tab in Firefox for years and years now, because I do it every week. :)
- mastax 9y ago
  It's in 57 for me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
KwanEsq 9y ago
If you have a mouse with a middle button (or just one with a left button and a keyboard with a CTRL key) you've been able to do this since probably Firefox 1.0 by clicking thusly on the refresh button in the target tab.
gruez 9y ago
or middle-click the reload button?

MrAlex94 9y ago

Huh, didn't expect to see this on here again! Just before I continue I'd like everyone to know I have complete respect for Mozilla and everything they have achieved with Firefox in v57! It really is awesome and a testament to their engineering talent. I used to submit patches to them to get the code base compiled with Intel's C++ compiler and they really are great in communicating with you and even going out of their way to fix obscure issues. I hope to return to submitting more helpful patches and I'm excited to see where Firefox goes from here on out! Now on to some other points: * v56 with security patches from v57 is available to test here if anyone is interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/7ed9sf/waterfox_56_test_build_download_plans_please/ https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/7ed9sf/waterfox_5... * v56 will stay here with security patches remaining until the end of v59 ESR (I'll be using it to track security issues and patch them). * In the spirit of YCombinator and HN, my next step after the release of v56 is to go to VCs (or other funding sources) and show that open source projects can be successful business ventures without having to sell out the user. Then hopefully set up a team and create a power-user focused browser based on all the exciting technology out there - (servo would definitely be a fun base). Of course I'm young and Waterfox was a side-project that I thought made me a real programmer at 16 because I managed to set the 64-bit flags on MSVC (oh dear). I never thought it'd basically become a full time job, get me into prestigious universities and even land me job contracts because of all the years I spent working on it! If anyone has advice I certainly wouldn't knock it and it would be much appreciated. If you think I'm crazy go ahead and let me know as well haha!

bad_user 9y ago
I have a lot of respect for open-source contributors and for OSS project maintainers. However in order for a fork to be sustainable it means that it needs to be more than a rebranding, otherwise it cannot survive. In particular, if Waterfox is retaining the XUL support, then it's going to get harder and harder to merge upstream Firefox into it, which means a bigger and bigger burden on you. > my next step after the release of v56 is to go to VCs (or other funding sources) and show that open source projects can be successful business ventures without having to sell out the user If you succeed, that's going to be great, since it means more funding for open-source. However the elephant in the room is that you're dependent on Mozilla's developers for continued development. That's much like greenwashing, you know, how some companies claim to be "green" by outsourcing pollution to other countries. And implicit in this claim is that Mozilla is selling the user out and I don't see how. I understand the reticence for Google being the default search engine, but as a DuckDuckGo user and as an European I can tell you that the difference can be night and day. And it's easy to change the search engine, there's no other browser that makes it easier, desktop or mobile. Speaking of which, Ecosia might be cool for having trees planted from its revenue, but it kind of has the same problem — being dependent on Bing and thus Microsoft. And I'm going to guess that the results are at least as poor as DDG and the problem for users is that most users will apply the "three strikes you're out" rule, because you don't want to second-guess your search engine on every search, unless you really, really care so much about privacy that you can take that pain and most people don't.

darklajid 9y ago

I just completed my first Firefox for Android build and I have to say that Mozilla makes it really easy to get started [1] - I plan to run a personal fork/modified Android version from now on if this works this smooth. Ignoring the huge download, this has been one of the easiest open source projects to build so far. I'm impressed. 1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Simple_Firefox_for_Android_build https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

Santosh83 9y ago
What's your reason for building your own FF for Android may I ask? Just curious...
- darklajid 9y ago
  Firefox improves greatly in speed and features - I like that and don't want a long term release thing or a radical fork like the one discussed here. I can live with some plugin issues on the desktop (web extensions being less powerful). But I refuse to use Firefox on Android without 'Share To Bottom' [1]. Feel free to link to xkcd's "you broke my workflow", but without this feature my blood pressure is constantly too high. Whenever I long-press on a link I want either (80% of the time) 'Open in new tab' or (the rest of the time. No exception. Never anything but these two things) 'Copy link'. I never ever want 'Share', but some time in the past Fennec/Firefox for Android moved that option to the top of the menu. I filed bugs for that, got shot down rather quickly and stumbled upon the addon [1] as a workaround. The workaround is now broken and so is literally nearly every single (I rarely just click links, always long-press them. I have sometimes more than 90 tabs open on my Android phone) interaction with a link on the internet. The menu is annoying me with a prominent button that I never want, but press in error again and again (probably adding to Mozilla's heatmap, so that they'll conclude in the future that this was a very good change indeed! Lots of people click "Share"!). So right now I created my own Firefox build and I'm trying to do this the nasty way (still searching my way around in this codebase, but I plan to completely remove the 'Share' menu item. A hardcoded 'Share To Trash' modification, if you will). I'll happily rebuild the browser for this change, for all eternity. (Note that I never understood the 'Share' option in that menu in the first place. Everyone I see around me uses 'Share' from the page menu, i.e. the top-right … thing. To share the page you're _actually_ looking at. Instead of sharing a link to a page (via a popup menu) that you cannot see right now. So the version I envision still allows you to share stuff, just not from the context menu of a link) 1: https://github.com/miraks/ShareToBottom/ https://github.com/miraks/ShareToBottom/

ak39 9y ago

Has anyone here done any line of business/crud type of app with XUL that they feel has been successful? I'd be interested in hearing any short description of the ups/downs of your efforts.

johannes1234321 9y ago
About 15 years ago German car rental company Sixt migrated some mainframe based console UIs to XUL, while keeping the backend in COBOL. They focused a lot on reaction time and keyboard shortcuts as the tool was used in the call center to capture damage reports. I have no idea how much of this is still used. Slides from an old talk about this: https://blog.mayflower.de/uploads/XUL_xtech2.pdf https://blog.mayflower.de/uploads/XUL_xtech2.pdf
- ak39 9y ago
  Thanks for this. I played around with XUL in 2004 for the first time - and last time. Being totally blown away by its native controls then, I suggested it for an in-house insurance app my client was developing. My recommendation did not receive much respect! They ended up developing an ASP app.