12 ms·

> I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by this choice. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising at all

> I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by this choice. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising at all since people lost a lot of useful functionality that still do not have replacements today. Users were not stuck on XUL as a technology. They cared about functionality and power user functionality! I’m using mainline Firefox and not some fork that still supports XUL addons, but I still miss not having good replacements for:† * Tab Mix Plus (I haven’t seen any replacement for this; and if you haven’t used this in the XUL world, you wouldn’t know the value of it) * Lazarus (form saver) * Session Manager (no, other session saving extensions still feel iffy to me) For reasons I haven’t delved into, these extensions cannot live in a WebExtensions world today. So yes, I’m one of the people hurt by the choice not of removing XUL, but not providing alternatives even several years later. > The main drawback is, of course, that WebExtensions do not give add-on developers as much power as the promiscuous extension mechanism. I hope that all the power that add-on developers need can eventually be added to WebExtensions API but that’s something that takes engineering power, a critical resource that we’re sorely lacking. I don’t have a lot of hope since years have passed with progress in making some more addons work with WebExtentions but not really close to being there for other addons. Though the Firefox team has said it’s currently not planning to implement Manifest V3, if and when it does (and depending on how it does), that could potentially make uBlock Origin obsolete. That would be a much larger blow to the users. †: Please let me know if you have suggestions for great replacements for the first two extensions.

fireattack 6y ago
They also made lots of promises about supporting these popular addons in WebExt era in particular, you should still be able to find plenty of meta-bugs about them on Bugzilla [1]. Of course, most of them never happen, and people are disappointed. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546
mintplant 6y ago
uBlock Origin is important enough to Mozilla that it's featured prominently on the add-ons pages, it was the first add-on made to work on the new Firefox for Android ("make uBlock work" was its own milestone item), and Mozilla developers have actually contributed design work back to the project. Couple this with the positioning win of having uncrippled blocking compared to Chrome, and you can rest assured that Firefox won't break uBO.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Well, that is a single addons and only one of 9 currenly allowed on Android Firefox (!!). All the other addons not on the list - bad luck! Its nice they help an addon or two, but does not help if they neglect the overall addon API & don't even let you install other addons not on their cherry picked list, even if they would work just fine!
  - majewsky 6y ago
    > Well, that is a single addons and only one of 9 currenly allowed on Android Firefox (!!). All the other addons not on the list - bad luck! What are you talking about? When I go to the store on Firefox for Android right now, it shows me a list of 11 "featured" extensions (so 9 is already wrong). To test whether that list is exhaustive, I searched for an extension not in the list (Old Reddit Redirect). I successfully installed it and confirmed that it works. So as far as I can see, both of your claims are completely wrong.
    - m4rtink 6y ago
      Are you sure you are running the new Fenix based Firefox (~v79) and not the old Fennec based one (v68) ? They are rolling the update in vawes abd not all countries are yet affected. But you can still try Fenix based Firefox by installing the Beta ir Nigtly versions
      - majewsky 6y ago
        I've had my current set of extensions for at least 6 months.
    - anonymousab 6y ago
      Mozilla has replaced the existing Android app, Fennec, with Fenix. It has not rolled out to all users and regions yet. So some users have yet to get or even see the update. Fenix uses a whitelist-only model for extensions, and had only around 9, last I checked. Based on some github issue comments, it seems like they'd prefer to stay with a whitelist approach for the foreseeable future. If your extensions are important to you, you'll need to disable auto-updates for Firefox in the Play store, and avoid using 'update all' and similar - that is, if your extensions aren't on the list. A version of the old app is available through F-Droid, but it purports to de-mozilla-fy the browser, so I presume sync and other things may not work the same.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
I'll agree this is all true for power users but I think that catering to that small number of power users at the expense of having a faster, more stable, more secure browser earlier was a major mistake. I loved Tab Mix Plus too and yes, there are some things you still can’t do in WebExtensions that you could do before. And that sucks. But I stopped using Firefox despite those options because it was so slow and unstable, especially on the Mac. By the time it got better, it was not only too late, but Chrome had extensions. Catering to the loyalists is what killed Firefox. What’s more important to normal users is speed, not Tab Mix Plus.
- arp242 6y ago
  Well, Firefox is far from dead, is it? I guess the issue is a different view of what Firefox should be; I feel that many people would be satisfied if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's nothing wrong with that: power users are users too (and there are more of them than many seem to think), and I feel that many people are somewhat frustrated that all software seems designed with only my grandmother in mind. This is an issue that extends far beyond XUL by the way.
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    The original design goal of Firefox was to be a "90/10" browser (relative to the old Mozilla suite). e.g. 90% of the people only need 10% of the features. Catering to power users was never the goal of Firefox and they lost users to Chrome when they did. What people want is a browser that loads webpages quickly and doesn't use a lot of system resources doing so.
    - arp242 6y ago
      Well, Mozilla included email, chat, and whatnot. Regardless of what the goals were, it did cater to power users and clearly many people don't want the direction Firefox went in.
      - Semaphor 6y ago
totetsu 6y ago
If there was no good browser with the option to use uBlock Origin, I think I would give up on the web.
- 29083011397778 6y ago
  Were that to ever become the case, I assume a PiHole would become a much more popular gift
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    A PiHole does not replace uBlock and vice versa. They can block different things at different points.
im3w1l 6y ago
You could consider downloading the source for firefox, modifying the UI and building. Swap patches with other people and you have your "promiscuous" extensions. Take a look at browser/base/content/browser.xhtml
- Reelin 6y ago
  ... and then maintain it all yourself. Depending on what your patches do you might need to be a skilled systems level polyglot programmer. And make sure not to fall behind tracking mainline because there's new zero days all the time! Related, I sure hope you're not trying to compile on a laptop with limited RAM.
  - ylyn 6y ago
    I mean that's basically how the old XPCOM extensions worked for developers.
    - Dagger2 6y ago
      Sort of? But the amount of effort required is much higher. Source patches require having a full dev environment, it takes much longer to build the entire browser and you also have to take on responsibility for rebasing onto upstream, dealing with security releases for the browser itself _and_ every one of the patches, and running an update infrastructure. Extensions from other people (which is 90%+ of them even for extension developers) just need to be loaded, and your own extensions only need a text editor and something that can make zip files. Maintaining Firefox build and update environments is a multiple-employee full-time job at Mozilla, and that's before you've even started modifying anything. It's just too much to expect an end user to do this (and even extension developers are end users most of the time).
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    If you go in with the intention of writing an extension rather than a general case fork then it becomes a bit easier. You know from the start that you will rebase on top of upstream over and over again, and you should write code taking that into account. Minimal changes to existing code, ideally put your code in separate files and make single line changes to existing code to install hooks. Consider what code and interfaces are stable and what changes a lot.
asddubs 6y ago
the one thing I still miss to this day is tamper data. a replacement is ZAP but it's nowhere near as convenient (and also much bigger in scope)
quietbritishjim 6y ago
Possible replacements for Tab Mix Plus: Obviously there's no drop-in replacement for everything. Even with that aside, it's hard to make recommendations because it had so many features and probably a few were especially important to you and they might differ from the ones that were important to me. For me, the number one feature originally was to force absolutely all popups to appear in tabs, not windows. This is actually just a built-in option now (maybe it was all along?) [1] I used to use a feature where you could hold down the right mouse button and use the scroll wheel to switch tabs - I can't remember now whether that was provided by Tab Mix Plus or FireGestures. Anyway, now it's in FireGestures' successor, Foxy Gestures [2]. But the main recommendation is Tree Style Tab [3] (plus its own extensions [4] e.g. I use TST mouse wheel, and there seems to be a tab colouring one if that's your cup of tea). The key thing is that TST draws the tabs itself so it can make any manipulations it likes to them, which it can't do with the original tab bar in new extensions (you can hide the original tab bar [5] to avoid confusing and wasteful duplication). I realise that laying your tabs out in a totally different way is quite a big change but it's actually an amazing change by itself. It's a much more logical way to layout tabs, and you can see more tabs at once (without resorting to multiple rows - yuck!). Once you get used to it, using a linear tab bar seems ridiculous in comparison. Plus extra vertical screen space is useful and horizontal space is typically just wasted. I recommend playing with its options a bit though; I find its default behaviour (collapsing trees automatically when you switch to another one) a bit frustrating. [1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.link.open_newwindow.restri... (set to 0) [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [4] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/blob/master/README.md#addons-that-extend-tst https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/blob/master/README.md... [5] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#for-userchromecss https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
MayeulC 6y ago
> * Lazarus (form saver) Not sure what this one used to provide, but I rely a lot on Form History Control [1] to save my input before the browser crashes (which it tends to do every ~10 minutes these days) and stupid websites. I have done so for years, probably even when XUL was still a thing. I use panorama Tabgroups as well as treestyletabs, but they have trouble coping with my 600+ tabs workflow. I think I might write my own with a graphical tree representation on a pinned tab, sort of a mindmap with tabs inside, comments, notes, etc. As this is how I would like to use my browser. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/form-history-control/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/form-history-...
- snazz 6y ago
  Why is your browser crashing every ten minutes? I can't tell you the last time that the desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari crashed for me. That seems like a huge productivity issue if you have to restart the browser frequently.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    It looks related to Wayland (sway). This behaviour has cropped up recently. Might be a combination of: * Having a relatively big number of tabs (~600 in multiple tab groups) * Having a lot of extensions * Using sway/wayland * Combination of the following environment variables: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 It used to work fine, until something broke a few weeks ago, maybe in a sway/mesa/firefox update (running ArchLinux). This was way worse when autoscroll was enabled, so I disabled it as there is a bugreport for that. I'm on holidays, so the browser is more of a productivity sink than something else, at times. Usually I don't mind much, and might restart it or leave it. Plus, 10 minutes is kind of an overstatement (it sometimes happens faster, but last three crashes took 23, 17 and 18 minutes respectively). I'm living on the bleeding edge, so that kind of stuff happens. I's recently gotten way worse with Qt apps as well, so I would tend to blame sway. But running it as is is a good way to find patterns that might help resolve the issues once reported. I've said a few words in #sway, but didn't get an answer. Don't worry, I could probably change my configuration in a few seconds if I needed more stability in a pinch (use another compositor, maybe another browser): I've launched a few Qt applications with -platform xcb recently. I'm getting errors ranging from [GFX1-]: Receive IPC close with reason=AbnormalShutdown to Gdk-Message: Error reading events from display: broken pipe
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brnt 6y ago
I certainly care about having proper multiprocess support, and that was an important reason for letting go of XUL. Given the choice, I'd chose what we have now.

fireattack 6y ago

They also made lots of promises about supporting these popular addons in WebExt era in particular, you should still be able to find plenty of meta-bugs about them on Bugzilla [1]. Of course, most of them never happen, and people are disappointed. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546

mintplant 6y ago

uBlock Origin is important enough to Mozilla that it's featured prominently on the add-ons pages, it was the first add-on made to work on the new Firefox for Android ("make uBlock work" was its own milestone item), and Mozilla developers have actually contributed design work back to the project. Couple this with the positioning win of having uncrippled blocking compared to Chrome, and you can rest assured that Firefox won't break uBO.

m4rtink 6y ago
Well, that is a single addons and only one of 9 currenly allowed on Android Firefox (!!). All the other addons not on the list - bad luck! Its nice they help an addon or two, but does not help if they neglect the overall addon API & don't even let you install other addons not on their cherry picked list, even if they would work just fine!
- majewsky 6y ago
  > Well, that is a single addons and only one of 9 currenly allowed on Android Firefox (!!). All the other addons not on the list - bad luck! What are you talking about? When I go to the store on Firefox for Android right now, it shows me a list of 11 "featured" extensions (so 9 is already wrong). To test whether that list is exhaustive, I searched for an extension not in the list (Old Reddit Redirect). I successfully installed it and confirmed that it works. So as far as I can see, both of your claims are completely wrong.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Are you sure you are running the new Fenix based Firefox (~v79) and not the old Fennec based one (v68) ? They are rolling the update in vawes abd not all countries are yet affected. But you can still try Fenix based Firefox by installing the Beta ir Nigtly versions
    - majewsky 6y ago
      I've had my current set of extensions for at least 6 months.
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    Mozilla has replaced the existing Android app, Fennec, with Fenix. It has not rolled out to all users and regions yet. So some users have yet to get or even see the update. Fenix uses a whitelist-only model for extensions, and had only around 9, last I checked. Based on some github issue comments, it seems like they'd prefer to stay with a whitelist approach for the foreseeable future. If your extensions are important to you, you'll need to disable auto-updates for Firefox in the Play store, and avoid using 'update all' and similar - that is, if your extensions aren't on the list. A version of the old app is available through F-Droid, but it purports to de-mozilla-fy the browser, so I presume sync and other things may not work the same.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

I'll agree this is all true for power users but I think that catering to that small number of power users at the expense of having a faster, more stable, more secure browser earlier was a major mistake. I loved Tab Mix Plus too and yes, there are some things you still can’t do in WebExtensions that you could do before. And that sucks. But I stopped using Firefox despite those options because it was so slow and unstable, especially on the Mac. By the time it got better, it was not only too late, but Chrome had extensions. Catering to the loyalists is what killed Firefox. What’s more important to normal users is speed, not Tab Mix Plus.

arp242 6y ago
Well, Firefox is far from dead, is it? I guess the issue is a different view of what Firefox should be; I feel that many people would be satisfied if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's nothing wrong with that: power users are users too (and there are more of them than many seem to think), and I feel that many people are somewhat frustrated that all software seems designed with only my grandmother in mind. This is an issue that extends far beyond XUL by the way.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  The original design goal of Firefox was to be a "90/10" browser (relative to the old Mozilla suite). e.g. 90% of the people only need 10% of the features. Catering to power users was never the goal of Firefox and they lost users to Chrome when they did. What people want is a browser that loads webpages quickly and doesn't use a lot of system resources doing so.
  - arp242 6y ago
    Well, Mozilla included email, chat, and whatnot. Regardless of what the goals were, it did cater to power users and clearly many people don't want the direction Firefox went in.
    - Semaphor 6y ago

totetsu 6y ago

If there was no good browser with the option to use uBlock Origin, I think I would give up on the web.

29083011397778 6y ago
Were that to ever become the case, I assume a PiHole would become a much more popular gift
- SahAssar 6y ago
  A PiHole does not replace uBlock and vice versa. They can block different things at different points.

im3w1l 6y ago

You could consider downloading the source for firefox, modifying the UI and building. Swap patches with other people and you have your "promiscuous" extensions. Take a look at browser/base/content/browser.xhtml

Reelin 6y ago
... and then maintain it all yourself. Depending on what your patches do you might need to be a skilled systems level polyglot programmer. And make sure not to fall behind tracking mainline because there's new zero days all the time! Related, I sure hope you're not trying to compile on a laptop with limited RAM.
- ylyn 6y ago
  I mean that's basically how the old XPCOM extensions worked for developers.
  - Dagger2 6y ago
    Sort of? But the amount of effort required is much higher. Source patches require having a full dev environment, it takes much longer to build the entire browser and you also have to take on responsibility for rebasing onto upstream, dealing with security releases for the browser itself _and_ every one of the patches, and running an update infrastructure. Extensions from other people (which is 90%+ of them even for extension developers) just need to be loaded, and your own extensions only need a text editor and something that can make zip files. Maintaining Firefox build and update environments is a multiple-employee full-time job at Mozilla, and that's before you've even started modifying anything. It's just too much to expect an end user to do this (and even extension developers are end users most of the time).
- im3w1l 6y ago
  If you go in with the intention of writing an extension rather than a general case fork then it becomes a bit easier. You know from the start that you will rebase on top of upstream over and over again, and you should write code taking that into account. Minimal changes to existing code, ideally put your code in separate files and make single line changes to existing code to install hooks. Consider what code and interfaces are stable and what changes a lot.

asddubs 6y ago

the one thing I still miss to this day is tamper data. a replacement is ZAP but it's nowhere near as convenient (and also much bigger in scope)

quietbritishjim 6y ago

Possible replacements for Tab Mix Plus: Obviously there's no drop-in replacement for everything. Even with that aside, it's hard to make recommendations because it had so many features and probably a few were especially important to you and they might differ from the ones that were important to me. For me, the number one feature originally was to force absolutely all popups to appear in tabs, not windows. This is actually just a built-in option now (maybe it was all along?) [1] I used to use a feature where you could hold down the right mouse button and use the scroll wheel to switch tabs - I can't remember now whether that was provided by Tab Mix Plus or FireGestures. Anyway, now it's in FireGestures' successor, Foxy Gestures [2]. But the main recommendation is Tree Style Tab [3] (plus its own extensions [4] e.g. I use TST mouse wheel, and there seems to be a tab colouring one if that's your cup of tea). The key thing is that TST draws the tabs itself so it can make any manipulations it likes to them, which it can't do with the original tab bar in new extensions (you can hide the original tab bar [5] to avoid confusing and wasteful duplication). I realise that laying your tabs out in a totally different way is quite a big change but it's actually an amazing change by itself. It's a much more logical way to layout tabs, and you can see more tabs at once (without resorting to multiple rows - yuck!). Once you get used to it, using a linear tab bar seems ridiculous in comparison. Plus extra vertical screen space is useful and horizontal space is typically just wasted. I recommend playing with its options a bit though; I find its default behaviour (collapsing trees automatically when you switch to another one) a bit frustrating. [1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.link.open_newwindow.restri... (set to 0) [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [4] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/blob/master/README.md#addons-that-extend-tst https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/blob/master/README.md... [5] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#for-userchromecss https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

MayeulC 6y ago

> * Lazarus (form saver) Not sure what this one used to provide, but I rely a lot on Form History Control [1] to save my input before the browser crashes (which it tends to do every ~10 minutes these days) and stupid websites. I have done so for years, probably even when XUL was still a thing. I use panorama Tabgroups as well as treestyletabs, but they have trouble coping with my 600+ tabs workflow. I think I might write my own with a graphical tree representation on a pinned tab, sort of a mindmap with tabs inside, comments, notes, etc. As this is how I would like to use my browser. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/form-history-control/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/form-history-...

snazz 6y ago
Why is your browser crashing every ten minutes? I can't tell you the last time that the desktop versions of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari crashed for me. That seems like a huge productivity issue if you have to restart the browser frequently.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  It looks related to Wayland (sway). This behaviour has cropped up recently. Might be a combination of: * Having a relatively big number of tabs (~600 in multiple tab groups) * Having a lot of extensions * Using sway/wayland * Combination of the following environment variables: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 It used to work fine, until something broke a few weeks ago, maybe in a sway/mesa/firefox update (running ArchLinux). This was way worse when autoscroll was enabled, so I disabled it as there is a bugreport for that. I'm on holidays, so the browser is more of a productivity sink than something else, at times. Usually I don't mind much, and might restart it or leave it. Plus, 10 minutes is kind of an overstatement (it sometimes happens faster, but last three crashes took 23, 17 and 18 minutes respectively). I'm living on the bleeding edge, so that kind of stuff happens. I's recently gotten way worse with Qt apps as well, so I would tend to blame sway. But running it as is is a good way to find patterns that might help resolve the issues once reported. I've said a few words in #sway, but didn't get an answer. Don't worry, I could probably change my configuration in a few seconds if I needed more stability in a pinch (use another compositor, maybe another browser): I've launched a few Qt applications with -platform xcb recently. I'm getting errors ranging from [GFX1-]: Receive IPC close with reason=AbnormalShutdown to Gdk-Message: Error reading events from display: broken pipe

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

brnt 6y ago

I certainly care about having proper multiprocess support, and that was an important reason for letting go of XUL. Given the choice, I'd chose what we have now.