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Firefox Will Run Chrome Extensions
An anonymous reader writes: Today Mozilla announced some big changes to its extension support. Their new addon API, WebExtensions, is mostly compatible with the extension model used by Chrome and Opera. In short, this means we'll soon see cross-platform browser extensions. They say, "For some time we've heard from add-on developers that our APIs could be better documented and easier to use. In addition, we've noticed that many Firefox add-on developers also maintain a Chrome, Safari, or Opera extension with similar functionality. We would like add-on development to be more like Web development: the same code should run in multiple browsers according to behavior set by standards, with comprehensive documentation available from multiple vendors."
Interoperability means everybody will start developing extensions solely for Chrome, since it's less work to make one build for every browser. So what's the point of Firefox after that happens?
I advocate for Pale Moon and Chromium. They're both FLOSS. Firefox no longer is, because it has integrated third-party binaries (Netflix DRM, Pocket). Consequently, Firefox is now less secure (see http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... ). This is also to say nothing about the build-in advertisements that read your browsing history, and the awful performance chokes it suffers from.
FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.
It started as an effort to be lighter and faster than the old Mozilla suite. I actually like the mail client, occasionally use composer to put something together quickly and Chatzilla is fine IRC client as often as I still want to use IRC. I stayed on the SeaMonkey side of the house on my personal systems this entire time.
It was funny as hell to watch FF get bigger and more bloated than SeaMonkey, and its performance plummet. SeaMonkey's UI in the mean time only got faster with fixes and improvements and the browser just got better with all the gekko and js improvements that came downstream from the Firefox project. SeaMonkey was always the better browser for my particular needs, but after perhaps FF3 and later it was the better browser over Firefox for pretty much all the reason FF was selected over it in the first place. Completely lost sight of what they'd been trying to do.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Another nice thing about FF is that it has its own FIPS compliant data stores for passwords as well as its own separate keystore. Chrome and IE use the system's keys on Windows.
This is important, because if someone gets a bogus root CA into the Registry, Chrome and IE will happily honor it, while Firefox will stop and point it out.
FF also provides password protection for the keystore data. This way, if FF is left unattended (and a timeout is set), an intruder can't just walk away with a user's password stash.