And you need to submit complaints to your local data privacy official about this planned data collection which is not opt-in (and therefore violates the privacy laws).
If you live in the EU, submit a complaint to your local data privacy official, in Germany those are the Landesdatenschutzbauftragten and Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten, for example, you can find the ones for Schleswig-Holstein here: https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/impressum/.
Submit a complaint today, so that a legal process against Mozilla can happen before they implement this.
Section 28, (6) of the BDSG (German Federal Data Protection Act):
(6) The collection, processing and use of special types of personal data (Section 3 (9)) for own commercial purposes shall be admissible when the data subject has not consented in accordance with Section 4a (3) if
(...)
4. this is necessary for the purposes of scientific research, where the scientific interest in carrying out the research project substantially outweighs the data subject's interest in excluding collection, processing and use and the purpose of the research cannot be achieved in any other way or would otherwise necessitate disproportionate effort.
> The collection, processing and use of special types of personal data (Section 3 (9))
BDSG Section 3 (9) says:
> (9) “Special categories of personal data” means information on a person’s racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical convictions, union membership, health or sex life.
This exception does not apply to behaviourial tracking, such as the list of the visited domains.
If you don't bother to understand the factors, then yes, it's very easy :)
Unfortunately, making opinions without learning about the factors in play is called "ignorance" and usually is frowned upon.
I should have wrote "how to collect". I thought I remembered a mozilla employee asking HN to let them know if their anonymisation methods were adequate (not necessarily in that latest thread).
XUL is still there, and there are no immediate plans to get rid of it. Mozilla has just decided that you dont get to use it anymore, the deadline is purely an administrative decision.
Its great to see they are going to drive firefox off a cliff with yet another anti-user decision.
The situation with popular extensions has improved, but there is going to be a lot of pain, especially with XUL functionality that they refuse to implement in WebExtensions.
> XUL is still there, and there are no immediate plans to get rid of it
It's true it's still there, but I think the plan is using it less and less. No new UIs are written in it and many things have been rewritten from XUL to HTML5. Eventually it could be removed entirely.
It is my understanding that getting rid of XUL in favor of a less peculiar way to do UI is a necessary step to improve security and performance and get rid of a lot of legacy ballast that keeps Firefox from getting better. So there are some upsides to the transition. Time will tell whether it will be a success or whether it will "drive Firefox off a cliff". I don't think you can say a priori what the result will be.
The UI toolkit "XUL" is something different from the extension API "XUL/XPCOM".
And no, it's certainly not just an administrative deadline. For now, you can still tell Firefox Nightly to install legacy extensions, the vast majority of them are just by now completely broken, because Mozilla is ripping out all of that legacy code and refactoring what's left.
Here's a list of all of the things that they can get rid of: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347507
The question is not about "XUL functionality" specifically, XUL is just an implementation detail, and html could work in its place just as well.
The question is how much the extensions can do, in the old model they could do anything firefox code could do, in WebExtensions model, they can do only very limited set of things.
On one hand it is quite sad to see firefox extensions go, on the other hand the old model was a maintenance hell both for firefox developers and for addon developers, because smallest changes in firefox ui were breaking bunch of addons, and even changes in addons themselves were breaking other addons, which all had incompatibilities and had to do lots of subtle hacks to work together.
I have worked on firefox addons for several years, and had to quit firefox when they started ignoring addons and investing in old addon sdk. But saying Mozilla is intentionally killing firefox is not fair the whole thing was shaky and full of hacks and would crumble by itself too.
What they should do now, is splitting their ui from the engine, so that advanced users can hack on the ui and get all the benefits of old addon system without the mess. If they fail to do that brave browser with https://github.com/brave/muon will take that niche.
The eventually goal is to fully dump XUL but that's going to take time to finish. The major point of 57 is legacy addons will no longer be supported.
Think about it this way: the transition away from XUL means the UI code (and more) is going to be very unstable for awhile. Thus addon authors would need to be continually rewriting their code for each update to keep up with the changes. It's better to bite the bullet now and switch to a more stable api.
Source? Last I heard from Moz, XUL was considered a maintenance burden that increasingly suffers from neglect. HTML now does a comparable job, is standardised, is widely used and needs to be implemented anyway.
Maintaining two interface languages doesn't make much sense in the long term.
The XUL/XPCOM extension API is a massive maintenance burden. The XUL UI toolkit is something different and while it's not either magically free of maintenance cost, it's much less of a maintenance burden than the XUL/XPCOM extension API.
They are disabling the direct access from extensions to apis used by browser itself (that is access to XUL _and_ XPCOM), to be able to modify the browser ui without worrying about breaking extensions, with the goal to remove XUL eventually.
Are the new APIs stable yet? I didn't think they have all the features required for some addons.
There are some people (like me) who use firefox because of addons that can't be supported on other browsers due to the lack of API support, so it's a bit disappointing if they're going to pull the rug from under those addons. If they do, they might see people leave for another browser.
For reference, the addon in question for me is Tabs Mix Plus.
All new APIs taken together, no, won't be stable for at least half a year still, very likely longer. They're still very much in the process of designing and implementing new APIs.
But the core APIs are the same as Chrome's. The implementation might not yet always be perfect, but the APIs themselves are stable. So, for the vast majority of add-on developers, the experience will already be much less burdensome. Or it will be in the future.
Yes, some add-ons will not happen or might only be possible long after the release of Firefox 57. But they're not going back on that plan. They haven't just forbidden these extensions for funsies. They've very much already used the opportunity to rip out tons of legacy code and refactor things that they could have never refactored before without breaking tons of add-ons each time. At this point, there's very few legacy extensions left that still function in Firefox Nightly, even if you tell it to load them.
Not to mention that this has helped them to speed Firefox up by a significant factor. All the performance improvements since Firefox 48 would not have been made without this deprecation on the horizon.
And considering that a significant chunk of Firefox users use no extension or just the obligatory ad blocker (or any set of extensions that's going to be easily replaceable with WebExtensions), this is also very much the decision that has to be made when asking yourself what's best for users.
As for people possibly leaving Firefox when their favorite extensions stop working, yes, that's possible, but Firefox's market share has been growing again since Firefox 48, and there's also just the fact that Firefox is still going to be the browser with the most powerful extension API.
You're not getting more extensions by switching. You'd have to be fine with even less extensions in exchange for maybe a particular feature that you like in another browser.
I have never said anything along those lines. Your problems do exist, I very much also am sad to see certain add-ons go. All I said is that in my opinion, and evidentally in Mozilla's opinion, your and my problem with add-ons going away, don't weigh up against the problems of 95+% of the user base.
I have no problem with you being sad about these add-ons going away. I do have a problem with you acting like what Mozilla does is completely unreasonable and objectively bad for users.
Nope. It uses XUL. It is in some parts new code, but not completely. If you were using Firefox Nightly, you could actually see them slowly changing Australis over to Photon.
Why is HTML slower than XUL? I thought XUL was pretty much just a weird version of HTML, possibly with more native toolkit support. Is it because XUL is being used from C++ rather than JS?
(I checked the browser.html issue tracker but most of their perf bugs seemed to be resolved.)
It may also be that XUL is more restrictive or less forgiving. By not having to handle as many edge cases they can skip a lot of code and speed things up.
I remember, for instance, that XUL was highly optimized to not create DOM nodes for huge/infinite lists/trees/... Last time I heard about someone attempting to implement these optimizations with comparable APIs in HTML5, the results were ok, but not nearly as good.
That was a few years ago, results may be obsolete, of course.
I suspect it's because the XUL used in Firefox and later is not "pure".
I seem to recall that one of the big "optimizations" that FF did compared to the mozilla suite (these days known as Seamonkey) was to translate a bunch of UI elements into native equivalents rather than drawing it all from XUL.
Thus replacing that with HTML may well be closer to reverting to the pre-FF XUL way.
The Browser Architecture team at Mozilla [0] is investigating stripping XUL(/XBL) out of Firefox, among other things, but it's more complex than you might expect.
2FA is actually globally enforced for all internal Mozilla accounts, IIRC---it's just not done over U2F. I'm not sure whether the details are public so I can't elaborate further.
So, one stable release without something like a two-factor authentication method. Since the addon will break and no official support will be released on time, there's no other choice but to use Chrome/Chromium to use Yubikeys.
It has been a while since I last tried compiling Firefox, so I don't know if things have improved. In some of my previous setup and build attempts I ended up giving up out of frustration. Just updating the docs would probably be of huge help to many users.
More and more it feels that self-compiling is not a considered usage for large projects. Instead if you compile at all, you do so as part of a distro maintenance team. And thus should be on all the relevant mailing lists and irc channels, and keeping notes.
At least that is how it feels to me after having spent some years using a distro that is a fair bit more hands on than most.
This is definitely relatable. I've lost interest in many projects after wasting hours trying to get things to compile.
The worst offender I've encountered has been android. The initial checkout is like +100GB, and it has incredibly poor fault tolerance. Based on my experience, it fails regularly at random points, requiring you to re-fetch everything. Despite multi-day efforts, I've never managed to build a ROM for my Nexus 5X or Pixel.
I'll add a +1 to this very issue. I likewise am not sure if it's still the case, but a few years ago I was looking into contributing some ES2015 implementations to the FF JS engine but couldn't get Firefox to compile based on the docs. I get that software development involves some amount of grit to grind out a problem and solve it, but to have to do so right at the beginning of possibly contributing to an open source project was asking just a bit too much of my free time and I bailed and have never made the attempt again.
Fwiw if you go to their irc server and go into the introduction channel you can get help on stuff like this. The artifact builds are also much quicker to download and compile too if you don't need to change the c++ core.
The only issue is that you have to clone whole mozilla-central even if you only work with small part of it.
But once you pull it, the building and hacking on it is quite easy :)
I've always had trouble compiling large projects. The only one I got working with no issues along the way was ReactOS, which (in a twist of fate) will not support Firefox 57.
Firefox does try to make it easy to build. However they're quite opinionated and want you to use a "bootstrap" script which downloads some stuff into ~/.mozbuild regardless of you potentially already having it.
It is however still very close to a clone & bootstrap & build process, at least on Linux and Mac - i.e. one of the better projects. (For comparison, I recently tried to build Facebook's Infer, and that was even worse than building OpenOffice back in the day.)
You can even contribute to them without a Firefox clone, they're an entirely separate repo that contains a webpage that can be run in both Firefox or Chrome as a regular website and used to debug both. It's fun!
It seems a bit awkward to me when Mozilla keep asking for contributors. They're profiting from Firefox (via the huge search engine deal), it's in really poor taste when such organisations then beg for contributors. They have enough money to employ people to keep their product going... Kinda the same with e.g. Facebook's open source projects, although I guess there are worse places to contribute (and FB's projects might actually be useful for other companies work - hence contributing isn't a complete waste of time).
My only exception would be scratching my own itches, but here they're asking for help with company goals.
Mozilla is a non-profit organization. Any money that they make, they have to reinvest into Firefox or other Mozilla projects. There's not some guy getting rich from you helping them out. All the help that you invest will eventually fall through to users in some way.
To be completely fair: many projects at many companies turn out to be failures. Rust could've been bad and Firefox OS could have ended up ruling the world, and suddenly your comment would look very different. There's just a fundamental risk in projects, and viability often only becomes later in hindsight. (Most other companies failures just happen to be a lot less visible since they're not developing in the open.)
Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) is non-profit. Most of the employees work for Mozilla Corporation, which is owned 100% by MoFo.
It's very clear the MoCo doesn't reinvest all the money they make (they have a lot in the bank). And some are getting rich from it, but that's a different topic.
I don't consider getting paid your wage as "getting rich", if that wage is within industry standards for the job that you're doing.
And yes, the MoCo is not reinvesting all money all the time right away, but they'll have to reinvest it or use it to pay wages at some point. They have no reason to just amass money senselessly.
If they make a surplus, have all wages paid, and don't save it up nor reinvest it, then they can only pay it out to the Mozilla Foundation, where it's again in nonprofit hands.
Companies like Facebook publish their libraries so they can hire people who are already familiar with the libraries they internally use. As an outsider you can't be an expert in <company internal library> if you don't even whether it exists.
So, it's not "asking for help", it's informing how you can help.
I'm also not "begging for contributors" or asking to help with "company goals", I'm suggesting ways to help with our current major release. If we're successful, it should make the whole Web better thanks to bringing more competition and choice to the user.
Major open source projects are actually fun to work with for many people. They're very challenging not just because of problems you solve, but also because of the massive project culture and technical infrastructure in place that you learn in the process.
That learning helps people grow as engineers.
Also the feeling that you made an impact on the lives of millions of users is quite awesome.
For others, they're already Firefox users and it's just about fixing a bug that was itching them.
So, generally speaking, there are reasons to help major open source projects, even if they can afford to hire full time engineers as well.
Two side notes:
1) We're way, way smaller than all our competitors. The number of engineers that Google, Apple and Microsoft can hire to work on their browser engines is significantly higher than what Mozilla can do. We can't compete and never will be able to. That's why, beside of our culture and Mozilla Manifesto, we rely on our ability to attract contributors.
2) It's a chicken and egg. Keeping the project really open (not technically open as in - we'll dump the source code to github every once in a while), requires continuous effort. Having a healthy community of contributors is important for our project culture to stay open. If people stop contributing, some things will naturally decay into less open state making it harder in the future for new contributors to come in. And I'm not even talking about code only. Mozilla's marketing, engineering, privacy, security, UX and other projects are working in the open.
If attracting contributors was such a priority for mozilla, you would think that so many screw-the-users-we-are-doing-this-anyways decisions wouldnt come to pass.
Tons of decisions mozilla makes are taken dispite generally negative outside feedback, usually with a vauge convoluted justification with some metric.
Its ok to do what you think is best and right, but if you want an open participation from the outside, its best to not to ignore the feedback users give (note telemetry metrics arnt feedback, especially when interpreted with an agenda, stuff dosent always measure what you think it does). The entire conversation process around mozilla products is ridiculously straight jacketed, and unless you agree with what they have already decided prepare to be ignored, or have your points moderated out of existence. A good example of this tendancy is the conversation surrounding the proposal to track visited urls[1], you either accept that differential privacy is information theoretically secure (it isnt), and you accept that mozilla should have this information (metrics are an unqualified good), or your posts will be removed. Nobody is enthusiastic about contributing to a project that ignores what they care about, even if the people ignoring you think its for the greater good.
It seems to be the general conclusion inside mozilla is that Chrome is winning because of x, we need more x, for any value of x (including values of X which are in direct opposition to an open, free internet), while ignoring the strengths that firefox has and why people are actually choosing to use it over chrome.
As you say, it is 100% hopeless to try to be a better chrome than chrome is, Google outresources you 1000 to 1. I wish that firefox cared more about being firefox, and less about becomming a worse version of chrome.
I understand that this is how you see our actions.
Working on Mozilla, I do not agree with you on multiple points:
> If attracting contributors was such a priority for mozilla, you would think that so many screw-the-users-we-are-doing-this-anyways decisions wouldnt come to pass.
It's way more complex than you present it. Working on a big project, with a solid legacy, will make you face dramatic decisions where each outcome is going to cost. For example, most users, due to their vested interest in one outcome, and lack of understanding of the cost of the other (they're not going to spend countless hours maintaining legacy APIs), would say "Keep legacy extension system forever". But as a module owner of Gecko, you understand the tremendous cost of doing it.
The decision you're making is way more complex and multi-factored that the decision those users made when they voiced their opinion.
Trying to say that "if you care about being open source project, do what users tell you to" is imho only possible if you don't understand the complexity.
> its best to not to ignore the feedback users give (note telemetry metrics arnt feedback, especially when interpreted with an agenda, stuff dosent always measure what you think it does).
I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying here.
Telemetry tells us what happens. Feedback tells us what users want to happen.
Telemetry done right gives us representation of the population, feedback gives us the representation of the sample that voiced their opinion.
Loud minority can sway the discussion in any way (WebVR on Linux is the most important thing for Mozilla to work on!). Telemetry gives a different picture (3% of our users are on Linux, and 0.01% of them uses WebVR at all).
You can also see it in this thread. I wrote a blog post about ways to contribute to an open source project. You'd guess the majority of the conversation should be about technicalities involved in contributing discussed among those who want to contribute but have questions.
Instead, majority is about whether Mozilla is doing what the given person wants it to do on a very high meta-level (I want extensions to work this way, or I want data to be collected that way).
There's a substantial difference between those two - one is about a case where an engineer working on Firefox UI filed a bug about switching the way we react to clicks on a button but had no time to fix it. Maybe it also affects you? Maybe you want to go and write a couple lines of JS to fix it? Cool! Let's talk.
The latter is "I have an opinion on privacy policies at Mozilla, and I voiced it together with a number of other individuals who, when asked, say that there should be always less tracking. We brought our pitchforks and loudly demanded it. Now it seems that Mozilla is, after holding a public discussion for months, adding the telemetry which is not in line with what we told them to do so it means they ignored us! Outrageous!"
I'm not saying that we've always done the right thing (I believe we made very high level mistakes on multiple projects, but I also believe I don't have the full knowledge that went behind those decisions, so tt's easy for me to say).
I'm saying that this post is for people who may want to contribute to Mozilla but didn't know how. Sort of "www.whatcanidoformozilla.com" or "#contribute-newbies" style. And "the feedback" is about high level complex decisions that Mozilla is doing that are not in line with the persons opinion. Much more of a "mozilla.governance" or "mozilla.upper-management.decisions" style.
It's easy to have high-level opinions if you don't aim to understand the full complexity of the topic at hand. I can right...
Your post is a load of mimimization of my concerns, and redirection about how I couldnt possibly comprehend these complexities.
What i care about is my experience as a user is being objectively destroyed by these kinds of changes, go on and call me a "loud minority" or say "our metrics indicate [ ... ]". The fact remains that those are dismissive statements that indicate that you really don't care about these issues, so please stop insulting me by pretending you do.
You don't respect my perspective because you beleive my perspective to be uninformed and incorrect.
The plain fact is, as a user, I dont care about how the sausage is made, what i care about is how it tastes to me, you can make the "complexities arising" excuse for practically any (perceived) failure of any complex system. It dosent mean that its acceptable to me as a user who is being essentially told we dont care about your use case anymore. Please try to understand that mozilla are essentially taking everything that I gain utilty from with firefox, and tossing it in the dumpster.
Don't expect me to not be upset about all this going on because its for some grand nebulous greater good that will surely happen Soon(tm).
For what its worth I think you will find this "loud minority" is more influential than your metrics capture, and post 56 you are going to see a lot more people moving to chrome.
> Your post is a load of mimimization of my concerns, and redirection about how I couldnt possibly comprehend these complexities.
I apologize. That was not my intention. Being ESL may played into how I expressed my opinion.
Again, apologies!
> What i care about is my experience as a user is being objectively destroyed by these kinds of changes, go on and call me a "loud minority" or say "our metrics indicate [ ... ]". The fact remains that those are dismissive statements that indicate that you really don't care about these issues, so please stop insulting me by pretending you do.
I certainly didn't mean to insult you. I apologize if that's how it feels.
Being a minority doesn't mean you're "wrong" or "irrelevant". I consider myself a vast minority (I use Linux, I'm a software engineer, I'm a Pole - all those are minorities!) and it certainly makes what I need from software, different than what most people need from software.
Understanding that I'm a minority helps me understand why what I want may not be the best for a product like Firefox.
I genuinely would want Firefox to add client side decorations (being worked on in bug 1283299) before they add color accents for Windows 10 (which I don't use).
But understanding that I'm a minority helps me understand why the priorities of Firefox UI module owners are different.
I don't want to be dismissive, just point out why what you or I want or believe is right, may not always be the best from the perspective of someone who has to decide for the product used by hundreds of millions of users.
> It dosent mean that its acceptable to me as a user who is being essentially told we dont care about your use case anymore.
I agree that what matters for you as a user is the outcome. I don't expect you to be happy about the decision that doesn't give you what you need because of the fact that "it's the right decision" on some other level.
But I ask you to separate your wants and needs as a user from indicating that decision makers are wrong in their decisions when they go against your needs.
And I also disagree that not doing what you want equals "not caring about your use case".
It's not about "care vs. not care". It's about priorities.
If your use case is valid, but not common, it will most likely just wait longer to be fixed (like CSD). If the value of what you ask for is going to bring less value to fewer users than the opposite, then the right decision for the decision maker is to do the opposite. Not because "they don't care", but because there's a more substantial value in it for more people.
> Please try to understand that mozilla are essentially taking everything that I gain utilty from with firefox, and tossing it in the dumpster.
I do understand that. I'm very sad to hear that this is what is happening to you, and I understand your frustration.
Please, try to understand that:
a) I'm not a decision maker, so I can only share my perspective.
b) Even if I was, I would probably have to see the bigger picture and may have to make the same decision.
> Don't expect me to not be upset
I don't. I really don't. I understand you're upset and I believe you have the right to be.
I just ask you to separate being upset, and making decisions based on it, from accusing others of not caring for it is possible to care about your use case, and yet make the rational and valid decision against it based on the value for more use cases.
I believe we're dropping into philosophical conversation about decision making that is getting close to trolley dilemma :)
> For what its worth I think you will find this "loud minority" is more influential than your metrics capture, and post 56 you are going to see a lot more people moving to chrome.
I can't argue here, only trade opinions. I hope that the technical value of the product will make...
> I don't want to be dismissive, just point out why what you or I want or believe is right, may not always be the best from the perspective of someone who has to decide for the product used by hundreds of millions of users.
There's also a simpler explanation (and following Popper's criterion - it's way more likely to be the actual reason): mozilla just decided to switch to total populism and now targets for amoeba-like users (that are an overwhelming majority) rather than power users (advanced, tech-savvy, where the share of users with 100+ tabs is higher than 10% compared to those ~0.01% among all users).
Why?
Because it's easier and because this way it will make higher profit (I know that MoFo is a non-profit, that never mattered anyways).
Hey Gandalf! One of the big disconnects in participation is technical vs. non technical. I still believes Mozilla is very welcoming to people that can contribute to building the product. However it's much less willing to let people contribute to decide what should be built.
Not saying it's good or bad - Mozilla has never been a democracy - but I feel this is what people complain a lot about.
At the same time I don't see the situation improving, with more and more product/project management happening behind the scenes in docs/platform that are not even accessible in read-only mode publicly.
> At the same time I don't see the situation improving
I actually do, but as you know, I'm an optimist by nature :)
The path that could lead to Mozilla tech opening for the case you're describing may look like this:
* Fx 57 is successful
* Gecko successfully transitions to be a modern Web engine with its own advantages over other engines
* The new features such as Rust and leapfrogging advancements like Stylo/WebRender etc. add up to make people want to use Gecko/Servo over other engines in their products
* We're successful at building a node/electron like wrapper for Gecko/Servo
* The innovation begins
I don't think it's certain, and I don't know if it'll happen, but I do now that there are people tinkering with things like GeckoView and electron like wrappers, with target for next year.
It's not guaranteed, but I do hope it'll happen.
That's a lot of ifs... And again these are very technical aspects, not strategic/product ones.
Mozilla has been putting 110% of their effort on a Desktop browser recently. Fine, their choice, but I can't help but think that their are cornering themselves in a niche and are missing where the new tech users will be.
As you can guess, I really feel it's a shame that gecko is becoming really good, just not used in a context that matters.
> That's a lot of ifs... And again these are very technical aspects, not strategic/product ones.
Correct. Lots of ifs. And on top of that, ifs from a regular engineer which means I know even less about all the factors in play than I should to predict.
> Mozilla has been putting 110% of their effort on a Desktop browser recently. Fine, their choice, but I can't help but think that their are cornering themselves in a niche and are missing where the new tech users will be.
My personal take is that we have to start somewhere. We can try to come up with a completely new technology, and we're trying to - see Servo.
We can make Gecko the best web engine on the planet.
Or we can try to build amazing products on top of an ok engine.
I believe we have to start somewhere, and stating by bringing Gecko to excellence is not a bad choice.
> As you can guess, I really feel it's a shame that gecko is becoming really good, just not used in a context that matters.
My comment wasn't specifically targeted at your blog post, more the general impression I've been getting of Mozilla. And sure, Mozilla is more open than Apple and MS, and probably a bit more open than Google.
But fundamentally, Firefox decisions are made by Mozilla employees, to further the goals of the Mozilla company (which makes money from those decisions - sure, to be hopefully reinvested). Firefox isn't like those other large open source projects where the codebase and thus decisions are owned by many independent (and mostly commercial) entities. Outside contributors have very little say in the product, so I wouldn't say its any better for people to contribute to Firefox vs e.g. Chrome. I.e. Mozilla wants their code - but in the many cases that have become publicised it doesn't seem like Mozilla wants their opinions.
(This is probably just the reality of end-user facing software projects with major UX components. But it's still sad to see contributors being invited in when they'll be ignored in the decision-making.)
// Edit: and it looks like fabrice_d made pretty much the same point while I was writing my comment : )
I think there's a deeper debate that Mitchell is running over the last few years at Mozilla, and that's how to find a balance between "your voice is heard" and "someone is making a decision".
If you voiced your opinion, and the decision has been made that is not in line with it, it's very easy to feel that "my voice didn't matter. Mozilla doesn't want my opinion".
I believe that it's a fallacy of communication.
So, in total. Sure, as the project grows and priorities change, we get to a more structured way of making decisions. It's getting harder for a casual contributor to steer the decision in a completely different direction.
But I do not believe that it's any different from Fedora, Wikipedia, Gnome, KDE, Wordpress or any other open source tech.
When you're a 10-person github project, it's easy to say that anyone can file an issue and change the course of it. When you're a multihundred million users project with 20 years of legacy code, and thousands of contributors, it is harder to see the connection between your opinion and the result.
But I do believe that if you gain trust in the community, and use the right forums (and I realize that finding the right forum to voice your opinion is not easy), you do have an impact.
Even if the final decision is not in line with it, which will happen, unless you and the decision owners are always 100% correct.
Back in ~2015, there were several Firefox developers who visited a local hacklab where I used to hang out. I was aware of a bug in the current version of FX at that time, and I knew how to fix it. I wanted to get their help to create a patch for the bug and get it submitted.
After about two hours of trying, we were unable to produce a working build from a tagged release point in their version control - even before applying any changes.
The Linux x86_64 build experience has worked very well on Ubuntu for many years. These days you don't even need to copy and paste the apt incantations: ./mach bootstrap takes care of that.
Oddly my impression is that their focus is more on Mac and Windows than on Linux. I swear that whenever i see them presenting something, it is invariably done using a Mac.
I'm also happy to say that we actually did improve our build chain. I have a build env for Firefox on Mac, Windows and Linux and it all works quite smoothly.
The only issue is that full compilation takes time (30 minutes on my laptop).
Fortunately we also now have Artifact Builds which allow you to hack on the front-end JS code without having to rebuild the C++ backend [0].
Had a similar experience trying to debug some UI problems I was facing a few years ago.
Building and contributing to Chromium is a breeze, in comparison, that is as long as you have a steady and fast Internet connection.
I just updated FF Nightly on Android and the new Photon UI is very big, very white and very obtrusive feeling in comparison to before I updated. I've got a pretty small android phone, I'm sure it looks better on the phablets of the world, but I ask for a dark UI option and small screen footprint please.
The new look screams "generic". You can say what you want about the old design, but you could always tell that someone was using FF Mobile because of the distinct black rounded background on the buttons. The new design looks like literally every other mobile browser in existence.
On the other hand, the most comment complaint I've seen in the wild about FF for Android is "the UI looks weird / doesn't fit in with the rest of Android". You can't please everyone.
It'd be easier to test and keep current with what Mozilla wants tested if they had a delta update for the nightly rather than a monolithic binary. For example if they jumped on board with delivering a flatpak version.
Dear Mozilla developers! I've been using Firefox since v1.0. And I want you to know that by ditching the old plugin architecture you are alienating your faithful users, myself included.
I'm sorry, but I decided to stick with Firefox 55 for now, possibly switching to Palemoon later. I need my old extensions to work: Status4Evar, EdgeWise and Classic Theme Restorer. I can't stand the current FF UI and I will not give up on this.
One more voice for the above. I will be stopping at Firefox 56 until I decide what works best for me. I rely on several plugins daily that are about to be made obsolete. Likewise I revert Firefox back to a very classic UI interface that is very compact and familiar. I have avoided Chrome all these years because I can't stand its UI. Now I'm also about to loose the ability to make FF feel familiar along with many of my required productivity add-ons.
I'll ride out FF 56 until I decide where to go next but honestly the many times in the past it has felt FF has ignored the requests of long term users, coupled with lack of differentiation from Chrome, I'm not sure I have much reason to stick around.
Kudos to the team for all the hard work improving the FF core. But you're about to abandon that which kept long term users like myself here through all those rough years. Makes me sad.
Yes it's a change but it serves a good purpose - to standardize the extension development and making sure that 1 extension can be running on multiples browsers e.g. Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc..
Yes, it's a good purpose to have a standard base. It's bad, though, that nothing besides the blessed parts are officially customizable anymore.
Previously, extensions had messed up with anything they wanted (they could override most of the browser's core). That had allowed third parties to do incredible things that weren't ever considered by the browser developers.
With WEs, though, the only things that browser developers had specifically thought about are possible. All for user's convenience, so they can switch to Chrome, Edge or Opera.
It's the same thing as plugins, unsigned drivers, etc. etc. If the platform gives unfettered control, that is nice in that it gives power users flexibility, but it comes at the cost of seriously jeopardizing the experience of non-power-users who don't understand the intricacies of the software. They expect the platform to protect them by default. This applies to the whole package -- security, performance, and overall experience.
Vendors have learned that if they fail to provide this protection, the average user will blame them directly, not the extension that makes memory usage bloat 6x. The solution is to enforce stringent controls, including limiting modifiable parts of the experience to some well-defined areas.
>All for user's convenience, so they can switch to Chrome, Edge or Opera.
Nah, it's the other way(s) around - it's for [longterm] developer convenience; so users don't have to switch to another browser because an add-on they need isn't available in FF.
Unfortunately I don't think so. The only draw keeping FF alive for years has been its extension system. They gave up the unique UI flexibility, now they are giving up the flexible extensions. When Google makes it so easy to find and install Chrome everywhere, and sync it with your mobile device, now that the extensions world will be on "par" FF is even less distinct than it was and thus less reason to use it. This is the beginning of Firefox's final dive.
In a few more releases I really won't have any concrete reason to recommend FF over Chrome anymore (and no, 99% of users outside of this forum don't care about memory usage and keeping 100 tabs open at the same time)
Then they should bring back the old UI we came to love. I want my blue title bar on Windows, my menu bar, my status bar, my square tabs, etc, etc. Also, I can't imagine living without EdgeWise, so they would have to incorporate that, as well. Other people use different sets of features, which are also not supported in the new plugin model. How can Mozilla ever hope to plug all these holes (pun intended)?
> I want my blue title bar on Windows, my menu bar, my status bar, my square tabs, etc, etc.
So like this [0]? The title bar isn't blue, but neither is any other title bar on Windows 10.
To achieve this on Nightly I opened the Customize view, switched the theme to "Light", checked the "Title bar" checkbox, and enabled "Menu bar" under the "Toolbars" dropdown. Tabs have squared edges by default.
Square tabs have been back for a while now. The Compact Light and Compact Dark themes are included in Firefox by default. Set the theme in Add-ons Manager -> Appearance.
Actually, it still does support legacy extensions and probably will do for a while. There are `browser/features/*.xpi` files in the browser install directory. Even in 57, they're all "legacy" extensions, and the only WebExtension there is `screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi` (even then, still a "legacy" install.rdf-type file, with embedded WE).
And I've just copied the legacy `https-everywhere@eff.org.xpi` non-WE addon there - and it worked ;)
I'm sure they're going to plug this "hole" shut, but it's still there. As well as patching omni.ja.
If it keeps working in FF 57 and won't break after every minor update, I might upgrade. I was actually thinking that providing some kind of officially unsupported backdoor for determined users like us might be a way out of this situation.
The internal APIs will eventually change (break). They already did on major releases - one can find lots of "does not work on Firefox NN+ anymore, please update" comments all over AMO. (By design, this should be significantly rarer occasion with the WebExtensions)
Now there is no requirement to keep them stable even across the patch-level releases. Whenever things would break faster or at the same pace is unknown.
I'm not involved in FF development, but I find it exceedingly unlikely that this will keep working for much longer than a few releases after 57. The whole purpose of all of this is to rip out all the XUL baggage to decrease maintenance cost and make it easier for the developers to focus on actual features and fixing bugs that actual people encounter (as opposed to keeping legacy code paths working where no one has a clue if they are even used anymore).
Ripping out XUL baggage is fine, it doesn't matter which language UI elements are described in. Yes, it would require to rewrite stuff, but that's manageable.
The important part is ability to replace (overlay) chrome resources, patching/extending the browser code. I hope that's going to stay for a while.
No, it is going to break after every minor update. Most legacy extensions already don't work anymore in Firefox Nightly, even if you tell it to load them [0], simply because Mozilla has very much already used their new freedom to throw out tons of legacy code [1] and to refactor what's left.
The Mozilla-supplied legacy extensions continue to function, because Mozilla is updating them as they make changes to the internals of Firefox. So, I imagine maintaining such a legacy extension is now as much work as it is to just directly contribute and maintain the feature in Firefox's codebase.
[0]: "extensions.legacy.enabled" in about:config. This won't be shipped in Stable, though, and will likely be taken out from Firefox Nightly soon or with the release of Firefox 57.
It's the other way around I think, telemetry isn't (wasn't?) on by default and I enabled it on purpose. And I'm a power user, that's why I don't use chrome (1k tabs here).
Sadly, I don't think the devs have much of a voice anymore. Corporate and upper management have taken over, as shown by the various SJW and usability debacles.
I'm always concerned of this happening to other large-scale independent FOSS projects. Special interests tend to take over without some benevolent dictator.
I'm going to be switching to the extended support release[1] (based on Firefox 52 but with security patches through June 18th 2018).
I don't mind WebExtensions, and cross-browser compatibility is a nice goal, but a half-baked system that breaks the most important distinguishing feature of Firefox (extensions that can modify any part of the browser) is ridiculous.
I'm already on ESR, but my reason is I need java plugin for my company OEBS (it supports web start, but it takes ages for our admins to patch anything).
At the same time, keeping legacy plugins working is a big bonus, I love Classic theme restorer.
Still undecided what to do after june 2018. I guess I'll just try firefox and chrome side by side and move to chrome if there is no real difference. It is probably more convinient to migrate to chrome, since it is on the phone by default too.
The main problem with legacy extensions is that they won't work with multiprocess firefox by design. Multiprocess is the only way forward, because of the enormous speed and stability benefits.
Unfortunately Mozilla has rushed the transition, and there hasn't been enough time to add important APIs and for developers to update their extensions. Firefox 57 is on the verge of being released, and there are still many addons which aren't webextension compatible.
I've been using Firefox since ~Phoenix 0.1 and I don't care at all about the legacy plugins.
It would be interesting to see what percentage of their long time users use more than 1 or 2 add ons (I have 4 installed and only really use 2 of them).
How many of those users really care about firefox and dont just use it for inertia reasons? (already installed, etc)
Frankly if they arnt using extensions they are going to have a vastly better user experience on chrome, and google has infinity manpower to always ensure thats the case.
So what is firefox gaining by becomming a crappier chrome? Why the hell wouldnt I just use chrome at that point, because I feel so great about mozilla, who regularly brushes me off when i try to take advantage of things unique to firefox?
I use mozilla nowadays on my low end laptop because chrome chokes on it most of the time (just plain hangs and stops working with more than 10 tabs which is all the time for me). FF 55 is much snappier with most of my important extensions and doesn't choke as much. So I moved from chrome to FF after 55. Hope they continue to make it better.
P.S FF is now not a crappier version of Chrome but Chrome is crappier if you don't have powerful hardware or RAM (mine's hardly 2 GB and everything sucks a lot though its only 4 years old)
In my case, the critical extension for me is Tab Mix plus (770k users) for multi-row tabs. It's really hard to use a browser without this feature because I've been using it for so long.
The real question is for me is how many users haven't moved onto Chrome -- which is obviously faster and more stable -- because of 1 or 2 add-ons.
i've used ff since the phoenix days (0.6? do not remember). this particular laptop now has 55.0.2 with Cookie Monster, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, Policeman, Show my Password, Tab Mix Plus. some other extensions are installed but not used.
I rely mainly on one add-on: Vimperator. It's a big big productivity enhancer and it's the main reason for sticking with Firefox for so long. Even in a period when Firefox was slower and buggier than the alternatives.
It's sad they will deprecate the old extension interface and make Vimperator a no-no. I understand the reasons behind WebExtensions, specially those related to security, and reckon the benefits of the multiprocess paradigm, but the flexibility of the old extensions API was a big advantage in my pov.
No, Vimperator won't be ported (I wish it could), because WebExtensions is a much more limited API. And no, Vimium and VimFx doesn't come even close to it. They are not alternatives.
I hate to add so little to the discussion, but I am on the exact same boat, and I am quite anxious about the upcoming change.
If there is anything to make either Mozilla hear this use case more, or contribute anywhere to make Vimperator a possibility for the future, I would be happy to do my part.
Though I haven't used it, it seems to radically make firefox into something like Qutebrowser. Not just the key bindings but also the UI which is not possible under new api for Web extensions while Vimium and vimfx only give vim key bindings in the browser (Not the full experience for those who are used to vimperator).
I've been using Firefox since 1.5, and I understand completely why they have to drop their legacy extensions framework to modernize the browser. In recent years I found myself using Chromium more and more because of its responsiveness. Firefox 57 is really close to where it needs to be to let me drop all my use cases of Chromium I have now. Yes, it means 4 of the ~12 extensions I've used for years stop working. Most of those have a web extension version being worked on or aren't worth the competitive disadvantage of supporting a 15 year old addon API.
I've seen plenty of my favorite software projects have to make "hard breaks" to modernize. KDE broke everything with Qt5 / Plasma 5, but the payoff is now they are the premier high DPI Linux desktop. Python broke everything with 3, but features enabled by the changes have made Python 3 the best scripting language ever in my book.
Firefox would be doomed to a slow death with its legacy extensions API the same way PHP and Perl languished for years with the inability to push a major version. A slow death is not a downfall anyone wants.
It's missing functionality because the old API allowed deep, deep hooks into FF's internals.
Per Mozilla, aside from security problems and other nightmares, these deep hooks allowed developers to write plugins that were incompatible with a multiprocess browser architecture where each tab/window can have its own sandbox and remain responsive even if other tabs go down.
And that is one of the killer features that has caused FF to bleed massive amounts of user share to Chrome in the last decade: Chrome almost always "felt fast" in situations where FF ground to an embarassing halt because something was happening in another tab/window that was causing the entire browser to become unresponsive.
I don't know what precisely is missing from the new WebExtensions API but I have to imagine that Mozilla will work to expand its capabilities as much as possible over time...
WebExtensions is also missing functionality because Mozilla set a release date before figuring out what APIs would be needed or how migration would work.
The Add-on SDK was supposed to fix the "deep hooks" problem and is mostly multiprocess-compatible. As far as I know, most currently maintained XUL extensions are multiprocess-compatible, too.
I'm the same. Been using since Phoenix 0.3 and am stoked about these changes, and the thought that Rust, and the major perf and safety improvements that come with it, are beginning to find their way into Gecko. Amazing work from a team that many had dismissed as irrelevant.
Then you must hate all of your software. It's impossible to always continue in the direction that happened to be chosen more than a decade ago. At some point, you will run into problems, which in the case of Firefox were severe problems in performance, security, maintainability and complexity as well as stability of the extension API. You can't fix all of these problems without breaking things, without doing things differently.
And yes, it is to some degree subjective whether this is worth it, but at the end of the day, you, as someone who uses lots of extensions and complex extensions, are only a very small fraction of the Firefox user base. Most users have no extensions or just the obligatory ad blocker. They don't benefit at all from keeping onto the old architecture with all of its problems, which they are suffering under.
And then, yeah, Mozilla has to at some point piss you off in order to help the majority of their user base. It's not like all other browsers had such a complex extension API and Mozilla is just being lazy by dropping it.
I’ve been using Firefox as my standard browser since 0.9.3 (except for a year or so when it was run-a-browser-from-a-USB-disk-or-use-IE and Firefox was just too terribly slow, so I used Chrome—by the next year Firefox had fixed its game and I could switch back), and for the last few years Nightly has been my standard browser.
I get why you’re dropping the legacy stuff and I’m looking forward to what’s possible after it’s gone. When the announcement came out in November last year that WebExtensions would be the only way come 57, I was intensely sceptical that it’d be ready within a year (no one was using it at that time) and prepared for a deal of pain: I’d just have to live with it, come November. (It’s not like I have any better options in mainstream browsers; they’re all hopeless with even only twenty tabs.)
Well.
You’ve proven me wrong, and I’m delighted. I was able to replace all my legacy extensions with WebExtensions ones with minimal loss of functionality (I miss the ability to style the chrome with Stylish, not that I was actually using it for anything other than shaving half pixels off here and there on my high-DPI screen). My Dad (also a programmer) is still grumbling about some status bar thing that broke a short while ago, but we went through his extensions and came to the conclusion that it’s really not that bad—the extensions that stop working at 57 were ones he didn’t use, or ones where there are already good alternatives available or a clear plan for the changeover.
(The fact that in several cases I did have to swap out one extension for another was a mild nuisance, but as a Nightly user I’m doing this a few months before everyone will have to, so I expected it.)
All in all, I’m happy with how things have gone and impressed at how well the migration is going. All that I really want now is to be able to hide the horizontal tab strip in favour of my vertical tab bar. And it looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 is almost there. (It’d also be good if file: URLs didn’t mess with said vertical tab bar something awful, but as I haven’t filed any bugs about that yet or investigated to find existing reports I’m not allowed to complain.)
Dear niche community using legacy extensions: We're sorry, but legacy extensions are holding back Firefox development in every way meaningful to the vast majority of users. In order to continue to exist as a viable option for an open web, Firefox must move forward. - (What I imagine they'd say)
Of the extensions you listed, the largest (Classic Theme Restorer) is only used by 333,000 people while the smallest (Edgewise) is only used by 218 people.
Firefox has 80 million daily active users, so that's an 'only' in context. Keeping XUL around and all of its messiness to support a small niche of users at the expense of what most users want is part of why Firefox has lost so many users to less customizable, (arguably) less capable competing browsers.
There are a boatload of assumptions in that statement that are pretty unwarrented. The vast majority of why chrome is popular is because google.com and youtube.com push it nonstop, not any other imagined reasons.
You're forgetting that people who want to use the features older versions had but not anymore are likely the same people who have been using Firefox for a long time. These are the same people who drive Firefox adoption by being experienced long-time users giving advice to the young'uns. If you lose that core user base, you'll lose the rest of 80 million to Google/Microsoft ads in no time.
Plenty of those long-time users giving advice to the young-uns are more than happy yo sacrifice a small part of firefox for big improvements elsewhere.
Your arguments may convince Mozilla not to port these features to WebExtensions, but what are you trying to tell me? To go fuck myself? What you're missing is there are many niches like these, and many people using many niches. It might still be a small percentage of users overall, but we're the geeks and we sit right in the center of the culture. Get rid of us, and the care-about-Mozilla temperature goes down significantly.
Mozilla should find a way of moving forward while keeping the code open enough to modding. AFAIK, features offered by these extensions that I use are not implementable in WebExtensions even in principle, and that is the main problem. Break the compatibility if you must, but make it possible for someone who cares enough to step in and rewrite these extensions to the new architecture.
The vast majority of Firefox users either don't use extensions or only use an ad blocker. I downsized to the same myself quite a while ago for performance and stability reasons in Firefox despite being one of the niche users that used to keep 10 extensions installed. Yes, there are quite a few different niches of users that use specific legacy extensions. But the legacy extension system is a mess and has been holding Firefox back for a while. Mozilla is going to fully embrace WebExtensions and keep moving it forward to enable as much functionality from old extensions as possible to serve several of those niches.
I'd argue that many of the users that choose Firefox over Chrome do so for the fact that Firefox is 100% open source and isn't tied to an advertising giant trying to capture tons of extra private data from you. This won't change that. It will mean you can't change the layout of the entire Firefox window and add tons of new custom buttons and things like that. But most users don't care about that.
For the niche that can't stand using a UI they can't fully customize, they're free to use a slower and less secure browser that continues to support XUL and the associated extensions while still keeping up to date with at least the slower Firefox ESR branch of renderer underneath. Pale Moon, for example.
Legacy extension system vs WebExtentions is actually a false dichotomy. Mozilla still can develop a low-level API in front of its new and improved subsystems. Yes, that will require more development and will be harder to maintain. But the benefits it would bring may arguably be worth it.
Mozilla is already planning on extension WebExtensions beyond what Chrome does with it (I believe they even implemented some of it already) and are planning on adding even more to enable the functionality of some of the more popular legacy extensions (bookmark trees, tab management, etc).
There is an umbrella issue that aggregates proposed improvements to WebExtensions [1]. If you look at RESOLVED WONTFIX issues linked in that bug, you will find a lot of them are rejected based on political reasons. For example: [2]. So there will never be anything close to feature parity with XUL extensions.
For every user of Classic Theme Restorer, there are probably a dozen more Firefox users who complain about the unnecessary UI changes but aren't aware that CTR exists to fix some of the usability regressions.
I used to do that until I discovered the Compact theme (which is now installed by default, previously only available on the developer edition without installing an add-on).
> I can't stand the current FF UI and I will not give up on this.
Then the simple way forward is to make your own browser, isn't it? Use an embeddable engine which does all the hard work for you and focus on making the UI the way you insist it must be. It really could be a single developer project.
TLDR; could someone point me to a tutorial or an explanation on how to properly install FF, update & save the open tabs without making bookmarks (that last point is and edge case we can skip if it's difficult), and having the current icon, on a nix system that has explanations for 5 year olds?
I would love to help but being an amateur I've encountered a few pain points, unless the issue is my search skills are lacking. A few days ago I finally updated my Firefox version on Debian 9 to the developer version 56 (previous 54). The problem has been finding documentation on both the Debian and Mozilla websites on how to do it the right way. Found a decent tutorial, made a back up, installed and my machine is working much better. It is old and got little memory :)
Then FF said there was an update. I got stumped. From what I could find FF sync has a limit of X bytes. I ended up looking into making a web extension but that's going to take me some time. It seems I could save the open tabs using Tabs.tab from the API, maybe. Sorry, I digress.
In short, how can I have two FF versions on at the same time, different directories obviously, with their respective icons, while manually updating them? I guess it would be to delete all the files in the dir, unpacking, and call it a day? Still need help with the two versions though.
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but try just using the same profile for both installs. It contains all the information about your browsing session including tabs, bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc.
His point is concurrent usage of one profile. FF does not support this.
Queue the FF is not tread safe jokes (and only that, not a flame).
OP: you can use Firefox Sync. There is a cloud version by Mozilla but also a WSGI app you could host. I know it is not a 100% solution, but what was recommended to me when I asked during FF alpha and beta testing with stable way back when.
Sorry if I explained myself incorrectly. My main point isn't concurrent usage of profiles.
I lack the necesary knowledge on how to correctly install two different FF versions and have them accesible with their respective icons. In my case, FF dev version and the one discussed in the article to help out with bug testing/development.
The issue is since I'm on Debian, auto update does not work. From my limited understanding, I would need to install FF 57 in its own directory. For this one I don't need a profile. But I don't know how to install it and have it accesible either by command line or the FF icon that comes with the browser since I already have my main FF I want to keep.
The second part is regarding the profile, sync with the other browser I recently installed.... I was about to go down a mental rabbit hole :)
The problem is, the lack of noob friendly documentation. I know I could figure it out if I research the issue through different topics on Linux administration. I was hoping that maybe someone knew of a tutorial which talked about the different steps on how to install Firefox on a nix system, explaining the different concepts as if I were a five year old. The best I've managed to find is a tutorial laying out the steps. But it didn't explain the concepts behind those steps.
That tutorial mentioned how to replace debians FF from the repo. But whenever a new version comes out I would need to delete it and unpack the new one, linking it to the old icon.
I use Ubuntu, which should be pretty similar to Debian as far as this is concerned:
I literally just downloaded the zip file (or maybe a .deb?) and unzipped it in a directory in my desktop. All I had to do after that was make sure I didn't have both browsers open, and everything worked properly. They both used the same profile, and the tabs I opened in nightly were available in stable and vice versa.
I did nothing more than unzip the browser, and everything works perfectly.
Thanks. I'll read this in a bit. When I was looking into different options I did find a mention about the profile, but the doc/tutorial seemed to be old and couldn't find it in the dir when I looked for it.
It's really sad. I love Firefox, but I think when 57 releases, it'll mark the beginning of the end before everyone switches to Chromium, when they realize it's easier to switch browsers than to find alternatives for all their extensions due to Mozilla's way-too-early deprecation of the existing extension API before many developers are able to switch APIs. Many extensions simply cannot be switched, like Vimperator, due to lack of features in the WebExtensions API or the complexity of the change. Other extensions were developed as one-off projects, like "Google Similar Images" or "Remove Google Redirect in Google Results", so their developers are not around anymore to update to WebExtensions.
That and Mozilla's search for "anonymized personal data" kill the benefits of using Firefox in the first place, which for most people is to avoid using Chrome/Chromium, made by a conglomerate advertisement company. Just last week, I updated to 56 beta and despite disabling Pocket in my about:config, advertisements for news companies (Wired, etc) were displayed thanks to Pocket's "popular news articles" section in my previously blank New Tab page! Even Chrome does not force bundled software like Pocket, despite their stronger incentives for doing so.
I downloaded nightly 57 and it gave me a preview of how bad the extension situation really is. It's like a forced downgrade to a completely different browser, so why not switch to something entirely different at that point? This is what I'll be forced to do, after certificates expire in a few years in the then-out-of-date stable 56 distribution.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2011/06/21/firefox-4-add-on-...
Here's an article from 2011 claiming that 85% of Firefox users have extensions installed and will thus be bothered by the change, and on average, users have 5 addons installed. It is my gut estimate that half of these addons have no replacement or a worse replacement.
As for the opt outs, this may be true for most things, but I am not able to opt entirely out of Pocket's "Recommended by Pocket" trending adverts, nor am I able to turn off Firefox's addon signing requirement to develop or try new addons from GitHub, unless I download a tweaked build version of Firefox.
I do not have numbers for how many users use extensions, but my gut feeling is that it's much lower than it was in 2011. We've been moving to e10s over last months enabling it for users who don't have legacy addons (so, they either don't have addons or they have e10s modern addons).
It indicates that over 60% of beta users had e10s activated which can only be activated for users who don't use old extensions. Based on the telemetry data it seems that only 3% were not eligible.
I'm not involved in e10s project so I don't know the details and updates, but I believe that the number of users affected is actually quite low (which doesn't mean irrelevant, just that majority of users won't be affected).
> As for the opt outs, this may be true for most things, but I am not able to opt entirely out of Pocket's "Recommended by Pocket" trending adverts
In the home tab? The icon on the top-right corner allows you to uncheck the "Recommended by Pocket" and "extensions.pocket.enabled" about:config option allows you turn off pocket completely.
Now, that we own Pocket, I hope we'll merge it more seamlessly into Firefox Accounts because I feel like the sole fact that it uses it's own brand name makes it feel like Firefox comes with a separate piece of software bundled.
`extensions.pocket.enabled = false` does not disable the "Recommended by Pocket" checkbox. I was not expecting Pocket telemetry to continue to work with this set to off.
Yeah, sure. Of course I (as part of everyone) am going to switch to Chromium because some add-ons I've never bothered to even try stop working – and aren't available on Chromium either.
What's not to like about the Google browser's useless address bar that's main functionality is to direct you to Google Search at every available opportunity instead of being helpful? I bet Firefox users can't wait to get that!
I'm not getting your reasoning, are you saying that because Firefox moved to WebExtension only therefore you should switch when other competing browsers support WebExtension only? (Mozilla are and will be adding more APIs in comparison to other competitors)
One of the appeals of Firefox is its support for Firefox extensions, which have been around for 15 years. Now, Firefox supports no more than what Chromium supports, so any advantage Chromium may have over Firefox in other areas, like better compatibility of the WebKit renderer with many websites, now may become the tipping point for many folks. In other words, removing the old Firefox extension API removes a reason to avoid switching to Chromium.
I just tried the Nightly on Windows and I'm very impressed. Much faster and better looking.
Long time Firefox user and have been dreading the extensions going away, but it looks like Nightly has resolved some of the problems I was using extensions for (i.e. duplicate tab context menu) and I know some of the more prominent extensions (like NoScript) are being worked on.
I haven't been a serious FireFox user since Chrome hit the streets nearly 10 years ago. I've gone back to try it many times. I've really wanted to like it, but it's always felt really slow and stiff. I just installed the Nightly and I totally agree – I'm impressed! It feels like modern browser again.
I can't even express how awesome it feels to hear it. Particularly, because the "duplicate tab context menu" landed just yesterday and I happened to write the final patch [0] :)
Thanks, I didn't know about "about:profiles"! Might be a reasonable substitute for Chrome's functionality.
I'm a FF user since the days of Phoenix but the profile management is something I've relied upon Chrome for in recent years.
That "create as many arbitrary profiles as you like!" feature is awesome for testing some kinds of web applications. Last year, I worked on an in-browser chat project. At some points I really needed to have 4-5 different users logged in simultaneously so I could send messages back and forth and track down some bugs.
Another common scenario: suppose you're developing, testing, or supporting a web application where the user experience differs depending on a user's permissions. Can be a lifesaver to have multiple browser windows, each using a different browser profile + app login, simultaneously. Rather than repeatedly logging in/out with a single browser window.
FF's Container Tabs are an interesting feature. They could get some adoption. Similar underlying technology I guess, but different (more restrictive) UI meant to guide users down a specific path. That's cool; hopefully it can be extended at some point to allow a set of arbitrary accounts to be created by devs, testers, support folks, and others.
I'm using container tabs for privacy reasons, i.e. I keep Facebook and Twitter in their own tabs and browse separately.
But the ability to keep work and home separate - separate bookmarks, extensions, etc. is really valuable. And although it's possible with Firefox, it can still be a little quirky having to setup custom Windows shortcuts, etc.
I'll check out about:profiles. Not sure I've ever seen it.
just tried it on macOS and I have to agree it feels very well made.
Some issues though: instead of going for 'native', they still seem to feel like Firefox is a little planet of its own. It doesn't use macOS-style menus, nor transparency. Not that Chrome uses all macOS style elements, but it at least feels like it has had some effort put into making it feel at home on macOS. There's also some weird defaults / ignorance of convention: every browser launches a private window with cmd+shift+n, Firefox uses cmd+shift+p. There's still a separate search field next to an URL&search field. Probably a few more that I missed.
On the issues - what you listed is the eternal dilemma of cross-platform software. Balancing cross-platform behavior vs. platform-compliance.
There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window.
Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each.
Those choices are hard to make perfect. I've been recently fixing the drop-down menu lists styling [0] to allow websites to style some of it, while keeping it looking native when they don't. It's pretty tricky to get it right :)
Oh, I fully understand there are some trade-offs, its just something that always makes it like something feels 'off' when I use cross platform apps. There's small touches that help a lot though.. a big one is UI elements transparency, like the Chrome window bar. Firefox actually had this until it was inexplicably ripped out in 43 (even more inexplicable when Firefox _does_ adapt to GTK styling on Linux).
Let me be clear that these are minor annoyances and I respect the effort you guys do and am pretty amazed that you can make ground on a browser backed by a behemoth like Google.
I'm also pretty stoked for when you guys will have fully Servo'd Firefox, or have released Servo as a standalone product. When I tried Servo it was already oh-so-smooth :)
> There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each.
Also if you're a user who don't care about any particular platform and want just to use your trusty Firefox browser, it's annoying to learn different shortucts for the same thing in the browser on windows, linux, and macos.
I always favor native over non-native, but the FF's non-native bits are tasteful enough for me not to care. Do I wish FF used native tabs on macOS? Sure, but FF's tabs are functional enough and visually innocuous enough for me to simply not really care.
And, wow does FF57 "feel" fast. Not sure if it's because I have Stylo enabled, or what, but the UI feels faster now. I'm not sure if I've felt that way about any other FF release. And I have used them all.
As long as you're implementing your own platform independent menus, then why don't you implement pie menus, like I implemented for the HyperTIES hypermedia browser at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab in the 1980's? (For another more recent example, see the pie menus in The Sims from 2000.)
To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu items at the top or bottom of the screen.
3. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION
The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking. Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection, but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the control of the selection is.
The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window, they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.
Humorously (at least to me) Safari has a at least a couple of standout non-native UI quirks.
One is the location of the red/yellow/green titlebar buttons. Like FF, Safari eschews a traditional titlebar and puts those buttons level with the main browser chrome. (IMHO I think this is a good trade-off to make for a browser; I'm not complaining)
Two is Safari's scrolling behavior. It seems to use its own scrolling behavior, separate from the standard scrolling behavior provided by MacOS. I've tried a few apps that modify system-wide scrolling behavior, and they work everywhere but Safari. They make Safari's scrolling insanely twitchy, with a single click of the mousewheel causing Safari to scroll 10x or 100x faster than anything else on the system.
I switched to FF nightly after reading a comment here in HN. I had tried FF stable with electrolysis and still went back to chrome. FF nightly is SERIOUSLY fast and snappy, like ridiculously so. I recommend it to everyone.
I use an old thinkpad x201 for everything, and chrome works great. Firefox flickers during scrolling(disabling hw accelaration doesn't help) and no alsa support in the builds(no i will not install pulseaudio just for firefox).
Does anyone know how can I stop the menu from vanishing (very slowly) and reappearing when I hover the top of the window? I just want it to stay there.
Lovely blog post. Well written, thorough and clear. Getting people involved in a large project is not an easy feat, and I think this may open the eyes of people not knowing were to start.
I might give it a try again as usual every year at least once, but I always end up with conclusion Firefox is unresponsive, freezing and has problems with rendering compared to smooth experience with Chrome. I would be very happy to ditch app from Google, but if it's crashing, freezing and has basic problems I am not gonna waste time with firefox, Chrome just works.
So I hope I will be surprised and Firefox finally made some revolutionary changes.
Btw. it's even worse on Android, you will hardly find slower browser + there is no pull down to refresh page which is showstopper for me and even with plugins there was no way to implement it.
Hit the download button for nightly, only to start reading the comments here and realizing that a bunch of addons will stop working. Checking my list, FireGestures will stop working, Self-Destructing Cookies apparently already stopped working this version (broke localStorage deletion), and a more obscure one (QuickJava) is also legacy. The latter is the only one I could find that adds easy on/off toggles for Javascript, CSS, Flash and Proxy. They want to receive telemetry to see how people use nightly? Well, here's my datapoint: can't use it altogether.
Downthemall was the only reason I was still using firefox. The "replacements" are extremely poor imitations, disappointing but I guess all good things must come to an end.
I'm not sure they will. Vimperator etc. has a lot of dependencies some of which will never come to be. But the parts that could, like a proper keyboard api hasn't even been reviewed for months. The community complained about the lack of apis, they made a webextension experiment, which is apparently the way you ask for api extensions and it's pretty much just being ignored(the thread is 2 years old [1][2]). The customization thing mentioned also applies since the plugin creates a custom status bar and hides all sorts of other stuff.
I'm not sure what browser I'm going to use to be honest. All the hotkey browsers are buggy as hell since they use qtwebkit, webkitgtk, qt-webengine and whatnot. Chrome has extensions like cvim which sort of work, but they suffer from issues like not being able to properly hook keys and properly notify the user about the state you're in making me frequently make mistakes on what I want to do. As the sibling said a poor imitation of what was possible before.
If firefox just immitates chrome, what's the point in having it? How about trying to eat some of IE's lunch by making enterprise customization a first class citizen? But then again not sure if that matters. And yes I'm aware of GPO[3], but calling that first class citizen is disingenuous at best.
I indeed looked for alternatives and they're just not there yet.
The more I read, the more APIs turn out to be missing or buggy, making it impossible for add-ons to be made (if the developer is active in the first place). I just don't understand this. Firefox was built on the extendible principle and they're now going back to "v0.2 beta" in that regard.
This process should have taken years to mature the new APIs before dropping support for the old method.
Notice that major bump in August 2016 and after? Firefox 48 was released on the 2nd August 2016. This was the first release to ship the new multiprocess architecture. And this new architecture also already required breaking all extensions.
They could not have shipped it this early without knowing that the switch to WebExtensions will cut off the multiprocess-incompatible extensions.
And they needed to get multiprocess shipped. Had that graph continued as in the half year before that, we would now have negative user numbers.
From a link on your sheet, I found that Tab Mix Plus multi-row tabs has over 700k users! This is the killer feature for me and Firefox and I won't be upgrading without it.
Please Firefox developers : always keep in mind that power users are loyal to Firefox for some specific reasons. One of those reasons is that Firefox is, by far, the browser with the most customizable interface. The "Customize..." feature is why I personally stick to Firefox :
I really don't care which browser is #1 in speed tests. I don't care about integrations with social networks. I simply want a browser that I can configure the way I want!
Another suggestion : when you change something, even if you are 100% sure everybody will like it, please at least leave an "about:config" option that can revert that modification.
Sadly, I realized that, when Firefox is updated, I'm not trilled anymore to see what new features are included, I'm instead anxious to see what has been changed/removed!
Why do you want to customise so much? I know there are people like you but maybe like the Firefox developers I don't understand it. I use software as it comes. I almost never change any options. I don't even change my desktop wallpaper. I think making developers add options for everything creates bloat. Just use the defaults!
Adding support for customisation has a cost - more code, more things to test. If people just used defaults we could have simpler code, shipped more quickly, with fewer bugs.
So supporting configurable options takes resources away from implementing useful features. I'd rather we had more useful features, and more bugs fixed, than silly options for fussy people to rearrange where their tabs are in their browser.
There are always things that people want to customize, and this is where Firefox differs from Chrome. An example is the recent change in Chrome that make the Backspace key no longer go back a page. Chrome just flatly forced users to adapt it, with no configurable option anywhere, whereas if Firefox ever adopts this, I have peace of mind that I can always go to about:config and change it back.
I'm not quite sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but one of the things I value more in software is costumizability. I don't want someone else to make my choices for me and force me in a given mold. No browser, no software, can be made perfect for everybody. Different people want different things, so a good software must always offer users the option to change it to fit their use case.
For instance neither "classic" top tabs nor a side list/tree is the "best" or "right" way to design a tab selector. Some users will prefer one, others the other. You should give them choice.
I'm not being sarcastic - I genuinely don't understand why people value being able to tweak such trivial things and why they want to spend their precious time and effort doing it.
I think building support for a choice about something like tab placement is a waste of time and code - I don't understand why people can't adapt to one way or the other and then we all benefit from simpler code with fewer bugs.
I don't think we need to decide if top or side tabs are better, because I can't see how it matters much. Just pick one, hard code it, and everyone get on with the things that matter.
It does matter to me. When I'm working I often have a large amount of tabs open. Side tabs let me view more tabs at one,which top tabs can't since they don't let me view more than ~10 at once. Furthermore, screens are wider than taller, while webpages scroll up and down. Makes much more sense to have all the real estate you can get vertically, while the tabs go on a sidebar.
I spend several hours every day on a browser, switching tabs hundreds of times. I am measurably and subjectively more efficient with side tabs than top tabs. Why is this something that doesn't matter? It's not trivial, I literally cannot browse without side tabs without getting annoyed. It's absolutely not a waste of time and code if it's important to people.
I've just had my "last straw" moment with Firefox after over a decade of using it. Several addons broke with their developers saying, in effect, F-it, and then it lost all of my saved logins. So, yep, F-it. Firefox has been moving toward becoming a clone of Chrome for years. I just skipped to the chase and started using Chrome. Congratulations, Mozilla. Nice work.
Instead of going to Chrome, I think you should consider moving to the better alternative to Firefox, Pale Moon. It has all the same mindset of decent Firefox, XUL compatibility (and an oath to never use WebExtensions), and other features.
>I really don't care which browser is #1 in speed tests.
You're in the minority then. The majority of users care, a lot, about speed, and Firefox is visibly slower than Chrome, probably one of the main reasons it has lost so much share.
Personally I care about both, that's why I am so conflicted about this update. But it's disingenuous to assume this is an unwarrented regression. You cannot get better in terms performance while keeping the extension system as it is. This reworking is necessary for Firefox to even compete wit Chrome. I understand the dillema but this is far from clear-cut one way or the other.
Just wanted to say that, annecdotally, I switched from chrome to firefox not because of speed, but stability, four years ago. Chrome would reliably crash on my laptop after opening three tabs, while firefox would let me open dozens without trouble. I guess it was an OOM issue, but I never really cared. Firefox worked, chrome didn't.
The added extensibility, while nice, was mostly an afterthought. The only extension I'll miss is cliget, and hopefully it can be added back eventually.
Yeah. I care about browser speed a lot; I'm one of those guys always looking for settings to tweak and measuring results and so forth. I spent I-don't-even-want-to-know-how-many hours a week using a browser so even small improvements become noticeable quality-of-life upgrades.
But, still:
1. Benchmarks are important, but aren't always the best reflection of actual performance, either real or perceived. Subjectively, Safari on Mac and Edge on Windows "feel" fastest to me even though benchmarks say otherwise. Within reason, that's what typical end users care about: "feel" vs. benchmarks. (FWIW, Firefox is my main browser; I'm not telling anybody to use Safari or Edge)
1a. Chrome benchmarks the best, but it also uses the most memory due to its multiprocess model, so for users on memory-constrained devices (particularly with spinning HDDs, where swap's going to be really slow) I'm not convinced reality always lines up with benchmarks here
2. The user's network connection is still usually the biggest factor.
3. I don't think actual site content's getting much heavier. All this extra browser performance is just getting soaked the hell up by heavier and heavier ads. So I can't get as excited about browser performance as I used to.
The fundamental problem with the legacy Firefox extension API is that its incredible power comes from putting incredible constraints on Firefox internals. Every stable API commitment involves some constraints, but the constraints from legacy Firefox extensions were out of control. They were killing the browser.
The "legacy" Firefox extension API is powerful because it reaches its tentacles into every corner of the internals of the browser. Keeping that API stable involves freezing a large amount of internal architecture and behavior.
Firefox needs to evolve if it's going to live, and it can't evolve in the ways that it needs to if so much of its internals are effectively frozen. It's a painful drag on development, slowing things down and preventing necessary changes.
I'm not even going to get into the problems with the API itself except to say that it had many, including widespread dependencies on synchronous behavior.
Mozilla's sacred-cow-level commitment to preserving legacy extension support is a big reason why Chrome beat Firefox on so many technical levels for so long. It ate up a ton of developer time, held off or killed critical architectural changes, was the cause of a lot of crashes, hangs, memory leaks, security problems... Thank goodness that's about to be over.
I'm sorry that you'll miss it but this is a really important step. Mozilla is doing a great job with WebExtensions, I suspect you'll be happy with how things shake out in the end.
Incredible short sighted decisions on Mozilla side, destroying their legacy plugin & addon platform. It's like Microsoft would switch off WinAPI support and kill thereby their platform. Firefox is all about "legacy API", Windows is all about "legacy API (WinAPI)" - almost no one gives a shit about WebExtension or UWP, there is no advantage over better competition Chrome / iOS or Android. Good luck with that.
Wouldn't it be better to offer a legacy addon API shim - old addons would still work even on new Firefox.
I don't see how it's short sighted. Long time Firefox user here and the extensions I depend upon Just Work (TM). The few remaining ones like NoScript are being worked on. I find it absurd when users of a handful of extensions claim "it's all thanks to us that you're successful, you'd better keep our sacred cow alive or we'll make everyone switch to Chrome". Here's the thing, I'm a power user too, and in the past I've installed modern browsers for friends and family who didn't know better. But by now, most of these casual users use Chrome because it's fast. The way to appeal to these users is to make a browser that's lighter and faster. That's how I can make a pitch to my friends to use Firefox again - "hey why don't you just use the browser that loads quicker and uses less memory?" That's something they'll listen to, rather than "hey why don't you use this incredibly modifiable browser that allows you to disable JS if you want to?"
Look, I get it. You have your extensions and you don't want to see them go away. But you're a tiny niche and even other power users don't use these extensions that you find essential. Certainly the vast majority of users rarely install extensions at all. Mozilla is doing the right thing and an entire thread praising the performance of the latest version vindicates their approach.
Why not just give the NEW browser that is incompatible but faster a different brand name? Why is the NEW browser not based on Servo? The potential new users don't know Firefox anyway, and the current user that still use Firefox despite Firefox-tech-standstill for like 5 years (multi-process is coming next year, we promise) are power user who customized it heavily (and deactivated phone-home/telemetry). Microsoft made the same mistake, same rabbit hole.
Where is the next Servo based browser? Instead of refactoring the 20year old mess (with COM and XML), the should focus 99% on Rust and Servo, and finally release a stable build with a lightweight HTML5 UI (Vivaldi).
Well, you answered your own question. Clearly they have a userbase that will stay with them out of inertia or loyalty. These users can now benefit from the improvements in the latest release. If they released a new browser, few people if any would try it out because of inertia. The lack of users would kill the product pretty quickly.
Of course, some users who rely on old addons will be left behind, but they have the option to use Firefox Extended Support Release, which will get security updates. Eventually the extensions situation will sort itself out and these few users can move to the main release.
Congratulations. This is definitely a huge step forward. The UI finally looks as good as the other guys, and it's fast, too!
If you had finally figured out that private mode's UI is too similar to the normal one, too, I'd even be amazed (let me help you: make the address bar and tabs dark instead of light).
I won't be happy if it were to fail but certainly I won't despair either.
I don't want amazing performance improvements at the cost of huge functionality losses. This update is simple a regression: almost every add-on I have been using will stop working and has a stupidly limited or no replacement at all. There will really be no reason for me to still use Firefox over any other browser now.
The only option seems to switch to the ESR version, at least for a while it will work.
Sorry Mozilla - for the reasons expressed above, 56 will be the last version of your browser I'm able to effectively use given the demands of my browser workflow. If my use-case no longer fits your business case, then we will part ways.
Currently, it looks like my best options are either Waterfox (with its pledge of continued XUL extension support), or Vivaldi.
Vivaldi has less powerful extensions than Firefox 57.
I can't imagine Waterfox or Pale Moon being able to keep XUL extensions alive for much longer. It was a major maintenance burden for Mozilla, so it's pretty much an impossible task for the comparatively tiny developer teams behind those.
Having said that, Firefox 52 ESR is still supported until June 26, 2018. So, you could use that. And the Waterfox + Pale Moon devs could base themselves on that until its EOL.
Vivaldi provides arguably the most customizable UI of any browser out of the box (see: ability to move tabs to any side of the screen), plus their culture seems to me to be all about customization and providing options. I like that.
Firefox ESR is pointless - it's just delaying the inevitable. I tried Midori, but it runs poorly on KDE. Palemoon is pretty bad - I tried it and it doesn't properly support existing XUL extensions that work fine in Firefox, so it's a no-go in my book. Waterfox, on the other hand, is fast, works exactly like Firefox, and is at least willing to give continued XUL support a shot.
So, it's Vivaldi or Waterfox as best I can figure at this point.
298 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadIf you live in the EU, submit a complaint to your local data privacy official, in Germany those are the Landesdatenschutzbauftragten and Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten, for example, you can find the ones for Schleswig-Holstein here: https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/impressum/.
Submit a complaint today, so that a legal process against Mozilla can happen before they implement this.
(6) The collection, processing and use of special types of personal data (Section 3 (9)) for own commercial purposes shall be admissible when the data subject has not consented in accordance with Section 4a (3) if
(...)
4. this is necessary for the purposes of scientific research, where the scientific interest in carrying out the research project substantially outweighs the data subject's interest in excluding collection, processing and use and the purpose of the research cannot be achieved in any other way or would otherwise necessitate disproportionate effort.
---
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_bdsg/englisch_bd...
---
IANAL. Everyone may draw their own conclusions.
> The collection, processing and use of special types of personal data (Section 3 (9))
BDSG Section 3 (9) says:
> (9) “Special categories of personal data” means information on a person’s racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical convictions, union membership, health or sex life.
This exception does not apply to behaviourial tracking, such as the list of the visited domains.
This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer.
If you don't collect any data, all the data you collect will be practically anonymous.
"Since the UI is written in major parts in JavaScript and CSS and an HTML-like language called XUL, anyone with webdev skills can improve it!"
I thought 57 was dumping XUL completely. Wasn't that a major point of 57?
Its great to see they are going to drive firefox off a cliff with yet another anti-user decision.
The situation with popular extensions has improved, but there is going to be a lot of pain, especially with XUL functionality that they refuse to implement in WebExtensions.
https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/
It's true it's still there, but I think the plan is using it less and less. No new UIs are written in it and many things have been rewritten from XUL to HTML5. Eventually it could be removed entirely.
Its amusing to me that mozilla expects everyone else to be moved off XUL, but not their own code because it has legitimate reasons....
Hilariously, dispite the pro-privacy stance mozilla pretends at, they want to start tracking urls visited
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15071492
Why keep using firefox? Because I love Mozilla so much when they clearly have zero interest in my needs as a user?
And no, it's certainly not just an administrative deadline. For now, you can still tell Firefox Nightly to install legacy extensions, the vast majority of them are just by now completely broken, because Mozilla is ripping out all of that legacy code and refactoring what's left. Here's a list of all of the things that they can get rid of: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347507
The question is how much the extensions can do, in the old model they could do anything firefox code could do, in WebExtensions model, they can do only very limited set of things.
On one hand it is quite sad to see firefox extensions go, on the other hand the old model was a maintenance hell both for firefox developers and for addon developers, because smallest changes in firefox ui were breaking bunch of addons, and even changes in addons themselves were breaking other addons, which all had incompatibilities and had to do lots of subtle hacks to work together.
I have worked on firefox addons for several years, and had to quit firefox when they started ignoring addons and investing in old addon sdk. But saying Mozilla is intentionally killing firefox is not fair the whole thing was shaky and full of hacks and would crumble by itself too.
What they should do now, is splitting their ui from the engine, so that advanced users can hack on the ui and get all the benefits of old addon system without the mess. If they fail to do that brave browser with https://github.com/brave/muon will take that niche.
Think about it this way: the transition away from XUL means the UI code (and more) is going to be very unstable for awhile. Thus addon authors would need to be continually rewriting their code for each update to keep up with the changes. It's better to bite the bullet now and switch to a more stable api.
https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml
Maintaining two interface languages doesn't make much sense in the long term.
XPCOM is another independent technology https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM.
They are disabling the direct access from extensions to apis used by browser itself (that is access to XUL _and_ XPCOM), to be able to modify the browser ui without worrying about breaking extensions, with the goal to remove XUL eventually.
There are some people (like me) who use firefox because of addons that can't be supported on other browsers due to the lack of API support, so it's a bit disappointing if they're going to pull the rug from under those addons. If they do, they might see people leave for another browser.
For reference, the addon in question for me is Tabs Mix Plus.
But the core APIs are the same as Chrome's. The implementation might not yet always be perfect, but the APIs themselves are stable. So, for the vast majority of add-on developers, the experience will already be much less burdensome. Or it will be in the future.
Yes, some add-ons will not happen or might only be possible long after the release of Firefox 57. But they're not going back on that plan. They haven't just forbidden these extensions for funsies. They've very much already used the opportunity to rip out tons of legacy code and refactor things that they could have never refactored before without breaking tons of add-ons each time. At this point, there's very few legacy extensions left that still function in Firefox Nightly, even if you tell it to load them.
Not to mention that this has helped them to speed Firefox up by a significant factor. All the performance improvements since Firefox 48 would not have been made without this deprecation on the horizon. And considering that a significant chunk of Firefox users use no extension or just the obligatory ad blocker (or any set of extensions that's going to be easily replaceable with WebExtensions), this is also very much the decision that has to be made when asking yourself what's best for users.
As for people possibly leaving Firefox when their favorite extensions stop working, yes, that's possible, but Firefox's market share has been growing again since Firefox 48, and there's also just the fact that Firefox is still going to be the browser with the most powerful extension API.
You're not getting more extensions by switching. You'd have to be fine with even less extensions in exchange for maybe a particular feature that you like in another browser.
You have basicly told us all "your problems dont exist, dont matter, or we dont care, deal with it"
I'm done with firefox post 56.
And due to jilted lover syndrome, I feel compelled to post in threads like this one saying so. Heh.
I have no problem with you being sad about these add-ons going away. I do have a problem with you acting like what Mozilla does is completely unreasonable and objectively bad for users.
There are some long-term investigations into using HTML/JS/CSS for the UI [1], but for the moment, the performance difference is still too much.
[1]: https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml
(I checked the browser.html issue tracker but most of their perf bugs seemed to be resolved.)
This is just a guess on my part.
That was a few years ago, results may be obsolete, of course.
Someone (working now at Apple) wrote a super fast list component in HTML for Firefox OS so this can definitely be done.
I seem to recall that one of the big "optimizations" that FF did compared to the mozilla suite (these days known as Seamonkey) was to translate a bunch of UI elements into native equivalents rather than drawing it all from XUL.
Thus replacing that with HTML may well be closer to reverting to the pre-FF XUL way.
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-browser-architecture
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...
At least that is how it feels to me after having spent some years using a distro that is a fair bit more hands on than most.
The worst offender I've encountered has been android. The initial checkout is like +100GB, and it has incredibly poor fault tolerance. Based on my experience, it fails regularly at random points, requiring you to re-fetch everything. Despite multi-day efforts, I've never managed to build a ROM for my Nexus 5X or Pixel.
The only issue is that you have to clone whole mozilla-central even if you only work with small part of it. But once you pull it, the building and hacking on it is quite easy :)
If you do want to tweak the native code it should just be ./mach boostrap + ./mach build, but it's entirely possible you'll have trouble with that.
It is however still very close to a clone & bootstrap & build process, at least on Linux and Mac - i.e. one of the better projects. (For comparison, I recently tried to build Facebook's Infer, and that was even worse than building OpenOffice back in the day.)
You can even contribute to them without a Firefox clone, they're an entirely separate repo that contains a webpage that can be run in both Firefox or Chrome as a regular website and used to debug both. It's fun!
Org: https://github.com/devtools-html
Debugger.html repo: https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html
Example of a network timeline. Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/16ZLENd.png Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/1j0NZcd.png
I get a better representation of the timeline waterfall in Chrome.
Like I said, the tools are almost there.
My only exception would be scratching my own itches, but here they're asking for help with company goals.
It's very clear the MoCo doesn't reinvest all the money they make (they have a lot in the bank). And some are getting rich from it, but that's a different topic.
And yes, the MoCo is not reinvesting all money all the time right away, but they'll have to reinvest it or use it to pay wages at some point. They have no reason to just amass money senselessly.
If they make a surplus, have all wages paid, and don't save it up nor reinvest it, then they can only pay it out to the Mozilla Foundation, where it's again in nonprofit hands.
So, it's not "asking for help", it's informing how you can help. I'm also not "begging for contributors" or asking to help with "company goals", I'm suggesting ways to help with our current major release. If we're successful, it should make the whole Web better thanks to bringing more competition and choice to the user.
Major open source projects are actually fun to work with for many people. They're very challenging not just because of problems you solve, but also because of the massive project culture and technical infrastructure in place that you learn in the process. That learning helps people grow as engineers. Also the feeling that you made an impact on the lives of millions of users is quite awesome. For others, they're already Firefox users and it's just about fixing a bug that was itching them.
So, generally speaking, there are reasons to help major open source projects, even if they can afford to hire full time engineers as well.
Two side notes:
1) We're way, way smaller than all our competitors. The number of engineers that Google, Apple and Microsoft can hire to work on their browser engines is significantly higher than what Mozilla can do. We can't compete and never will be able to. That's why, beside of our culture and Mozilla Manifesto, we rely on our ability to attract contributors. 2) It's a chicken and egg. Keeping the project really open (not technically open as in - we'll dump the source code to github every once in a while), requires continuous effort. Having a healthy community of contributors is important for our project culture to stay open. If people stop contributing, some things will naturally decay into less open state making it harder in the future for new contributors to come in. And I'm not even talking about code only. Mozilla's marketing, engineering, privacy, security, UX and other projects are working in the open.
Tons of decisions mozilla makes are taken dispite generally negative outside feedback, usually with a vauge convoluted justification with some metric.
Its ok to do what you think is best and right, but if you want an open participation from the outside, its best to not to ignore the feedback users give (note telemetry metrics arnt feedback, especially when interpreted with an agenda, stuff dosent always measure what you think it does). The entire conversation process around mozilla products is ridiculously straight jacketed, and unless you agree with what they have already decided prepare to be ignored, or have your points moderated out of existence. A good example of this tendancy is the conversation surrounding the proposal to track visited urls[1], you either accept that differential privacy is information theoretically secure (it isnt), and you accept that mozilla should have this information (metrics are an unqualified good), or your posts will be removed. Nobody is enthusiastic about contributing to a project that ignores what they care about, even if the people ignoring you think its for the greater good.
It seems to be the general conclusion inside mozilla is that Chrome is winning because of x, we need more x, for any value of x (including values of X which are in direct opposition to an open, free internet), while ignoring the strengths that firefox has and why people are actually choosing to use it over chrome.
As you say, it is 100% hopeless to try to be a better chrome than chrome is, Google outresources you 1000 to 1. I wish that firefox cared more about being firefox, and less about becomming a worse version of chrome.
[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/8... feedback here is virtually 100% negative, but I gaurentee this change is going in anyways.
Working on Mozilla, I do not agree with you on multiple points:
> If attracting contributors was such a priority for mozilla, you would think that so many screw-the-users-we-are-doing-this-anyways decisions wouldnt come to pass.
It's way more complex than you present it. Working on a big project, with a solid legacy, will make you face dramatic decisions where each outcome is going to cost. For example, most users, due to their vested interest in one outcome, and lack of understanding of the cost of the other (they're not going to spend countless hours maintaining legacy APIs), would say "Keep legacy extension system forever". But as a module owner of Gecko, you understand the tremendous cost of doing it. The decision you're making is way more complex and multi-factored that the decision those users made when they voiced their opinion.
Trying to say that "if you care about being open source project, do what users tell you to" is imho only possible if you don't understand the complexity.
See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma for details.
> its best to not to ignore the feedback users give (note telemetry metrics arnt feedback, especially when interpreted with an agenda, stuff dosent always measure what you think it does).
I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying here. Telemetry tells us what happens. Feedback tells us what users want to happen. Telemetry done right gives us representation of the population, feedback gives us the representation of the sample that voiced their opinion.
Loud minority can sway the discussion in any way (WebVR on Linux is the most important thing for Mozilla to work on!). Telemetry gives a different picture (3% of our users are on Linux, and 0.01% of them uses WebVR at all).
You can also see it in this thread. I wrote a blog post about ways to contribute to an open source project. You'd guess the majority of the conversation should be about technicalities involved in contributing discussed among those who want to contribute but have questions. Instead, majority is about whether Mozilla is doing what the given person wants it to do on a very high meta-level (I want extensions to work this way, or I want data to be collected that way).
There's a substantial difference between those two - one is about a case where an engineer working on Firefox UI filed a bug about switching the way we react to clicks on a button but had no time to fix it. Maybe it also affects you? Maybe you want to go and write a couple lines of JS to fix it? Cool! Let's talk. The latter is "I have an opinion on privacy policies at Mozilla, and I voiced it together with a number of other individuals who, when asked, say that there should be always less tracking. We brought our pitchforks and loudly demanded it. Now it seems that Mozilla is, after holding a public discussion for months, adding the telemetry which is not in line with what we told them to do so it means they ignored us! Outrageous!"
I'm not saying that we've always done the right thing (I believe we made very high level mistakes on multiple projects, but I also believe I don't have the full knowledge that went behind those decisions, so tt's easy for me to say). I'm saying that this post is for people who may want to contribute to Mozilla but didn't know how. Sort of "www.whatcanidoformozilla.com" or "#contribute-newbies" style. And "the feedback" is about high level complex decisions that Mozilla is doing that are not in line with the persons opinion. Much more of a "mozilla.governance" or "mozilla.upper-management.decisions" style.
It's easy to have high-level opinions if you don't aim to understand the full complexity of the topic at hand. I can right...
What i care about is my experience as a user is being objectively destroyed by these kinds of changes, go on and call me a "loud minority" or say "our metrics indicate [ ... ]". The fact remains that those are dismissive statements that indicate that you really don't care about these issues, so please stop insulting me by pretending you do.
You don't respect my perspective because you beleive my perspective to be uninformed and incorrect.
The plain fact is, as a user, I dont care about how the sausage is made, what i care about is how it tastes to me, you can make the "complexities arising" excuse for practically any (perceived) failure of any complex system. It dosent mean that its acceptable to me as a user who is being essentially told we dont care about your use case anymore. Please try to understand that mozilla are essentially taking everything that I gain utilty from with firefox, and tossing it in the dumpster.
Don't expect me to not be upset about all this going on because its for some grand nebulous greater good that will surely happen Soon(tm).
For what its worth I think you will find this "loud minority" is more influential than your metrics capture, and post 56 you are going to see a lot more people moving to chrome.
I apologize. That was not my intention. Being ESL may played into how I expressed my opinion. Again, apologies!
> What i care about is my experience as a user is being objectively destroyed by these kinds of changes, go on and call me a "loud minority" or say "our metrics indicate [ ... ]". The fact remains that those are dismissive statements that indicate that you really don't care about these issues, so please stop insulting me by pretending you do.
I certainly didn't mean to insult you. I apologize if that's how it feels. Being a minority doesn't mean you're "wrong" or "irrelevant". I consider myself a vast minority (I use Linux, I'm a software engineer, I'm a Pole - all those are minorities!) and it certainly makes what I need from software, different than what most people need from software.
Understanding that I'm a minority helps me understand why what I want may not be the best for a product like Firefox. I genuinely would want Firefox to add client side decorations (being worked on in bug 1283299) before they add color accents for Windows 10 (which I don't use). But understanding that I'm a minority helps me understand why the priorities of Firefox UI module owners are different.
I don't want to be dismissive, just point out why what you or I want or believe is right, may not always be the best from the perspective of someone who has to decide for the product used by hundreds of millions of users.
> It dosent mean that its acceptable to me as a user who is being essentially told we dont care about your use case anymore.
I agree that what matters for you as a user is the outcome. I don't expect you to be happy about the decision that doesn't give you what you need because of the fact that "it's the right decision" on some other level.
But I ask you to separate your wants and needs as a user from indicating that decision makers are wrong in their decisions when they go against your needs.
And I also disagree that not doing what you want equals "not caring about your use case". It's not about "care vs. not care". It's about priorities.
If your use case is valid, but not common, it will most likely just wait longer to be fixed (like CSD). If the value of what you ask for is going to bring less value to fewer users than the opposite, then the right decision for the decision maker is to do the opposite. Not because "they don't care", but because there's a more substantial value in it for more people.
> Please try to understand that mozilla are essentially taking everything that I gain utilty from with firefox, and tossing it in the dumpster.
I do understand that. I'm very sad to hear that this is what is happening to you, and I understand your frustration.
Please, try to understand that: a) I'm not a decision maker, so I can only share my perspective. b) Even if I was, I would probably have to see the bigger picture and may have to make the same decision.
> Don't expect me to not be upset
I don't. I really don't. I understand you're upset and I believe you have the right to be. I just ask you to separate being upset, and making decisions based on it, from accusing others of not caring for it is possible to care about your use case, and yet make the rational and valid decision against it based on the value for more use cases.
I believe we're dropping into philosophical conversation about decision making that is getting close to trolley dilemma :)
> For what its worth I think you will find this "loud minority" is more influential than your metrics capture, and post 56 you are going to see a lot more people moving to chrome.
I can't argue here, only trade opinions. I hope that the technical value of the product will make...
There's also a simpler explanation (and following Popper's criterion - it's way more likely to be the actual reason): mozilla just decided to switch to total populism and now targets for amoeba-like users (that are an overwhelming majority) rather than power users (advanced, tech-savvy, where the share of users with 100+ tabs is higher than 10% compared to those ~0.01% among all users).
Why? Because it's easier and because this way it will make higher profit (I know that MoFo is a non-profit, that never mattered anyways).
Not saying it's good or bad - Mozilla has never been a democracy - but I feel this is what people complain a lot about.
At the same time I don't see the situation improving, with more and more product/project management happening behind the scenes in docs/platform that are not even accessible in read-only mode publicly.
> At the same time I don't see the situation improving
I actually do, but as you know, I'm an optimist by nature :)
The path that could lead to Mozilla tech opening for the case you're describing may look like this:
* Fx 57 is successful * Gecko successfully transitions to be a modern Web engine with its own advantages over other engines * The new features such as Rust and leapfrogging advancements like Stylo/WebRender etc. add up to make people want to use Gecko/Servo over other engines in their products * We're successful at building a node/electron like wrapper for Gecko/Servo * The innovation begins
I don't think it's certain, and I don't know if it'll happen, but I do now that there are people tinkering with things like GeckoView and electron like wrappers, with target for next year. It's not guaranteed, but I do hope it'll happen.
Mozilla has been putting 110% of their effort on a Desktop browser recently. Fine, their choice, but I can't help but think that their are cornering themselves in a niche and are missing where the new tech users will be.
As you can guess, I really feel it's a shame that gecko is becoming really good, just not used in a context that matters.
Correct. Lots of ifs. And on top of that, ifs from a regular engineer which means I know even less about all the factors in play than I should to predict.
> Mozilla has been putting 110% of their effort on a Desktop browser recently. Fine, their choice, but I can't help but think that their are cornering themselves in a niche and are missing where the new tech users will be.
My personal take is that we have to start somewhere. We can try to come up with a completely new technology, and we're trying to - see Servo. We can make Gecko the best web engine on the planet. Or we can try to build amazing products on top of an ok engine.
I believe we have to start somewhere, and stating by bringing Gecko to excellence is not a bad choice.
> As you can guess, I really feel it's a shame that gecko is becoming really good, just not used in a context that matters.
yeah. I know :)
But fundamentally, Firefox decisions are made by Mozilla employees, to further the goals of the Mozilla company (which makes money from those decisions - sure, to be hopefully reinvested). Firefox isn't like those other large open source projects where the codebase and thus decisions are owned by many independent (and mostly commercial) entities. Outside contributors have very little say in the product, so I wouldn't say its any better for people to contribute to Firefox vs e.g. Chrome. I.e. Mozilla wants their code - but in the many cases that have become publicised it doesn't seem like Mozilla wants their opinions.
(This is probably just the reality of end-user facing software projects with major UX components. But it's still sad to see contributors being invited in when they'll be ignored in the decision-making.)
// Edit: and it looks like fabrice_d made pretty much the same point while I was writing my comment : )
I think there's a deeper debate that Mitchell is running over the last few years at Mozilla, and that's how to find a balance between "your voice is heard" and "someone is making a decision".
If you voiced your opinion, and the decision has been made that is not in line with it, it's very easy to feel that "my voice didn't matter. Mozilla doesn't want my opinion".
I believe that it's a fallacy of communication.
So, in total. Sure, as the project grows and priorities change, we get to a more structured way of making decisions. It's getting harder for a casual contributor to steer the decision in a completely different direction. But I do not believe that it's any different from Fedora, Wikipedia, Gnome, KDE, Wordpress or any other open source tech. When you're a 10-person github project, it's easy to say that anyone can file an issue and change the course of it. When you're a multihundred million users project with 20 years of legacy code, and thousands of contributors, it is harder to see the connection between your opinion and the result.
But I do believe that if you gain trust in the community, and use the right forums (and I realize that finding the right forum to voice your opinion is not easy), you do have an impact. Even if the final decision is not in line with it, which will happen, unless you and the decision owners are always 100% correct.
After about two hours of trying, we were unable to produce a working build from a tagged release point in their version control - even before applying any changes.
I'm hoping the new tooling works better.
The Linux x86_64 build experience has worked very well on Ubuntu for many years. These days you don't even need to copy and paste the apt incantations: ./mach bootstrap takes care of that.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
It's just a ./mach build after checking out the code and running the bootstrap script.
I'm also happy to say that we actually did improve our build chain. I have a build env for Firefox on Mac, Windows and Linux and it all works quite smoothly. The only issue is that full compilation takes time (30 minutes on my laptop).
Fortunately we also now have Artifact Builds which allow you to hack on the front-end JS code without having to rebuild the C++ backend [0].
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
Edit: Found some images http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/08/08/mozillas-new-photon-... I just noticed, it recolors my system stsusbar too. So, it's white on white while FF is open. Everywhere else it's black.
Do hope there's an option to change it soon
[0] https://material.io/guidelines/style/color.html#color-color-...
[1] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/Window....
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195138
I'm sorry, but I decided to stick with Firefox 55 for now, possibly switching to Palemoon later. I need my old extensions to work: Status4Evar, EdgeWise and Classic Theme Restorer. I can't stand the current FF UI and I will not give up on this.
I'll ride out FF 56 until I decide where to go next but honestly the many times in the past it has felt FF has ignored the requests of long term users, coupled with lack of differentiation from Chrome, I'm not sure I have much reason to stick around.
Kudos to the team for all the hard work improving the FF core. But you're about to abandon that which kept long term users like myself here through all those rough years. Makes me sad.
Yes it's a change but it serves a good purpose - to standardize the extension development and making sure that 1 extension can be running on multiples browsers e.g. Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc..
Yes, it's a good purpose to have a standard base. It's bad, though, that nothing besides the blessed parts are officially customizable anymore.
Previously, extensions had messed up with anything they wanted (they could override most of the browser's core). That had allowed third parties to do incredible things that weren't ever considered by the browser developers.
With WEs, though, the only things that browser developers had specifically thought about are possible. All for user's convenience, so they can switch to Chrome, Edge or Opera.
Vendors have learned that if they fail to provide this protection, the average user will blame them directly, not the extension that makes memory usage bloat 6x. The solution is to enforce stringent controls, including limiting modifiable parts of the experience to some well-defined areas.
Nah, it's the other way(s) around - it's for [longterm] developer convenience; so users don't have to switch to another browser because an add-on they need isn't available in FF.
In a few more releases I really won't have any concrete reason to recommend FF over Chrome anymore (and no, 99% of users outside of this forum don't care about memory usage and keeping 100 tabs open at the same time)
So like this [0]? The title bar isn't blue, but neither is any other title bar on Windows 10.
To achieve this on Nightly I opened the Customize view, switched the theme to "Light", checked the "Title bar" checkbox, and enabled "Menu bar" under the "Toolbars" dropdown. Tabs have squared edges by default.
[0] https://vgy.me/KvNgxS.png
It's not part of a plugin, though, I had to patch something manually (I never remember what and have to re-google it every time).
Square tabs have been back for a while now. The Compact Light and Compact Dark themes are included in Firefox by default. Set the theme in Add-ons Manager -> Appearance.
I use Compact Light.
And I've just copied the legacy `https-everywhere@eff.org.xpi` non-WE addon there - and it worked ;)
I'm sure they're going to plug this "hole" shut, but it's still there. As well as patching omni.ja.
Now there is no requirement to keep them stable even across the patch-level releases. Whenever things would break faster or at the same pace is unknown.
The important part is ability to replace (overlay) chrome resources, patching/extending the browser code. I hope that's going to stay for a while.
The Mozilla-supplied legacy extensions continue to function, because Mozilla is updating them as they make changes to the internals of Firefox. So, I imagine maintaining such a legacy extension is now as much work as it is to just directly contribute and maintain the feature in Firefox's codebase.
[0]: "extensions.legacy.enabled" in about:config. This won't be shipped in Stable, though, and will likely be taken out from Firefox Nightly soon or with the release of Firefox 57.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347507
I wonder what the telemetry says about those plugins. If it shows a minority, than Mozilla many not give it a thought at all.
I'm always concerned of this happening to other large-scale independent FOSS projects. Special interests tend to take over without some benevolent dictator.
I don't mind WebExtensions, and cross-browser compatibility is a nice goal, but a half-baked system that breaks the most important distinguishing feature of Firefox (extensions that can modify any part of the browser) is ridiculous.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/
Still undecided what to do after june 2018. I guess I'll just try firefox and chrome side by side and move to chrome if there is no real difference. It is probably more convinient to migrate to chrome, since it is on the phone by default too.
Unfortunately Mozilla has rushed the transition, and there hasn't been enough time to add important APIs and for developers to update their extensions. Firefox 57 is on the verge of being released, and there are still many addons which aren't webextension compatible.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Guides/Multi...
It would be interesting to see what percentage of their long time users use more than 1 or 2 add ons (I have 4 installed and only really use 2 of them).
Frankly if they arnt using extensions they are going to have a vastly better user experience on chrome, and google has infinity manpower to always ensure thats the case.
So what is firefox gaining by becomming a crappier chrome? Why the hell wouldnt I just use chrome at that point, because I feel so great about mozilla, who regularly brushes me off when i try to take advantage of things unique to firefox?
P.S FF is now not a crappier version of Chrome but Chrome is crappier if you don't have powerful hardware or RAM (mine's hardly 2 GB and everything sucks a lot though its only 4 years old)
The real question is for me is how many users haven't moved onto Chrome -- which is obviously faster and more stable -- because of 1 or 2 add-ons.
It's sad they will deprecate the old extension interface and make Vimperator a no-no. I understand the reasons behind WebExtensions, specially those related to security, and reckon the benefits of the multiprocess paradigm, but the flexibility of the old extensions API was a big advantage in my pov.
No, Vimperator won't be ported (I wish it could), because WebExtensions is a much more limited API. And no, Vimium and VimFx doesn't come even close to it. They are not alternatives.
If there is anything to make either Mozilla hear this use case more, or contribute anywhere to make Vimperator a possibility for the future, I would be happy to do my part.
What does vimperator do that vimium and vimfx can't?
I've seen plenty of my favorite software projects have to make "hard breaks" to modernize. KDE broke everything with Qt5 / Plasma 5, but the payoff is now they are the premier high DPI Linux desktop. Python broke everything with 3, but features enabled by the changes have made Python 3 the best scripting language ever in my book.
Firefox would be doomed to a slow death with its legacy extensions API the same way PHP and Perl languished for years with the inability to push a major version. A slow death is not a downfall anyone wants.
Per Mozilla, aside from security problems and other nightmares, these deep hooks allowed developers to write plugins that were incompatible with a multiprocess browser architecture where each tab/window can have its own sandbox and remain responsive even if other tabs go down.
And that is one of the killer features that has caused FF to bleed massive amounts of user share to Chrome in the last decade: Chrome almost always "felt fast" in situations where FF ground to an embarassing halt because something was happening in another tab/window that was causing the entire browser to become unresponsive.
I don't know what precisely is missing from the new WebExtensions API but I have to imagine that Mozilla will work to expand its capabilities as much as possible over time...
The Add-on SDK was supposed to fix the "deep hooks" problem and is mostly multiprocess-compatible. As far as I know, most currently maintained XUL extensions are multiprocess-compatible, too.
Dear Mozilla developers!
I've been using Firefox as my daily driver nearly non-stop since it was Phoenix and I'm totally cool with you dropping the legacy stuff.
Prove them wrong!
And yes, it is to some degree subjective whether this is worth it, but at the end of the day, you, as someone who uses lots of extensions and complex extensions, are only a very small fraction of the Firefox user base. Most users have no extensions or just the obligatory ad blocker. They don't benefit at all from keeping onto the old architecture with all of its problems, which they are suffering under.
And then, yeah, Mozilla has to at some point piss you off in order to help the majority of their user base. It's not like all other browsers had such a complex extension API and Mozilla is just being lazy by dropping it.
I’ve been using Firefox as my standard browser since 0.9.3 (except for a year or so when it was run-a-browser-from-a-USB-disk-or-use-IE and Firefox was just too terribly slow, so I used Chrome—by the next year Firefox had fixed its game and I could switch back), and for the last few years Nightly has been my standard browser.
I get why you’re dropping the legacy stuff and I’m looking forward to what’s possible after it’s gone. When the announcement came out in November last year that WebExtensions would be the only way come 57, I was intensely sceptical that it’d be ready within a year (no one was using it at that time) and prepared for a deal of pain: I’d just have to live with it, come November. (It’s not like I have any better options in mainstream browsers; they’re all hopeless with even only twenty tabs.)
Well.
You’ve proven me wrong, and I’m delighted. I was able to replace all my legacy extensions with WebExtensions ones with minimal loss of functionality (I miss the ability to style the chrome with Stylish, not that I was actually using it for anything other than shaving half pixels off here and there on my high-DPI screen). My Dad (also a programmer) is still grumbling about some status bar thing that broke a short while ago, but we went through his extensions and came to the conclusion that it’s really not that bad—the extensions that stop working at 57 were ones he didn’t use, or ones where there are already good alternatives available or a clear plan for the changeover.
(The fact that in several cases I did have to swap out one extension for another was a mild nuisance, but as a Nightly user I’m doing this a few months before everyone will have to, so I expected it.)
All in all, I’m happy with how things have gone and impressed at how well the migration is going. All that I really want now is to be able to hide the horizontal tab strip in favour of my vertical tab bar. And it looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 is almost there. (It’d also be good if file: URLs didn’t mess with said vertical tab bar something awful, but as I haven’t filed any bugs about that yet or investigated to find existing reports I’m not allowed to complain.)
Good job!
Of the extensions you listed, the largest (Classic Theme Restorer) is only used by 333,000 people while the smallest (Edgewise) is only used by 218 people.
doesn't sound like an "only" to me.
Plenty of those long-time users giving advice to the young-uns are more than happy yo sacrifice a small part of firefox for big improvements elsewhere.
Mozilla should find a way of moving forward while keeping the code open enough to modding. AFAIK, features offered by these extensions that I use are not implementable in WebExtensions even in principle, and that is the main problem. Break the compatibility if you must, but make it possible for someone who cares enough to step in and rewrite these extensions to the new architecture.
I'd argue that many of the users that choose Firefox over Chrome do so for the fact that Firefox is 100% open source and isn't tied to an advertising giant trying to capture tons of extra private data from you. This won't change that. It will mean you can't change the layout of the entire Firefox window and add tons of new custom buttons and things like that. But most users don't care about that.
For the niche that can't stand using a UI they can't fully customize, they're free to use a slower and less secure browser that continues to support XUL and the associated extensions while still keeping up to date with at least the slower Firefox ESR branch of renderer underneath. Pale Moon, for example.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215059
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246706
Oh, and good news, the ui you dislike is going away.
Then the simple way forward is to make your own browser, isn't it? Use an embeddable engine which does all the hard work for you and focus on making the UI the way you insist it must be. It really could be a single developer project.
So why not just do that?
I would love to help but being an amateur I've encountered a few pain points, unless the issue is my search skills are lacking. A few days ago I finally updated my Firefox version on Debian 9 to the developer version 56 (previous 54). The problem has been finding documentation on both the Debian and Mozilla websites on how to do it the right way. Found a decent tutorial, made a back up, installed and my machine is working much better. It is old and got little memory :)
Then FF said there was an update. I got stumped. From what I could find FF sync has a limit of X bytes. I ended up looking into making a web extension but that's going to take me some time. It seems I could save the open tabs using Tabs.tab from the API, maybe. Sorry, I digress.
In short, how can I have two FF versions on at the same time, different directories obviously, with their respective icons, while manually updating them? I guess it would be to delete all the files in the dir, unpacking, and call it a day? Still need help with the two versions though.
If you read all of this, thank you.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
Queue the FF is not tread safe jokes (and only that, not a flame).
OP: you can use Firefox Sync. There is a cloud version by Mozilla but also a WSGI app you could host. I know it is not a 100% solution, but what was recommended to me when I asked during FF alpha and beta testing with stable way back when.
I lack the necesary knowledge on how to correctly install two different FF versions and have them accesible with their respective icons. In my case, FF dev version and the one discussed in the article to help out with bug testing/development.
The issue is since I'm on Debian, auto update does not work. From my limited understanding, I would need to install FF 57 in its own directory. For this one I don't need a profile. But I don't know how to install it and have it accesible either by command line or the FF icon that comes with the browser since I already have my main FF I want to keep.
The second part is regarding the profile, sync with the other browser I recently installed.... I was about to go down a mental rabbit hole :)
The problem is, the lack of noob friendly documentation. I know I could figure it out if I research the issue through different topics on Linux administration. I was hoping that maybe someone knew of a tutorial which talked about the different steps on how to install Firefox on a nix system, explaining the different concepts as if I were a five year old. The best I've managed to find is a tutorial laying out the steps. But it didn't explain the concepts behind those steps.
That tutorial mentioned how to replace debians FF from the repo. But whenever a new version comes out I would need to delete it and unpack the new one, linking it to the old icon.
I hope it's clear now. Thanks for the reply.
I literally just downloaded the zip file (or maybe a .deb?) and unzipped it in a directory in my desktop. All I had to do after that was make sure I didn't have both browsers open, and everything worked properly. They both used the same profile, and the tabs I opened in nightly were available in stable and vice versa.
I did nothing more than unzip the browser, and everything works perfectly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6tt7wj/nightly_cre...
Not sure if you are looking something like this, but OneTab extension it's pretty useful to me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/
That and Mozilla's search for "anonymized personal data" kill the benefits of using Firefox in the first place, which for most people is to avoid using Chrome/Chromium, made by a conglomerate advertisement company. Just last week, I updated to 56 beta and despite disabling Pocket in my about:config, advertisements for news companies (Wired, etc) were displayed thanks to Pocket's "popular news articles" section in my previously blank New Tab page! Even Chrome does not force bundled software like Pocket, despite their stronger incentives for doing so.
I downloaded nightly 57 and it gave me a preview of how bad the extension situation really is. It's like a forced downgrade to a completely different browser, so why not switch to something entirely different at that point? This is what I'll be forced to do, after certificates expire in a few years in the then-out-of-date stable 56 distribution.
Extensions scare me. They're a huge potential invasion of privacy, especially with recent hijackings of Chrome extensions in the store.
I'm also more confident that Mozilla will always listen to users, and give us the necessary opt-outs. I really don't trust Google as much.
As for the opt outs, this may be true for most things, but I am not able to opt entirely out of Pocket's "Recommended by Pocket" trending adverts, nor am I able to turn off Firefox's addon signing requirement to develop or try new addons from GitHub, unless I download a tweaked build version of Firefox.
I found a status update from the e10s meeting from Jun 2nd - https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s/Status/June2
It indicates that over 60% of beta users had e10s activated which can only be activated for users who don't use old extensions. Based on the telemetry data it seems that only 3% were not eligible. I'm not involved in e10s project so I don't know the details and updates, but I believe that the number of users affected is actually quite low (which doesn't mean irrelevant, just that majority of users won't be affected).
> As for the opt outs, this may be true for most things, but I am not able to opt entirely out of Pocket's "Recommended by Pocket" trending adverts
In the home tab? The icon on the top-right corner allows you to uncheck the "Recommended by Pocket" and "extensions.pocket.enabled" about:config option allows you turn off pocket completely.
Now, that we own Pocket, I hope we'll merge it more seamlessly into Firefox Accounts because I feel like the sole fact that it uses it's own brand name makes it feel like Firefox comes with a separate piece of software bundled.
No shit, Sherlock. After crapzilla removed/maimed most of the APIs - who'd even think that extensions'd degrade as well?
Can you try restarting the browser, and if it doesn't help, file a bug pls?
What's not to like about the Google browser's useless address bar that's main functionality is to direct you to Google Search at every available opportunity instead of being helpful? I bet Firefox users can't wait to get that!
That isn't the case. See the FAQ: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ
After thirteen loyal years with Firefox as my primary browser they finally forced me away. Bye, Mozilla.
Works great on my nightly installation, but have fun with Vivaldi.
Long time Firefox user and have been dreading the extensions going away, but it looks like Nightly has resolved some of the problems I was using extensions for (i.e. duplicate tab context menu) and I know some of the more prominent extensions (like NoScript) are being worked on.
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455722
By the way, is multi-process going to make it more feasible to introduce a more robust profile feature like Chrome?
I have it working mostly on Windows but it still feels pretty rudimentary.
That's the only major feature for me that Chrome is really just so much better than Firefox.
You are talking about the actual Firefox Profiles and not about Container Tabs, right? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
You can also get to an alternative, somewhat more Chrome-like profile manager by typing "about:profiles" into the URL-bar.
I'm a FF user since the days of Phoenix but the profile management is something I've relied upon Chrome for in recent years.
That "create as many arbitrary profiles as you like!" feature is awesome for testing some kinds of web applications. Last year, I worked on an in-browser chat project. At some points I really needed to have 4-5 different users logged in simultaneously so I could send messages back and forth and track down some bugs.
Another common scenario: suppose you're developing, testing, or supporting a web application where the user experience differs depending on a user's permissions. Can be a lifesaver to have multiple browser windows, each using a different browser profile + app login, simultaneously. Rather than repeatedly logging in/out with a single browser window.
FF's Container Tabs are an interesting feature. They could get some adoption. Similar underlying technology I guess, but different (more restrictive) UI meant to guide users down a specific path. That's cool; hopefully it can be extended at some point to allow a set of arbitrary accounts to be created by devs, testers, support folks, and others.
But the ability to keep work and home separate - separate bookmarks, extensions, etc. is really valuable. And although it's possible with Firefox, it can still be a little quirky having to setup custom Windows shortcuts, etc.
I'll check out about:profiles. Not sure I've ever seen it.
Some issues though: instead of going for 'native', they still seem to feel like Firefox is a little planet of its own. It doesn't use macOS-style menus, nor transparency. Not that Chrome uses all macOS style elements, but it at least feels like it has had some effort put into making it feel at home on macOS. There's also some weird defaults / ignorance of convention: every browser launches a private window with cmd+shift+n, Firefox uses cmd+shift+p. There's still a separate search field next to an URL&search field. Probably a few more that I missed.
On the issues - what you listed is the eternal dilemma of cross-platform software. Balancing cross-platform behavior vs. platform-compliance.
There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each.
Those choices are hard to make perfect. I've been recently fixing the drop-down menu lists styling [0] to allow websites to style some of it, while keeping it looking native when they don't. It's pretty tricky to get it right :)
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386015
Let me be clear that these are minor annoyances and I respect the effort you guys do and am pretty amazed that you can make ground on a browser backed by a behemoth like Google.
I'm also pretty stoked for when you guys will have fully Servo'd Firefox, or have released Servo as a standalone product. When I tried Servo it was already oh-so-smooth :)
Also if you're a user who don't care about any particular platform and want just to use your trusty Firefox browser, it's annoying to learn different shortucts for the same thing in the browser on windows, linux, and macos.
And, wow does FF57 "feel" fast. Not sure if it's because I have Stylo enabled, or what, but the UI feels faster now. I'm not sure if I've felt that way about any other FF release. And I have used them all.
Demo of The Sims Pie Menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser
By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland.
Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, A.V. Williams Bldg., University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742, U.S.A.
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433...
Pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions:
To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu items at the top or bottom of the screen.
3. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION
The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking. Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection, but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the control of the selection is.
The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window, they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.
Wasn't Firefox (or even Mozilla) the first to have this feature and possibly even before there was any alternative?
If so, did this keyboard shortcut change in the new FF?
If not, then the 'convention' is whatever FF has always done, which the others then broke..
One is the location of the red/yellow/green titlebar buttons. Like FF, Safari eschews a traditional titlebar and puts those buttons level with the main browser chrome. (IMHO I think this is a good trade-off to make for a browser; I'm not complaining)
Two is Safari's scrolling behavior. It seems to use its own scrolling behavior, separate from the standard scrolling behavior provided by MacOS. I've tried a few apps that modify system-wide scrolling behavior, and they work everywhere but Safari. They make Safari's scrolling insanely twitchy, with a single click of the mousewheel causing Safari to scroll 10x or 100x faster than anything else on the system.
Other browsers don't have to have "undo close window" as a feature at all, so had the shortcut free for private browsing.
Just remembered that about:config exists and disabled the vanishing menu.
Well done!
So I hope I will be surprised and Firefox finally made some revolutionary changes.
Btw. it's even worse on Android, you will hardly find slower browser + there is no pull down to refresh page which is showstopper for me and even with plugins there was no way to implement it.
I might as well switch to MSIE as update to 57.
FireGestures -> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures... SDC -> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
It'll take a bit for the new generation of extensions to fully replace the old one, but it's happening.
I'm not sure what browser I'm going to use to be honest. All the hotkey browsers are buggy as hell since they use qtwebkit, webkitgtk, qt-webengine and whatnot. Chrome has extensions like cvim which sort of work, but they suffer from issues like not being able to properly hook keys and properly notify the user about the state you're in making me frequently make mistakes on what I want to do. As the sibling said a poor imitation of what was possible before.
If firefox just immitates chrome, what's the point in having it? How about trying to eat some of IE's lunch by making enterprise customization a first class citizen? But then again not sure if that matters. And yes I'm aware of GPO[3], but calling that first class citizen is disingenuous at best.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061
[2] https://github.com/Koushien/keyboard-shortcut-api
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/gpo-for-firef...
The more I read, the more APIs turn out to be missing or buggy, making it impossible for add-ons to be made (if the developer is active in the first place). I just don't understand this. Firefox was built on the extendible principle and they're now going back to "v0.2 beta" in that regard.
This process should have taken years to mature the new APIs before dropping support for the old method.
Notice that major bump in August 2016 and after? Firefox 48 was released on the 2nd August 2016. This was the first release to ship the new multiprocess architecture. And this new architecture also already required breaking all extensions.
They could not have shipped it this early without knowing that the switch to WebExtensions will cut off the multiprocess-incompatible extensions.
And they needed to get multiprocess shipped. Had that graph continued as in the half year before that, we would now have negative user numbers.
http://i.imgur.com/AH1ahF3.jpg
I really don't care which browser is #1 in speed tests. I don't care about integrations with social networks. I simply want a browser that I can configure the way I want!
Another suggestion : when you change something, even if you are 100% sure everybody will like it, please at least leave an "about:config" option that can revert that modification.
Sadly, I realized that, when Firefox is updated, I'm not trilled anymore to see what new features are included, I'm instead anxious to see what has been changed/removed!
Just customize!
Not supporting images or JavaScript would simplify things as well...
That's just your opinion—which I guess the Firefox devs and most users don't share.
Customizability is a very useful feature for many people.
Not really a "configurable option" but very close to it, it achieves the same goal and has been released along with the Backspace modification.
For instance neither "classic" top tabs nor a side list/tree is the "best" or "right" way to design a tab selector. Some users will prefer one, others the other. You should give them choice.
I think building support for a choice about something like tab placement is a waste of time and code - I don't understand why people can't adapt to one way or the other and then we all benefit from simpler code with fewer bugs.
I don't think we need to decide if top or side tabs are better, because I can't see how it matters much. Just pick one, hard code it, and everyone get on with the things that matter.
I spend several hours every day on a browser, switching tabs hundreds of times. I am measurably and subjectively more efficient with side tabs than top tabs. Why is this something that doesn't matter? It's not trivial, I literally cannot browse without side tabs without getting annoyed. It's absolutely not a waste of time and code if it's important to people.
You're in the minority then. The majority of users care, a lot, about speed, and Firefox is visibly slower than Chrome, probably one of the main reasons it has lost so much share.
Personally I care about both, that's why I am so conflicted about this update. But it's disingenuous to assume this is an unwarrented regression. You cannot get better in terms performance while keeping the extension system as it is. This reworking is necessary for Firefox to even compete wit Chrome. I understand the dillema but this is far from clear-cut one way or the other.
The added extensibility, while nice, was mostly an afterthought. The only extension I'll miss is cliget, and hopefully it can be added back eventually.
But, still:
1. Benchmarks are important, but aren't always the best reflection of actual performance, either real or perceived. Subjectively, Safari on Mac and Edge on Windows "feel" fastest to me even though benchmarks say otherwise. Within reason, that's what typical end users care about: "feel" vs. benchmarks. (FWIW, Firefox is my main browser; I'm not telling anybody to use Safari or Edge)
1a. Chrome benchmarks the best, but it also uses the most memory due to its multiprocess model, so for users on memory-constrained devices (particularly with spinning HDDs, where swap's going to be really slow) I'm not convinced reality always lines up with benchmarks here
2. The user's network connection is still usually the biggest factor.
3. I don't think actual site content's getting much heavier. All this extra browser performance is just getting soaked the hell up by heavier and heavier ads. So I can't get as excited about browser performance as I used to.
The "legacy" Firefox extension API is powerful because it reaches its tentacles into every corner of the internals of the browser. Keeping that API stable involves freezing a large amount of internal architecture and behavior.
Firefox needs to evolve if it's going to live, and it can't evolve in the ways that it needs to if so much of its internals are effectively frozen. It's a painful drag on development, slowing things down and preventing necessary changes.
I'm not even going to get into the problems with the API itself except to say that it had many, including widespread dependencies on synchronous behavior.
Mozilla's sacred-cow-level commitment to preserving legacy extension support is a big reason why Chrome beat Firefox on so many technical levels for so long. It ate up a ton of developer time, held off or killed critical architectural changes, was the cause of a lot of crashes, hangs, memory leaks, security problems... Thank goodness that's about to be over.
I'm sorry that you'll miss it but this is a really important step. Mozilla is doing a great job with WebExtensions, I suspect you'll be happy with how things shake out in the end.
Wouldn't it be better to offer a legacy addon API shim - old addons would still work even on new Firefox.
Look, I get it. You have your extensions and you don't want to see them go away. But you're a tiny niche and even other power users don't use these extensions that you find essential. Certainly the vast majority of users rarely install extensions at all. Mozilla is doing the right thing and an entire thread praising the performance of the latest version vindicates their approach.
Where is the next Servo based browser? Instead of refactoring the 20year old mess (with COM and XML), the should focus 99% on Rust and Servo, and finally release a stable build with a lightweight HTML5 UI (Vivaldi).
Well, you answered your own question. Clearly they have a userbase that will stay with them out of inertia or loyalty. These users can now benefit from the improvements in the latest release. If they released a new browser, few people if any would try it out because of inertia. The lack of users would kill the product pretty quickly.
Of course, some users who rely on old addons will be left behind, but they have the option to use Firefox Extended Support Release, which will get security updates. Eventually the extensions situation will sort itself out and these few users can move to the main release.
That's Firefox. Many of the components in Firefox 57 are taken from Servo.
Congratulations. This is definitely a huge step forward. The UI finally looks as good as the other guys, and it's fast, too!
If you had finally figured out that private mode's UI is too similar to the normal one, too, I'd even be amazed (let me help you: make the address bar and tabs dark instead of light).
The only option seems to switch to the ESR version, at least for a while it will work.
Sorry Mozilla - for the reasons expressed above, 56 will be the last version of your browser I'm able to effectively use given the demands of my browser workflow. If my use-case no longer fits your business case, then we will part ways.
Currently, it looks like my best options are either Waterfox (with its pledge of continued XUL extension support), or Vivaldi.
I can't imagine Waterfox or Pale Moon being able to keep XUL extensions alive for much longer. It was a major maintenance burden for Mozilla, so it's pretty much an impossible task for the comparatively tiny developer teams behind those.
Having said that, Firefox 52 ESR is still supported until June 26, 2018. So, you could use that. And the Waterfox + Pale Moon devs could base themselves on that until its EOL.
Firefox ESR is pointless - it's just delaying the inevitable. I tried Midori, but it runs poorly on KDE. Palemoon is pretty bad - I tried it and it doesn't properly support existing XUL extensions that work fine in Firefox, so it's a no-go in my book. Waterfox, on the other hand, is fast, works exactly like Firefox, and is at least willing to give continued XUL support a shot.
So, it's Vivaldi or Waterfox as best I can figure at this point.