Mozilla Will Deprecate XUL Add-ons Before the End of 2017

Artem Tashkinov writes: Mozilla has published a plan of add-ons deprecation in future Firefox releases. Firefox 53 will run in multi process mode by default for all users with some exceptions. Most add ons will continue to function, however certain add ons have already ceased to function because they don't expect multi user mode under the hood. Firefox 54-56 will introduce even more changes which will ultimately break even more addons. Firefox 57, which will be preliminarily released on the 28th of Novermber, 2017, will only run WebExtensions: which means no XUL (overlay) add ons, no bootstrapped extensions, no SDK extensions and no Embedded WebExtensions. In other words by this date the chromification of Firefox will have been completed. If you depend on XUL add ons your only choice past this date will be Pale Moon.

Comments

Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother using this bloated browser when it drops support for the incredible addon library it's accumulated over the years? Without customization, what exactly does Firefox offer over Chrome?

Re:Great.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Exactly. "If it's successful and it works, remove the feature" seems to be rather popular these days.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't track and send your data to Google.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't track and send your data to Google.

It will after they eviscerate all the privacy plugins.

Google's tracking shit is on almost every single page on the web.

Re:Great.

[Ghostworks]

I haven't updated firefox in a long time. Sadly, it no longer even works in my corporate environment. As a long-time user though, I can hope that this is finally the act that causes share to plummet enough to make them realize that extensions are the ONLY good thing left about Firefox. If Mozilla wants to survive, it will have to cope.

Or it will die, and web will belong totally to Google.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Using domain names that are not obfuscated and don't change. Google's tracking is beyond trivial to block.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither does Chromium with simple configuration.

By the way, Firefox also sends data to Google by default.

Re:Great.

[iampiti]

It still does have something: It doesn't help Google spy even more on you. It's not made by a megacorp.
Granted, most people don't care about those but I do. Anyway, I agree that the huge amount and great addons Firefox has will be a huge loss

Re:Great.

[allo]

It does. Look up, what's the unique wrkey, firefox uses to get anti-phishing-data from google.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't just google. The number of tracking domains is effectively infinite. You cannot solve the problem by blacklisting known bad ones.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, what's the alternative?

Chrome? Since Firefox is trying to become Chrome, why switch to the browser that's already the epitome of what I don't like about the direction Firefox is headed? Especially since Chrome is put out by a company whose stated purpose is to spy on everything you do and sell it to the highest bidder.

IE? Edge? Considering Microsoft's always-on spyware in Windows 10, I'm pretty certain they're trying to be just as bad, if not worse, than Chrome about this. And they're not open source, so you have no idea what they're doing behind the scenes.

Pale Moon? This would be a perfect alternative for them to snatch up the alienated Firefox users by starting a new fork of the code base from the last version to support XUL extensions. Unfortunately, they're so insistent on NOT USING AUSTRALIS that they'll never do this, despite the fact that their current code base is old enough that it doesn't support a lot of the best Firefox extensions either.

My only hope is that another project will fork from Firefox with the stated goal of keeping XUL extensions, and that they'll lure the disgruntled developers of these extensions from Firefox. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Barring that, I'm afraid there is no alternative to the new Crippled Firefox. I know for a fact that some of my must-have extensions will not work in the new version. This marks the end of the golden age of Internet browsing, at least for me. A lot of things I used to do all the time will no longer be possible.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of tracking domains is effectively infinite. You cannot solve the problem by blacklisting known bad ones.

Shh! Don't mention that or you-know-who is going to show up to plug his blacklisting program!

Re:Great.

[Qzukk]

Hopefully Seamonkey won't go hurtling down the same path with Firefox (they're built on FF49 right now).

Re:Great.

[MSG]

what exactly does Firefox offer over Chrome?

It's smaller, for one: smaller download, smaller installation, smaller memory footprint.

It supports extensions on the mobile version, for another. Chrome doesn't. It's true that they're changing the API, but that means that they're significantly decreasing the amount of effort that developers need to put in, to get an extension that works on both Firefox and Chrome. I'm cautiously optimistic. It'll probably be a painful transition, but you should consider that your premise is flawed. Firefox isn't going to be "without customization."

Re: Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Got a wide gamut monitor? FF is color managed, Chrome is not.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Chromium?

Re:Great.

[aix tom]

One of the main points of Pale Moon was that it was for people who NOT wanted Australis. And since the fork most of Pale Moon was completely rewritten anyway (Including dropping Gecko as a rendering engine, and replacing it with the self written Goanna.), so "re-forking" from a newer Firefox version would be pretty pointless.

Also, the new version 27.1.0 includes a completete rewrite of multimedia handling, that passes it of to ffmpeg directly in Linux. Which is really great for HTML5 video, since everything that is supported by ffmpeg *just works* out of the box.

Re:Great.

[thegarbz]

It still does have something: It doesn't help Google spy even more on you. It's not made by a megacorp.

Use Chromium.

Re:Great.

[dryeo]

To quote someone on mozilla.dev.apps.seamonkey

Practically old extensions are already obliterated piecemeal by changes in Gecko. Older javascript language constructs get removed and old apis too. With 2.49 and then again with 2.50 a lot of them will break.

As far as i see it web extensions don't cut it yet and probably never will. They are also still a moving target and even gecko is slowly becoming a construction site with Servo and Quantum.

But SeaMonkey has imho not enough developers to retain the stuff. Porting web extensions need to be done in the future and even this will not be easy.

I would say enjoy it while it lasts and we will see what comes of it.

I've seen quite a few similar postings. Basically SeaMonkey (and Thunderbird) just don't have enough developers to do a lot of stuff including getting out regular releases, little well forking Gecko.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox doesn't work in a corporate environment anyway. Better uninstall it and get back to the standard IE6.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't spy as much as chrome? But yeah, not sure why they are trying so hard eradicate all of the features that made it good in the first place.

Re:Great.

[skids]

At some point the technical battle against meta-surveillance must simply be declared lost unless you want to go full Tor, dress up in an airtight jumpsuit, and learn how to navigate the sewer systems.

It can only be fought on a legal and economic front... also it's really the integrity, ethics, motivations, and cultural longevity of the institutions doing it that matter more than the act itself. On the bright side, maybe once the consequences of individualized attention by self-interested corporations and governments both foreign and domestic starts to sting the general public a bit more, that will increase the market/political value of integrity and ethics, above what seems to right now be pretty much nil.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

and don't install the google api keys. Chromium seems to hate it but tinfoils aprove.

Re:Great.

[higuita]

Because current add-on design do not work with multi-process!!

They are not ending the add-on, they must be migrated to the new API. Sadly many add-on are abandoned and will not be migrated. Others will not be allowed to do some functions, almost all of then must be rewritten. But the current add-on have fatal flaws and are doomed sooner or later.

There are several problems with the current^WOLD add-on layer
1- Old add-on have too much access to the firefox internals (security, memory leaks and performance problems)
2- Old add-ons do not know how to work with multi-process and mozilla had to simulate a pool+lock for then to work (big lock, performance problems)
3- Migrating code from Servo to Geko would break many add-on unless there are many compatibility layers (performance and code maintenance problems)

Solutions:
1-They could swap unsafe parts slowly and break many add-on on each release, forcing a slow and never ending add-on update cycle. It is much easier to just swap the API and warn that everyone must rewrite.
2-Add-ons need to be fixed or else the browser will not really use the multi-process well and worse, may be even slower because of the big lock. If they remove the compatilbity layer, add-on stop working, but postponing the removal will keep the browser slower too and the add-on may never be updated (multi-process is already a several years project and all add-ons where flagged to be updated, but many are just abandoned). So wait more is not a solution, they need to be rewrite
3-No one wants layers over layers, it is a maintenance hell, specially because the add-on have access to almost everything. Migrating to a simpler API make mozilla job much easier, firefox safer. Add-on will have to be rebuild and developers need to learn a new API. They will also be unable to do some things they can right now, but on the good side, it will much easier to port add-on between chrome and firefox and the add-on can be run in separated process, so bad add-on will be easier to stop and control.

Yes, i too would like to keep all the add-ons, but between a fast browser with fewer add-ons and a slow one with many outdated add-ons, i prefer the first one. You can not complain about firefox being slow and also complain about keeping old add-ons. To fix one, you need to fix the other too! and you can not delay this, market share is shrinking due firefox being slower.

They were making changes slowly, as they were mostly doing the last few years, and try to not break the add-ons, but you can not postpone a big internal change forever and now it is time to drop some old features, like NPAPI plugins and the old add-on interface

What i hope is that mozilla is now more open to some features, as some features will be blocked to add-ons, mozilla need to be more flexible on certain features. The google design model ("only allow features that at least 80% of people use") is bad for firefox, as many of the users of firefox are the 20% of excluded people in chrome

Re:Great.

[higuita]

Also, chrome for a couple of tabs is ok, but eats lot of cpu, uses lot of ram with many tabs. Firefox in the past was the worst in resource usage, but now is chrome!
Firefox can scale to many tab without using so much resources. Multi-process is helping more in that too.

Firefox also do not track you, quite the opposite, they are adding several tracking protection to the browser

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no IE6 for Windows 10

Re: Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox works for me just great, and on all my devices. I just dont understand the hate.

In any case getting extensiond out of firefox internals is a good thing: it is a real security risk mitigated by a proper API.

and
Look at the mindless monoculture here at Slashdot.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you don't expect to win the war, you should still throw indiscriminate wrenches at the thousands of machines. Block, disable, blacklist, sabotage, just spew it all out, if only on principle. It's your machine, try to control what it does, where it (invisibly) goes, what it announces.

Then, yes, continue efforts at the source. But my website/software (eg app) is going to scoop up everything in reach, and trying to outlaw it will just cause cat-and-mouse workarounds, loopholes, moving goalposts. It's going to be financially advantageous no matter what. It's going to be happening, no matter what. As a powerless commoner in an oligarchy nation, my attention is best spent treating the symptoms in my own life, and whining on internet message boards to encourage stigma.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

They will have almost no UI customization anymore. Many used Firefox because they have been able to make the UI "their own" - with UI customization or a very limited Firefox is not better than Chrome or IE.

Removing all what is unique creates a browser which is perhaps slightly better than Chrome bc of enhanced webextensions. But that is not enough. All is reduced to lure over Chrome users. That is what Mozilla cares. For the most common lowest denominator. Alone for that mentality i dump Firefox.

Add-ons are not the only source of customization. Mozilla has turned into a carricature of a once proud and user-loyal open source project. Many of us will leave, because fool me once and i will forget it. Fool my twice and i am a bit wary. Fool me thrice and you can go to hell!

Re:Great.

[0111 1110]

Pale Moon? This would be a perfect alternative for them to snatch up the alienated Firefox users by starting a new fork of the code base from the last version to support XUL extensions. Unfortunately, they're so insistent on NOT USING AUSTRALIS that they'll never do this, despite the fact that their current code base is old enough that it doesn't support a lot of the best Firefox extensions either.

It doesn't support the most recent versions of the best extensions,but if you go back to older versions you will probably find one that works. If you are referring to newer post-FF24 only extensions then yes that would be a problem, but... the palemoon team is probably going to end up doing exactly what you would like to see.

The idea would be to rebase their core codebase on a more recent version and just factor out Australis. Apparently the Australis UI is not so tightly integrated as to make this not doable. From what I can see Pale Moon or whatever they end up calling the newer refork is going to be the *only* alternative to The Google Browser and its clones. Well aside from just disabling autoupdate on FF52 and living with that which is what I plan to do for the time being. That will probably work for the next 2-3 years. If I have time maybe I can help with the Pale Moon project now that FF has finally pounded a stake through its own heart. Customization is Firefox and once Mozilla kills that it really is dead and there is no reason to use it.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have the google adware delivery system.

Re: Great.

[jenningsthecat]

Firefox works for me just great, and on all my devices. I just dont understand the hate.

Firefox's vast array of extensions renders it highly configurable to a user's individual tastes and needs, and it is utterly unique among browsers, so the disappearance of that flexibility understandably pisses off those of us who have come to rely on it. If Slashdot got rid of mod points, karma, thresholds, and spam ratings, and no longer permitted user-submitted stories, wouldn't you be upset? If not, then why are you here at all?

In any case getting extensiond out of firefox internals is a good thing: it is a real security risk mitigated by a proper API.

And if Mozilla hadn't wasted so much time, energy, and money making frivolous UI changes that pissed off most of their user base and a good few developers as well, (not to mention sinking pointless effort into diluting their brand further with a stupid new logo for a company that's hemorrhaging market share), then perhaps they could have transitioned to a more secure platform while at the same time providing a way to translate existing extensions to the new security model.

Look at the mindless monoculture here at Slashdot.

Look at the mindless monoculture you're advocating when you say that it's OK for Firefox to become a late-to-the-party Chrome clone. Slashdot ain't the problem here pal - you are. And if what you see here bothers you so much, go somewhere else. Please. You obviously don't 'get' Slashdot in the same way that you don't 'get' Firefox - so do us all a favour and slag off over to Reddit.

Re:Great.

[jenningsthecat]

Mod parent up!

Even if you don't expect to win the war, you should still throw indiscriminate wrenches at the thousands of machines. Block, disable, blacklist, sabotage, just spew it all out, if only on principle. It's your machine, try to control what it does, where it (invisibly) goes, what it announces.

Thank you for putting words to the things I do and to the attitude that I have and can't shake, even though life would be simpler without it. I'm usually pretty articulate, but you've expressed the reasons for me doing what I do better than anything I've managed so far.

Then, yes, continue efforts at the source. But my website/software (eg app) is going to scoop up everything in reach, and trying to outlaw it will just cause cat-and-mouse workarounds, loopholes, moving goalposts. It's going to be financially advantageous no matter what. It's going to be happening, no matter what. As a powerless commoner in an oligarchy nation, my attention is best spent treating the symptoms in my own life, and whining on internet message boards to encourage stigma.

Thanks for this too - I think I'll call it 'incidental trench warfare'.

Re:Great.

[jenningsthecat]

I haven't updated firefox in a long time. Sadly, it no longer even works in my corporate environment.

You really should give Pale Moon a try - it's our last best hope for maintaining the almost-extinct Firefox ecosystem that we've come to know, love, and rely on. And because it incorporates Firefox security updates, (at least so far), it may even work in your corporate environment.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed is NOT the problem with Firefox. The problem is that the UI keeps getting worse.

I have to have addons for putting a status bar back at the bottom, I have to have addons for putting the window title back at the top. I don't want the preferences in a tab, I want them in a window. I have zero interest in reading lists, whatever the fuck "Pocket" is, or any of the other new shit that keeps showing up and not used by anybody.

It pisses me off that plugins were intentionally broken. It pisses me off that the first thing I have to do upon install is remove Yahoo as a search engine. I usually use a Mac, but when I'm having to use Windoze, before I can do anything else, I have to turn the menu bar back on - it should never be off, it shouldn't even be possible to turn it off.

I run four extensions that are critical: Classic Theme Restorer, Status 4 Evar, Adblock Plus, and NoScript. I also typically install a video download extension, because YouTube sucks.

If those extensions break, I'll have to drop back to a LTS release and hope somebody forks Firefox.

Dump the new API, then you won't have layers upon layers, just the one that works.

Re:Great.

[0111 1110]

Yes, i too would like to keep all the add-ons, but between a fast browser with fewer add-ons and a slow one with many outdated add-ons, i prefer the first one.

Doesn't a fast browser with fewer addons basically describe Google Chrome? Why don't you just switch to that if speed trumps customization for you? Do you really think the mozdevs can compete with the massive GoogleCorp at what they do best? You think they are going to outGoogle Google?

You can not complain about firefox being slow and also complain about keeping old add-ons.

I haven't seen a lot of people complaining about speed for any browser. I don't think speed is much of an issue for browsers. They have been fast enough for a very long time. Trying to make them faster is fixing a nonproblem. Finding a browser that will do what you want it to do if you want more than what Chrome can do otoh...that's about to be nontrivial.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a shame. I only recently converted from Pale Moon and Thunderbird to SeaMonkey. I should have been using it for the past decade.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

A non-profit organization that can be twisted for political purposes and personal profit.

If Mozilla isn't maintaining its own rendering engine, then it has failed at its primary purpose in life, but has freed up a lot of resources for purposes they were never intended for.

Re:Great.

[higuita]

>Doesn't a fast browser with fewer addons basically describe Google Chrome?

Browsers are all the "same", with little different details. Those details are the key
firefox is the open standard champion , flexible, open and protects your privacy. Sync is also a killer feature for many people
chrome is big, open, but tracks you and is not as flexible as firefox (google totally controls it)
chromium track you less, but still tracks you, or will be several missing features. It is open, but google still mostly controls it
edge is closed, tracks you, is little flexible and tries to pull a new IE (lock you up in closed standards, hidden agenda). It also miss some w3c features. It is not cross-platform
safari is closed, not flexible at all, miss many w3c features (simply because they refuse to do it, hidden agenda) and tried to push their closed and patented formats, it is also not really cross-platform (no one really use it in windows)

>Why don't you just switch to that if speed trumps customization for you?

Please notice that firefox is not killing add-on or customization, most of the currently working add-ons will be redone. Most add-on are not happy mostly because they will need to redo it and the more limited API (but needed for security reasons)

>I haven't seen a lot of people complaining about speed for any browser.

firefox single process was "slow", but not in the sense of page load speed, but in small hiccups and lack of smooth operation in certain areas... one heavy tab
affects the all browser, locks and crashes in one tab lock and crash all tabs. Multi-process was set to solve most of this, with rust/servo being the final fix.
Most people report that chrome is faster because it starts fast and each tab (mostly) is a different process, so switching tab is always smooth and heavy tabs do not really lock the other ones in different process. Firefox single process design with javascript heavy pages do not scale and with time, with more javascript, this is getting worse...all the small problems make user prefer webkit browsers

Re:Great.

[Tough Love]

Firefox remains my primary browser for multiple reasons:

  * Handles hundreds of tabs easily, by default
  * Avoids reloading pages until needed when restarting with multiple tabs
  * Superior url suggestion algorithm keys on text in mid-url
  * The addons of course
  * Google monoculture threatens freedom and progress
  * Google hostile takeover of browser market at expense of community-owned Firefox using tactics learned from Microsoft still rankles
  * Google's advertising business conflicts with user's desire for privacy (remember Eric Schmidt's self-serving quotes

I use Chrome too of course, but every time I do I think about how unpleasant the world will become if Google manages to exterminate all its rivals, both proprietary and open. Remember that thing about absolute power. But the more mundane reason is that Firefox just works better for me and is more pleasant to use. I am also pleased with the acceleration in development that came about when Mozilla foundation finally woke up and realized that sucking at Google's tit forever would be an existential threat.

Re: Great.

[Tough Love]

Firefox works for me just great, and on all my devices. I just dont understand the hate.

I do. Google employees have a lot of time on their hands, including a lot of time for shit-posting. It's hard to imagine why anybody without an agenda would spend time and effort attacking.

Re: Great.

[Tough Love]

Look at the mindless monoculture you're advocating when you say that it's OK for Firefox to become a late-to-the-party Chrome clone.

Firefox has one feature of greater importance than any other: it is not ruled by corporate overlords whose primary goal is to invade your privacy and auction it off the highest bidder. Otherwise, Firefox differs from Chrome in many ways that I like, and some that I do not. I see it as a good thing if the latter are addressed. And even if Firefox somehow became exactly the same as Chrome, much to my distress, it would still possess that all-important quality of not being under the thumb of an evil monopolist.

Re:Great.

[Tough Love]

As a long-time user though, I can hope that this is finally the act that causes share to plummet enough to make them realize that extensions are the ONLY good thing left about Firefox.

They already realize that. From the FAQ, they want to announce the intention to deprecate XUL, XPCOM[1] et al early, in order to enhance community involvement in honing the new WebExtensions model. Hopefully, WebExtensions will provide all the same functionality as the deprecated APIs, plus important advantages.

The perception issue seems to be that a plan to improve extensibility has been misinterpreted as a plan to abandon extensibility. I for one am convinced by the FAQ, but that is just a quickly formed opinion. Only someone actually involved in extension development, with experience in both the old and new models can tell you the real story.

[1[ Remember COM? Yikes.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

They did add chat and whatever the fuck "pocket" is

What else do you need in a browser? Security? Performance?

THOSE ARE YESTERYEAR'S CONCERNS -WE HAVE A NEW LOGO NOW!!!!

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's so much defeatist bullshit about privacy on the internet that I sometimes wonder if at least part of it psychological shilling by government agencies, advertising companies and their minions. Almost every method of tracking can in principle be blocked by a combination of spoofing and sandboxing. Just because no one has gone to the effort of making a universal idiot proof tool to do all the work for you doesn't mean its technically unfeasible.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

>1- Old add-on have too much access to the firefox internals

The entire point of an "add-on" is to hack the mainline product without recompiling. Access to internals is not a "problem," it's expected behavior. It would be fine for FF to introduce a lighter, "safer" API and encourage people to move to that, but don't kill one of the primary reasons people still use it.

>performance
There's no performance problem. The problem is JavaScript bloat. People need to quit building full programs in a lightweight scripting language, and go back to native fat applications. Don't try to cram a cargo container into a Ferrari -- let the Ferrari be a Ferrari, and put the cargo container on a flatbed rail car or truck. Translation for the dense: mobile devices are for lightweight purposes. Heavy work should be done by native applications.

Re:Great.

[Dagger2]

Hopefully, WebExtensions will provide all the same functionality as the deprecated APIs

You can hope all you like, but not doing this is explicitly one of the goals of WEs. It's thus highly likely that they won't provide the same functionality.

Re:Great.

[Tough Love]

Hopefully, WebExtensions will provide all the same functionality as the deprecated APIs

this is explicitly one of the goals of WEs. It's thus highly likely that they won't provide the same functionality

Yes, the FAQ clearly states that security and privacy issues dictate that some access will not be available to plugins. It will require actual analysis rather than shoot-from-the-lip opinionating to know whether that is a good thing. Are essential capabilities are affected, and if so then does the possibility exist to recover additional functionality in some way? Maybe consider including add some informed commentary in your next post instead of hiding behind some largely content free generalization.

My principle concern, quite naturally, is: are the addons I use implementable using WebExtensions. It is entirely possible that some will work better, for example, I have yet to find a video auto-start blocker that works naturally and reliably. Tends to suggest that the addon API has problems rather than addon developers.

Re: Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have mod points today, so have a hug instead. It's nice to know that there are people out there who get it.

Re: Great.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Firefox works for me just great, and on all my devices. I just dont understand the hate.

On desktop, it does for me, too. Its Android version is somewhat problematic, though. Servo is desperately needed there. Or at least some bug fixes.

Re:Great.

[AmiMoJo]

Sounds like you want Pale Moon.

You are not typical though. Most Firefox users I know don't change any defaults. Maybe install AdBlock, that's about it.

To most people, performance matters. As other browsers improve, Firefox must keep up. Web sites will add more JavaScript as engines get faster, and for most people NoScript = broken.

Mass market products will always cater to the majority. You really want Pale Moon.

Re:Great.

[skids]

I only said going half-assed is futile, not that it is futile in general. You have to go full tinfoil if you want a technical fix, and that there are non-technical fixes which could disincentivise the behavior.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you just switch to Chrome?

Because Google is evil and I don't want to depend on them. And if everyone switches to Chrome we get an internet monoculture and we all (excepting you apparently) remember the previous IE monoculture and what that was like. Google's interests aren't aligned with us users so whatever would happen, it wouldn't be fun.

I haven't seen a lot of people complaining about speed for any browser.

I take it this is your first day on /.? People are always complaining about Firefox being slow, leaking memory, crashing, freezing and suffering from things like choppy video playback and jittery scrolling. Firefox has severe architectural problems and low code quality and the resulting performance is driving users away, mostly to Chrome.
And there we touch upon another point. Everything has a cost. Mozilla cannot bring good performance and stability while at the same time keeping the old extension system working. Otherwise they'd have already done so; these issues aren't new. Everything you keep around you have to maintain and soaks up resources. And speed and stability are a growing problem, mainly because the web is getting crappier and crappier, but we cannot fix that. Would that we could.
So Mozilla is facing a choice. Either a) keep the XUL add-ons and watch pretty much all of their users walk away because the browser gets unusable for a growing fraction of its userbase, or b) drop the XUL add-ons, offer a new extension system to placate that particular fraction of their userbase, that has got nowhere to go with better extension support anyway, and fix their browser in the vague hope that it isn't too late already.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Goanna isn't self-written, it's basically a rebranded increasingly out-of-date fork of Gecko.

Re: Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

They should spend their resources on.coding rather than logos then.

Re: Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Avoids reloading pages until needed when restarting with multiple tabs"

Until you do need to reload all tabs at once. There is an addon for this but it probably doesn't work any more.

Re:Great.

[0111 1110]

I use Chrome too of course, but every time I do I think about how unpleasant the world will become if Google manages to exterminate all its rivals, both proprietary and open.

I like that Ãf course'. No need to exterminate them if you can get their product to be a clone of your own. Then there is no real reason for anyone to use their product over yours. With Mozilla killing customization or at least customization that is better than what Chrome already has, they have in every way become indistinguishable from Google's browser. Choosing one over the other becomes a hair splitting exercise.

Actually for a while Chrome will probably have better customization just because they have a huge head start in their extension ecosystem. Whether Firefox will eventually catch up is questionable but it may not. So one reason to use Chrome over Firefox may be that it is more customizable and that may never change.

Re: Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that they should, but I'm somewhat familiar with the codebase and the reasons why the new architecture is necessary and why it doesn't jive with the old extension API, and Mozilla simply hasn't got and has never had and likely will never have the resources. It would not only be prohibitively expensive now, but it would also be a permanent maintenance burden and soak up resources indefinitely into the future.
And yes, I think Mozilla should spend its money more wisely and put its developers to work in a more productive fashion. But making the situation even worse isn't going to make it better.

Re:Great.

[xenobyte]

Smaller memory footprint?

Here at work I have a session with a gmail tab, a Google calendar tab, a Google docs tab, a zendesk tab and a dozen Atlassian Confluence tabs. It starts out with a usage of about 2.5GB and at the end of the day reaches 3.7GB... Opening the same tabs in Chrome takes about 800MB.

Re:Great.

[higuita]

Add-on right now can mess with firefox internal and make it leak memory, crash and steal data it should not even have access. They are dangerous! Mozilla tries to review all add-ons. but there are too many, malware can be hidden in code and only major bug may be found in the review.
Also, both API will exist in parallel and the way to "encourage" add-on to migrate to the new API is saying that they will end by year end

About performance, it is not only javascript, the all GUI, web, network, images share the same process. Firefox feal laggy due to that, specially compared with webkit browsers. And again, even if many people do not like javascript webapps (myself included) and prefer plain html pages and native apps, they will not stop existing, quite the opposite, all those java and flash apps will be migrated to javascript heavy pages, many native apps will be migrated to webapps (so they can cash a subscription and more agile developer model). There is nothing you, me or mozilla can do about it. Just look at the speed that gmail took the web and the birth of many heavy webapps in the web, how every site used jquery and/or other js frameworks, even if they do not really need it!

Finally, between flash or java and javascript heavy webapps, i prefer the latest! without it, the web would be full of flash and java, a truly horrible place!

Re:Great.

[higuita]

yahoo as search engine is one of their way to earn money, they have to pay everyone! just like you install add-on, you just swap the search engine for whatever you like.

I do not know about mac, but on linux, if i press the customization, i the can right click on the menu bar and select it to always show, no need a add on for that.
They hide the status and menu bars so smaller screens have more space for web pages. Not everyone have high end computers with big screens, and metrics show that both status bar and menu bars are mostly unused. I too restored the status bar in the past, but i finally agree that is not needed. My menu bar is still always visible!

I do agree that they added some trash, but again, it is just some way to get some money without selling the user base

>Dump the new API, then you won't have layers upon layers, just the one that works.
Not one option! Again, multi-process, restrict add-on usage of internal code and servo integration will force the API to change! that or firefox will stop... but then, nothing stops you of using one old firefox version or using pale moon.

Re: Great.

[higuita]

designers do not code! If anything, they can design new UI, but most people do not really want new UI! so yes, let then design new logos!

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

This already happened. Pale Moon v27 is based on the frontend of Firefox 24(ish), and the backend of Firefox 38(ish). It even supports SDK addons made for Firefox 38 (i.e. built with jpm) as of Pale Moon 27.1.

BEEP BOOP

[Merk42]

{company} did {thing}! {thing} is bad!
It's still bad even though it may be something I complained they didn't do before!

If only they listened to ME they would succeed!
I won't tell them or make my own {software} lest I be shown that my needs aren't the needs of everyone.

Re:BEEP BOOP

[Anonymous Coward]

If only they listened to ME they would succeed!

If I wanted to run Chrome browser, I would have installed Chrome and not FireFox.
The entire point of using their software was that I wanted to use their software, not something else...

I won't tell them or make my own {software} lest I be shown that my needs aren't the needs of everyone.

Why tell them for a hundredth and one time?
After telling them our needs a hundred times, and their staff delete the forum post or close the ticket or ban you from their support form for asking a "After version X how do I do Y" - we pretty much got the hint that they don't WANT to hear our needs.

Personally I ran FireFox for exactly two reasons:
It was light on resources and faster than alternatives, and for the many thousands of addons available to handle any want or need I've ever had.

Now firefox is more bloated than even IE let alone pretty much all other browsers in existence (except perhaps Chrome itself, as they play leap-frog in who is slightly faster every few weeks)

And now they are basically killing addon support.

If I needed no addon support I would be using IE, which has had the feature of no addons since the very start :P

Re:BEEP BOOP

[Anonymous Coward]

People in this thread alone have contributed more to the discussion than you have, in any way.

Must be a hard moment for a low ID luser like you, realizing that you've reached the point where you actually ARE the type of person that everyone complains about here.

Re:BEEP BOOP

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I ran FireFox for exactly two reasons:

Make it three: I has a beautiful name. ;)

Re:BEEP BOOP

[Anonymous Coward]

shh the adults are talking, go back to acting entitled.

Re:BEEP BOOP

[thegarbz]

{company} did {thing}! {thing} is bad!

Actually it's company continues to do thing it has been doing for the past 5 years. The past 5 years have shown it is demonstrably bad.

It's still bad even though it may be something I complained they didn't do before!

Not a single person has ever said "I wish Firefox was more like Chrome. It bothers me that it has such an incredible plugin system. If only they removed all user choice!"

If only they listened to ME they would succeed!

Well that's kind of a given at this point. Really if they listened to anyone other than the few fwits driving the project their market share could only improve at this point.

I won't tell them

Holy crap are you in for a treat if you ever stumble across the Mozilla mailing list. Or bug tracker. Or the replies to their blog. Or any of the myriad of ways people have been shouting "What are you doing. STAHP!" At them.

or make my own {software} lest I be shown that my needs aren't the needs of everyone.

Yeah I think I'll make my own browser. Erm can you recommend a good book to read with the basics? Maybe like an intro to C? How hard can it be right? I mean the solution to everything is to code it myself. Maybe I'll replace windows next.

Re: BEEP BOOP

[Anonymous Coward]

C? What on earth are you talking about? Everyone knows the best and only language for programming something as complex as a browser is INTERCAL.

The end of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Once Mozilla kills their extension framework, there is literally no longer any reason to continue using Firefox.

In the future, they will do the same to Rust

[lucasnate1]

If they were willing to deprecate what was once a flagship technology once, they will do it again.

Re:In the future, they will do the same to Rust

[Anonymous Coward]

They will call that the Project Smelter. You know, to get to the base metal again.

This cant be!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Noooo!!!!!!!!
Why oh why must this happen? I think someone must not be sacrificing enough to the Mozilla gods.

I've switched to Vivaldi

[Joe Jordan]

Mozilla has forgotten what made Firefox great. Vivaldi is my new default browser. There are still some things missing that I used from Firefox (Live bookmarks, the DownloadThemAll plugin), but the performance is better and they care about the power user.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[codr4life]

Mozilla did a Borland, managed to pivot themselves out of relevancy; throwing away years of hard work and experience on trying to be more hipster than the hipsters.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that Vivaldi is a nice browser but don't expect powerful extensions. It only runs Chrome extensions, and not all of them well.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing it wasn't so much a change of direction as a change of workforce. The people bringing us new gimmicks and UI changes every month aren't the same people who originally gave us firefox. Those people obviously aren't interested in playing musical chairs with the UI, or firefox wouldn't have been as great as it was up to 3.x.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[allo]

firefox will only run webextensions, which use the same api as chrome extensions. So they aren't more powerful.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[x_t0ken_407]

Same. As an old Opera Presto lover, Vivaldi was a welcome addition to the scene. I've been using it since 2015, trying to help with finding bugs and testing new snapshots. Definitely recommend if you're a fan of Opera =version 12.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[Anonymous Coward]

Vivaldi is just another Chrome clone like Opera is now.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[CrashNBrn]

Not even. It's Apple's WebKit. So don't count on "Chrome" extensions to continue to work either.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[roca]

That's not true at all. Firefox extends the Chrome extensions API in various places as needed. For example, see the "New APIs" here: https://blog.mozilla.org/addon...
Another example: Firefox has implemented a "sidebar" Webextensions API, Chrome has not. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/ch... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[DarkVader]

Chrome is WebKit. Yeah, it's a fork, but it's WebKit.

Re:I've switched to Vivaldi

[allo]

yeah, but it is still "we build a whitelist". You may have a nice whitelist for the web, allowing youtube, wikipedia, maybe even slashdot. Still you wouldn't call it the free web, even when 95% of the users never encounter something not on the whitelist. Simliar you cannot speak of a full featured extension api, when you need to wait for mozilla to specifiy an API for the part of GUI you want to customize ...

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I am so very glad they're getting rid of every single thing that made Firefox popular in the first place

What's left after XUL is gone? Remove access to about:config?

Mozilla is so out of touch with their tech-minded userbase it's unreal. They probably think if they become like Chrome, Chrome users will jump to Firefox. Laughable. Once Firefox becomes Chrome, nobody's going to stick around - there will be no reason to anymore, at that point you either accept Chrome/ium or use a Firefox fork.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is so out of touch with their tech-minded userbase it's unreal.

I doubt that's it. I think it's more than the tech-minded userbase is about 0.1% of the total population of web browsing users.

We're all up in arms, but we're too few to matter. Our wishes are swamped by the masses who think that if Facebook still loads, everything is fine.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

"We're all up in arms, but we're too few to matter. Our wishes are swamped by the masses who think that if Facebook still loads, everything is fine."

I think most of those people have switched to Chrome or never got off IE or Edge in the first place.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone else brought this up in another discussion: how many non-tech-minded people use Firefox (or used to) because a tech-minded relative/friend installed it for them?

Re:Great

[FatdogHaiku]

I am so very glad they're getting rid of every single thing that made Firefox popular in the first place

What's left after XUL is gone? Remove access to about:config?

Mozilla is so out of touch with their tech-minded userbase it's unreal. They probably think if they become like Chrome, Chrome users will jump to Firefox. Laughable. Once Firefox becomes Chrome, nobody's going to stick around - there will be no reason to anymore, at that point you either accept Chrome/ium or use a Firefox fork.

So, stick a Firefox fork in them, they're done...

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

We're all up in arms, but we're too few to matter.

I'm not up in arms. Removing support for old add-ons based on cruft-ridden legacy APIs can be a good thing, and fear of change is generally a bad thing. As far as I can tell, many of the add-ons I personally use will be at least potentially ported to WebExtensions form, if they haven't already. Some have been, some are being looked into, and a few have announced that they won't be ported. I understand that it's putting a lot of workload on the devs of some complex add-ons to make the switch, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. But I suspect the final impact of this change is being overblown; as far as I can tell, Mozilla is putting a lot of functionality in the new APIs, and there won't be much that is currently possible that will become impossible.

And however much you want to criticise Mozilla, it would be stupid of them to allow their decisions to be driven primarily by the most reactionary, stick-in-the-mud portion of its user-base. For example, the biggest hooha over the change seems to be coming from Classic Theme Restorer users; by definition, people who are fixated on the way Firefox was at a given point in the past, and extremely resistant to any change whatsoever. Now I don't begrudge them their "classic" UI while they can get it, but let's be honest, they are not the future of anything.

Mozilla may be flailing around a bit trying to figure out what their future is, but I think they're quite aware what their future isn't, and that's actually not a bad start.

Re:Great

[AntiSol]

I think it's more than the tech-minded userbase is about 0.1% of the total population of web browsing users.

This is true, but what people don't seem to realise is that tech-minded userbase is about 100% of the remaining population of firefox users. All the non-tech-minded users switched to chrome ages ago because it has the shiny and unconfigurable chrome-a-like interface they love. As an added bonus, it's it's much faster and doesn't require petabytes of RAM to open more than three tabs.

It seems obvious to me that Mozilla has decided to go for the people who like chrome but just think it's just not slow or resource-intensive enough. Seems like a limited market to me.

In other words, as others have said, Mozilla is deprecating Firefox. It was fun while it lasted. Sounds like it's time to check out Pale Moon.

XUL is not inclusive enough!

[Anonymous Coward]

XUL is not inclusive enough as the name only uses three letters.

The patriarchy of those three letters must not be allowed to continue unchallenged!

We demand equal rights for the other 23 letters, and digits too!

Not updating

[Anonymous Coward]

So don't update FF past 56. Got it.

Re:Not updating

[Anonymous Coward]

So don't update FF past 56. Got it.

That's also my plan, but it's only a very short term plan. You don't get very long before it becomes infeasible to run a severely out of date browser.

Re:Not updating

[Anonymous Coward]

Even without the security implications, using a package manager and trying to avoid library errors is not fun.

Re:Not updating

[iampiti]

Infeasible because of security concerns? That's the only one I can think of because it should take a long time until web stop working on Firefox because it doesn't implement the latest standards

Re:Not updating

[allo]

mozilla will stop distributing xul addons at some point. And as firefox doesn't let you install addons, which aren't signed on addons.mozilla.org ... you're still out of luck with xul addons.

Re:Not updating

[Cyphase]

And as firefox doesn't let you install addons, which aren't signed on addons.mozilla.org ...

That's not true; you can install addons from other sites or from a file on your computer.

Re:Not updating

[allo]

you can't anymore, if you're not using a nightly. The release version blocks installation from files, which are not signed by AMO. They can be distributed on other sites, but they need to be signed on AMO.

Re:Not updating

[0111 1110]

Well I think the important thing is whether you can archive existing .xpi files from AMO now to use as part of the installation of FrozenFox until/unless a practical non Chrome clone exists or for the next decade or so whichever comes first. Presumably signatures won't be a problem if the .xpi files were originally sourced from AMO.

Re:Not updating

[allo]

If they are sourced from AMO after they started signing, they will be no problem (not sure about expiring signatures). And if you want to use a source fork, you may be able to disable the signature check. Still not very convenient, if you just want to keep using an old version.

Re: Not updating

[Anonymous Coward]

Waterfox and Cyberfox still allow unsigned add-ons, though.

last shards of protection from advertisers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never gotten a 100% clear answer on this, but it seems that the new extension scheme does not really allow the same degree of adblock/noscript/etc protection. There were adblock-like extensions for other browers that didn't display the ads, but still fetched them from the network, which of course still discloses (almost) everything to advertisers as would be if you fetched and displayed them.

I want a rock solid, iron-clad system to (1) never, under any circumstances, EVER fetch ads, tracking bugs, cookies, or other similar malware from the network, (2) ONLY run javascript on a tightly restricted set of whitelisted sites that I control.

That was the value of Firefox over other browsers. Chrome and others were written by ad companies themselves and were less trustworthy when comes to protecting my data. Firefox had a rich ecosystem of extensions to provide privacy features. If that ecosystem goes away or is degraded in what it can accomplish due to restrictions, then there is no more value to Firefox.

I'd probably have to stick to using the last version of FF before the change, but that will quickly become impossible. Think about trying to use a 20 year old browser on today's internet. Today's FF may be utterly unusable in 20 years or even much sooner.

Interested to hear what privacy extension developers such as umatrix and ublock origin have to say about this.

Re:last shards of protection from advertisers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interested to hear what privacy extension developers such as umatrix and ublock origin have to say about this.

I don't know the answers to your questions, but I was going to suggest asking gorhill how complete ublock/umatrix blocking is in Chrome; it may already be answered somewhere, but at the moment I can't think of a good search string for it.

Re:last shards of protection from advertisers?

[allo]

Tracking protection already works, i.e. on uBlock. But for example deleting flash cookies (as files on your system) is probably not possible.
Moving your tab bar into a sidebar won't work as well.

What does this mean, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean I will no longer be able to run things like UBlock Origin or Flagfox? Or is this something else?

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

OP here. Thank you for the clear, concise explanation.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[allo]

> Your favorite add-ons will continue to work.
No, they won't.
The DownThemAll Developer mourned when they first announced the move, the Tabgroups developer recently said he won't be able to port his addon, mozilla ruled out many addons themselfes ...

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[SumDog]

Relevant uBlock Origin Issue:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/622

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of my favorite addons started delivering warnings that they'll soon stop to work. Tab groups for instance.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Who are you trying to kid? A lot of the extensions I liked *already* quit working ages ago. Likewise themes.

And the default UI has become progressively shittier over time, with fewer and fewer options remaining for making it sensible again. Nuking the status bar. Moving the tabs *above* the menu bar. And all the other senseless UXtard horseshit.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

She's a Mozilla shill. If she says one thing, the opposite is true.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[CrashNBrn]

Quicksaver has five extensions, four of which are Featured by Moz://a

1) Findbar Tweak, 2) OmniSidebar, 3) Tab Groups, 4) Beyond Australis, and Puzzle Bars.

All of them will be gone with Firefox 57. I highly doubt Piro will be able to continue Tree Style Tab and co either.

Firefox users are fucked.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[epine]

Ultimately, this will affect almost no one. Planning for this change has been happening for a long time now. Your favorite add-ons will continue to work.

Trust, but keep one foot wedged in the emergency exit, and one ear cocked for a fell voice on the air:

I cannot continue working on my add-ons anymore. I'm sorry, but it's time.

It took me a year and a half of extensive rewriting to make my add-ons e10s/multiprocess compatible, something that is being rolled out only now, all with the prospect of a long-lasting life for them. And the WebExtensions announcement was made not two months after. "Demotivating" doesn't quite cover it ...

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[0111 1110]

Ultimately, this will affect almost no one. Planning for this change has been happening for a long time now. Your favorite add-ons will continue to work.

https://developer.mozilla.org/...

Compared with XUL/XPCOM extensions, WebExtensions provide much more limited options for the add-on's UI, and a much more limited set of privileged JavaScript APIs.

WebExtensions can only access web content by injecting separate scripts into web pages and communicating with them using a messaging API (note, though, that this is also true of XUL/XPCOM extensions that expect to work with multiprocess Firefox).

Those are the facts. That is right from the horse's mouth. Not all extensions are going to be ported. Period. Maybe a few of the most popular, but it's basically going to be like porting your extension to Chrome. FF basically will be Chrome as far as extensions are concerned.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[Zontar The Mindless]

That was pretty much my point, yeah. The condescending "this will affect almost no one" bit made it obvious.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot this gem: "The way add-ons worked in the past is what caused the 'shifting-sands' api developers just dealt with for years." Translation: "We're blaming the folks who used our API--that we touted as being the greatest thing since sliced bread--and who through no fault of ours are the same folks we're hanging out to dry now--for our inability to keep it stable."

Fuck that noise and the horse it rode in on.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[psyclone]

Exactly. All the great extensions will be gone.

How does anyone survive with tabs on the top? Even on a portrait monitor, I have tabs on the side. Grouped, colored, trees of tabs...

Re: What does this mean, exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear non-native speaker,

"stop to work" doesn't mean what you think it means. The phrase you're looking for is "stop working".

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[narcc]

There will be some extensions that don't work, but that was also true with any update as the api wasn't stable due to how add-ons work. Again, add-on developers have always had to deal with api changes.

UBlock Origin will continue to work, as will NoScript. You know, the big ones.

  The OP mentioned FlagFox, which is still under active development, having received an update this year. There is no reason to suspect that it will stop working, given how simple it is.

As for DownThemAll, I don't know what they'll do. They updated their add-on to work with e10s, after all, and have dealt with countless api changes over the years already. Of course, they could always abandon it and let it die, allowing the countless competitors take over their spot. They've had, and continue to have, plenty of time to get their add-on ready for a change they knew was coming ages ago.

Yeah, he posted a stupid rant, but it's devoid of anything I can meaningfully check. Not a single technical point that can be addressed. That should tell you something.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[narcc]

I'm sorry that reality is so difficult for you to accept.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[narcc]

WebExtensions announcement was made not two months after. "Demotivating" doesn't quite cover it .

Someone wasn't paying attention ... or they're just lying. Anyone paying even a little bit of attention has known about the new extension system for almost two years now.

But don't let facts get in the way of your meaningless hate-fest.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[narcc]

Not all extensions are going to be ported. Period.

That's right. I never claimed otherwise. The popular extensions, and the ones mentioned by the OP, however, will be ported. The OP's favorite add-ons will continue to work. This change affects him in no way.

You know, the add-ons that people actually use. UBlock Origin, NoScript, etc. are being ported. Hence, this change will affect almost no one.

For those (very few) devs posting nonsense about how this comes as a total shock, they've had almost two full years to prepare, and they still have the remainder of this year! They've even had ample opportunity to work with Mozilla to shape the new API.

So, no, not every add-on will be ported. Of course, considering the incredibly long time they've had to make the change, I don't think users are missing much by losing what are very likely to be low-quality add-ons with little to no support.

Re:What does this mean, exactly?

[allo]

uBlock will, as it is already ported. NoScript isn't ported but possible (see uMatrix, which might be a better replacement anyway). Things like CTR, SessionSaver, Tabgroups, DTA might be a bigger problem. DTA not for the UI, but for the better network functions it's using.

> They've had, and continue to have, plenty of time to get their add-on ready for a change they knew was coming ages ago.
It's not like there were all the APIs years ago. Starting to port something doesn't work, when the API isn't available yet. Many of them are not fully specified up to today. And some APIs are just no longer available. Currently they are used low-level and may need an updated extension with each firefox upgrade, but they work. Then there is a stable API, but it just does not provide the needed functionality.

Pale Moon is very nice

[Doke]

I've been using Pale Moon for a couple years. I hated when Firefox went to the Australis, chrome clone, interface. I hated when Firefox kept deleting features, especially preferences. Pale Moon is lighter, faster, more customizable, and pays more attention to security ideas. They were the first to deal with html5 canvas fingerprinting.

On the down side, I do occasionally find a site that won't work. I'm not entirely sure if it's Pale Moon, or my combination of script and ad blockers. It's usually a fluff entertainment site, and I don't care enough to turn them all off, or fire up chrome.

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[ctrlshift]

This has been my experience as well, and I have had some success appeasing the few uncooperative websites by adjusting the UserAgent. Regardless of the actual technical compatibility of Pale Moon, some sites behave better if it claims it's actually Firefox or Chrome or whatever.

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[QuietLagoon]

...On the down side, I do occasionally find a site that won't work. I'm not entirely sure if it's Pale Moon, or my combination of script and ad blockers....

The past few months, I've been finding more and more sites that don't work or render properly using the latest and greatest version of Firefox. I've had to use IE in order to use the website. So Firefox seems to be falling behind in the website compatibility area. Given its dismal marketshare, it is not really a surprise to me that web developers seem to be abandoning Firefox.

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[bhcompy]

Does Pale Moon support Firefox addons directly? Or is it a separate library?

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[Anonymous Coward]

For the most part directly. Regarding Jetpack compatibility in PM27 see http://developer.palemoon.org/Add-ons:Extensions/Jetpack

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[hairyfeet]

Most of the FF extensions work OOTB but they have a list of known incompatible extensions and in nearly every case they have a link to a previous version that works with Pale Moon.

I've been using it for a couple of years now, since it was obvious Mozilla was gonna commit suicide by turning FF into a badly support Chrome-Lite, and I have to say Pale Moon is a really solid browser. All of my extensions work, my theme works, and the few sites that didn't like Pale Moon were placated easy enough by changing the UserAgent. All in all I think its a great browser and hope my fellow /. readers do as I do and ask your favorite extension devs that are being left in the cold by Moz to switch to Pale Moon, which with extension dev support could be the solid replacement to FF we've been wanting since Moz shit the bed with Australis

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here.

The only problem I've had with Pale Moon lately is that certain games use BattlEye for cheat detection, and for whatever reason, it blocks PaleMoon.exe. Probably just due to obscurity.

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[0111 1110]

The problem with Pale Moon is extension compatibility. It's the extensions that make Firefox worth using. As with Firefox it seems like extension archiving of most recent working versions is a necessity, but I don't know which versions of each extension I use will be compatible with Pale Moon and it's a bit of a research project to figure that out.

Nevertheless I guess I am going to have to do exactly that for Firefox itself soon while the mozilla addons site still works. Pretty soon Firefox itself will be a kind of Pale Moon: a browser frozen in time. Any extensions will have to be frozen along with it.

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[DigitalSorceress]

I too was baothered by the FireFox shift toward Chrome, so I went with PaleMoon as my primary browser and have not regretted it one bit.

THe most important addon for me is NoScript and it works fine in PaleMoon.

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched when FF was still fiddle farting around with 32bit Pentium 1 code and PM had a 64bit version optimized for modern processors. Noscript, uBlock Origin, an older version of keyfox and I'm good to go. People who believe PM is 'frozen in time' are absolutely wrong. The lead dev seems to be a hard driving, opinionated, SOB, and kind of a jerk. Just so happens his goals for the browser closely align with what I want out of a browser. Go get'em Moonchild!

Re:Pale Moon is very nice

[DeVilla]

I've been considering Palemoon more and more lately, but I have to admit. I've come to like Australis. (I didn't mean to. I started using it at work. The menu bar is gone unless I press alt. I have the nav buttons, address bar, a few indicator and high use icons and the hamburger button. In the hamburger button I have a few lower use icons. Everything I don't use is gone. It's easy to tweak.) I do wish I could keep that so I wasn't eager to try PM.

Firefox has killed a number of things I like. It sounds like most of the addons I depend on won't be there (at least any time soon) when XUL is removed. If I'm going to be left to rebuild a work flow, I figure I might as well try other alternatives. I can't trust Mozilla anymore. They've given up on Extensions. They gave up on open (non-proprietary) web standards with EME/DRM support. They don't respect users any more. They really have no purpose anymore.

An obviously bad move

[iampiti]

The justification they've given for removing classic extension support is that they depend too much on the internals of Firefox, for the same reason they also said they're a security risk.
They are valid technical reasons. Most people would agree that making extensions use a stable API decoupled from the browser's internals is a good thing for stability and compatibility in the long run.
But, and this is a very big but, that means many popular current extensions can't just be made to work with the new APIs. Also, the ones that can be adapted will probably need a good amount of work. The result is that many extension developers have said they will abandon their extensions.
Also, since those powerful extensions are one of the reasons many people keep using Firefox that will surely suppose a big hit on their maket share and that's the last thing Firefox needs.
Their stated mission is to fight to keep the web open, if nobody uses their browser they'll have no money and no influence and hence they can't fulfill their mission.
I know this must've been a hard decision to make at Mozilla but I feel it's not the right one.

Re:An obviously bad move

[thegarbz]

Well losing the last remaining users won't have too much of an effect on their marketshare at this point.

Re:An obviously bad move

[tender-matser]

Most people would agree that making extensions use a stable API decoupled from the browser's internals is a good thing for stability and compatibility in the long run.

The same most people would agree that linux should have a stable device driver API. Except that kernel developers strongly disagree.

An extension API that's both invasive and limited combines the worst of both worlds: interfaces that would better cut loose have to be kept alive and abstracted away indefinitely, and an extension developer is loosing the benefits of power and simplicity that direct access offer.

As to security, a rogue WebExtension can still do a lot of damage and I don't think they had an army of competent code reviewers that poor over and test extensively any addon submitted.

Re:An obviously bad move

[Luthair]

They're moving towards a standard based on Chromes current extension API, the standard is also being used by Edge. Creating, and using an industry standard ends up reducing the burden for many extension developers, sure someone might have something tightly knit to the old Firefox API but they've now had several years advanced warning to fix it.

Re:An obviously bad move

[iampiti]

I am aware that they've intentionally chosen an API similar to that of Chrome's. That's a good thing.
The bad part is that this new API is much less powerful, it doesn't let you do many things that you could previously do. So, many of the more complex extensions just can't be done with the new API and thus they'll have to die. The fault doesn't lie with the extension developers but with Firefox which have failed to provide an API as powerful as the old one. They've claimed they're open to additions to the API but it's pretty obvious I'll never be a good as the old one

Re:An obviously bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this must've been a hard decision to make at Mozilla

Hah! Mozilla likely made this decision without a moment's thought towards their users who rely on a lot of extensions.

Have Mozilla ever thought about their users when they've made these ridiculous changes?

Once the extensions stop working there will be no reason for Firefox to exist.

Re:An obviously bad move

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is it is not only about security.

No one believes that lie that UI customizaton in Firefox before Australis was threatening user's security. Customization was removed because it is not in line what today's generation of Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr users do want.

They want a simple stupid browser which goes out of their way and has no "bloat from the 90's and 2000's" - That was already done before the decision about killing XUL was made.

Fact is Mozilla wants to support Chrome users interests. This is all about money and influence. Hell, Opera did the same. They looked over to Google, saw their success and dumped everything to get a piece of their blackberry cake with a cherry on top. Well, it still does not work out for them. Users stay with Chrome mostly because they use the original and no lame copy.

This applies also to the hopes and dreams of Mozilla. It would be so funny if it wouldn't be so sad actually!

Re:An obviously bad move

[doom]

I was reading a piece by a mozilla dev where he seemed to be arguing that he didn't see what the problem was, because a lot of stuff like firebug is broken already, and all people have to do is find an equivalent extension in the chromium extensions...

It wasn't clear to me why one wouldn't just switch to chrome, rather than continue with mozilla jerking their user-base around (this is the third big one, by my count, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm missing a few).

Even worse than all this though is that it all seems like a symbolic surrender: mozilla is giving up on firefox and forking chrome instead.

Re:An obviously bad move

[DeVilla]

Their stated mission is to fight to keep the web open, if nobody uses their browser they'll have no money and no influence and hence they can't fulfill their mission.

They surrendered that mission when they aggreed to implement EME/DRM. They've failed. They have no mission anymore.

Actual Post

[gQuigs]

https://blog.mozilla.org/addon...

Re:Actual Post

[0111 1110]

No new legacy add-ons will be accepted on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). Updates to existing legacy add-ons will still be accepted.

On April 18th. That's huge. Although to be fair you'd have to be the king of bad timing to be releasing a new firefox addon right before Mozilla is pounding a stake through the heart of them. I wonder how long Mozilla will even keep addons available. I'm guessing not very long after they have been deprecated in the current version. Mozilla clearly wants to do whatever it can to get and keep users on their newest and shiniest version and killing extensions on past versions will be a scorched earth way to do that.

Those of us who like Firefox should be archiving all of our favorite extensions soon. I want to archive versions that work with Pale Moon as well although that is much more difficult because I think they will all claim to be incompatible and have to actually be tested to see if they work. I am also going to do a major search for more extensions that I don't know about. So that I can archive those as well. Soon they will all be gone, and as with past Complete Themes, probably forever.

If I am being optimistic I could hope that this move to make Firefox much less customizable and feature poor (in the name of speed, stability, and simplicity for the developers) will push some extension developers to develop specifically for Pale Moon. Maybe someone will fork the last XUL compatible version of Firefox as well. I'm not completely clear on which version that will be. Maybe 52 since 53 starts disabling extensions that don't set the multiprocess flag, basically a start of the War on XUL.

I thought it said ...

[CaptainDork]

... defecate.

Re:I thought it said ...

[Anonymous Coward]

it did.

so i get to choose obsolete potentially vulnurable version with noscript, et al that i rely on with every click......

or a chrome knockoff.

guess it's time to turn off auto update.

fuck, mozilla. you had ONE JOB. *be the alternative* -- not morph into one of the bad guys.

Re:I thought it said ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Firefox is shit, that's an easy mistake to make. Totally understandable.

In other words...

[Dracos]

This year, Mozilla Will Remove the #2 reason everyone started using Firefox in the first place.

Copying Chrome has been a bad strategy, and killing XUL is one of their worst decisions ever. I'm waiting for the announcement that Firefox will become a re-branded Chrome, like Opera. Yay for software monoculture!

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because XUL allows far greater customizability of the browser. And you need to customize Firefox to make it usable, since the devs keep making dreadul errors like Australis.

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a list of API access in extensions. Notice how many don't have equivalents in the webextensions column: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Comparison_with_XUL_XPCOM_extensions

Re:In other words...

[allo]

> It won't have any effect at all on what extensions can do.
That's wrong. Everything which changes the browser chrome will be very very limited.

Re:In other words...

[CrashNBrn]

In other words, Moz://a will remove the #1 reason we started using Firefox in the first place.

Pocket

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone knows why it's not been removed yet?
I find mozilla quite arrogant. They kill extensions people choose to use instead keep pushing some unwanted and unused extensions into the browser itself.

doesn't anyone at all remember

[Anonymous Coward]

that a few years ago, google paid big bucks to mozilla, much of which went to CEO, not programmer, salary ?
I mean, do I *have* to draw it out ?

why hasnt slashdot taken over Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

With enough Pissed off Slashdot users we should be able to force mozilla to release a non crippled browser that retains key technologies such as XUL, npapi, xp support and traditional ui. Pale moon is not enough, we need to make Firefox a decent browser again.

Re: why hasnt slashdot taken over Mozilla

[bill_mcgonigle]

Slashdotters are often willing to express unpopular opinions so they could never work at MoFo (or Twitter, et.al.). The few engineers I k

Re: why hasnt slashdot taken over Mozilla

[bill_mcgonigle]

... know of there live in fear(avoidance) of the hipster social signalers who love to burn money to stay warm.

firefox sucked the last 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

so they finally decided to kill it by the end of the year.
From then on, it will be just another re-branded chrome.

bye failfox.

Ad blocking?

[fishscene]

How does this affect the myriad of adblockers? How I understand Chrome to handle adblocking: The ad loads, and still does its thing, but you can hide it. This isn't adblocking at all actually.

Re:Ad blocking?

[Anonymous Coward]

not true. chrome has a webRequest API that allows adblocking extensions to block most ads before the connection is ever made. however, obviously 1st party ads embedded in the page markup returned from the server must be blocked at the element.

Massive loss of capability.

[Gravis Zero]

The new WebExtensions API is capable of many things but there is going to be a lot of lost capabilities. There are some pages comparing the capabilities and you'll find WebExtensions is lacking in many areas.

WebExtensions versus XUL/XPCOM extensions - see "Services.jsm API" table.
WebExtensions versus Add-on SDK - see "Low-level APIs" table

I don't know if Firefox will recover from this kind of seismic shift in APIs. Let's just hope they were rarely utilized parts of the API or that they are currently developing new replacements for the parts that people loved.

Re:Massive loss of capability.

[Anonymous Coward]

86 capabilities lost

No good end

[allo]

So firefox has the same addons (literally) like chrome, the same limited possiblity to tune the UI, a loss of many good firefox-only addons and the thunderbird developers need to maintain xul themself?

Looks like firefox will get a lot less important and thunderbird may die.

Make Mozilla Great (Again?)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mozilla has forgotten what made Firefox great."
The only great thing about Mozilla is that it supports Linux; otherwise I would switch to IE 6.

Removing features is good, but removing bugs would be even better.

Re:Make Mozilla Great (Again?)

[Anonymous Coward]

The only great thing about Mozilla is that it supports Linux; otherwise I would switch to IE 6.

Well, it does support Linux. But so does chromium (the open-source version of Google Chrome). So does Vivaldi and Opera and SeaMonkey and Dillo and .... Let's not even get started about Pale Moon or Konqueror.

Time to choose an alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of Firefox forks with the focus on the old Firefox philosophy of customization and advanced user friendliness.
The only thing missing is community involvement in one of them so they get a surge in development.

Slashdot could do good with a poll and a thread discussion on precisely this. A poll listing all the viable Firefox forks,
and a discussion on which one would be best to focus on and officially adopt by the former Firefox community.

Deletion disorder is a treatable mental condition

[WaffleMonster]

Some people honestly believe throwing shit and features in the trash because it aligns with their narrow opinions and agendas is a constructive activity. They are incapable or unwilling to accept the possibility of a reality beyond their narrow worldview.

From mass deletion of useful articles from Wikipedia to the bands of trolls constantly closing questions they don't understand on SO. From land of "developers" creating "API"s they constantly and willfully break and defecate (deprecate).. because why shouldn't everyone else be expected to constantly play semantic musical chairs to make *your* unorganized life marginally easier?

All of those who think taking settings away and denying user choice constitutes a better user experience or who truly believe everyone appreciates your nonsensical unproductive abstract notions of art that make software painful and unusable...There is a cure. You can be saved.

Avoid use of ALL computer INPUT device until end of days n ye shall be cured. ~ from Book of Krusteaz 12:10.

Mozilla Will Deprecate Firefox By the End of 2017

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I read.

Already left them a long time ago for Pale Moon.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Pale Moon? Nah

[fustakrakich]

Seamonkey... It's still the best browser out there, but how much longer it can hold out is anybody's guess.

Lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is currently run by lawyers and bean counters. They will kill a successful enterprise every time, unless it's a law firm or a wall street firm.

I trust them to do the right thing

[cerberusss]

I've already seen a bunch of posts mourn the whole bunch of addons that will stop working end of this year. Probably, I'll lose some myself.

But personally, I trust Mozilla to do the right thing here. They've probably weighed the pros and cons, and made their decision. I'll see what the end result is. There's enough browsers to choose from nowadays.

Firefox has some unique things why I use it, first and foremost "search in links". Try it, tap the single-quote key and type text that appears in a link. Then hit enter. It's the fastest way to surf the web without a mouse.

But if end of this year comes and it turns out they screwed it up, fine -- I'll go and use another browser.

Re:I trust them to do the right thing

[Anonymous Coward]

if you think "there are enough browser out there" it follows that you have no understanding of the depth of ffox's add-ons and the variety of deeply expert capabilities people have realized for it. this might be multiple millions that are zapped by the monies behind less capable user-interfaces and convolutions in and around other tech stacks. ... so screw you for patronizing from within the bubble of your ignorance. or do we have shills for dumbness here too now?

Re:I trust them to do the right thing

[markdavis]

>"I'll see what the end result is. There's enough browsers to choose from nowadays."

And that is where you are WRONG. Please list all the browsers that are:

* 100% open source
* Run on all major platforms, including Linux
* Run on just about any Linux and without relying only on distro packages.
* Will work on 99+% of websites because the browser is an accepted standard (think business software, not just home stuff).

Your list is going to be very small. And that is where a lot of us stand. Firefox is not something we can just throw away, and for many of us, Chrome is simply not an option. It either does not give us the control or addons we need, or we can't tolerate the closed-nature or potential spyware like environment.

Stop "improving" it

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Will the new version still have memory leaks? Because it just isn't Firefox if it doesn't have memory leaks that grow to crippling proportions in 24 hours or so.

Hopefully this new-fangled multi process mode will allow for multiple, simultaneous memory leaks so the browser will become unusable in 2 or 3 hours instead of having to wait a whole day.

Re:Stop "improving" it

[0111 1110]

I think its possible that killing the extension ecosystem may have a positive effect on the memory leak problem because at the very least the mozdevs will not be able to blame the extension devs for the leaks anymore. AFAIK the mozdevs don't recognize that there is a memory leak problem. I think they think they fixed it sometime in 3.x or earlier.

Re:Stop "improving" it

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I think its possible that killing the extension ecosystem may have a positive effect on the memory leak problem because at the very least the mozdevs will not be able to blame the extension devs for the leaks anymore. AFAIK the mozdevs don't recognize that there is a memory leak problem. I think they think they fixed it sometime in 3.x or earlier.

I think you're right. They're oblivious to it because they can't admit there's a problem.

It may be a moot point for me, since I just installed Pale Moon and am giving it a try. So far, so good. And it works with the key two must-have extensions I use: Adblock and NoScript.

now this will be the year i deprecate firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the head-up mozgoogle. it was a nice love affair we had there

no this no that

[Anonymous Coward]

noa use firefox is last sentance

time for a real FORK

[Anonymous Coward]

i helped get communicator 5 to you all one of 60 some odd hosts....this has become disgusting how its all become perverted, i wish id never helped them do it now.

"never check for updates"

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone should just do that on the last one before they do this and then we make a site for all the extensions to goto....re-code a few bits and patch it up when stuff is found to get bad or exploited.

Seamonkey ?

[rossdee]

How long until Seamonkey gets depreciated as well?

Re:Seamonkey ?

[antdude]

I hope never since I still love the suite product since Netscape v2 days. :(

Time to auto-delete...

[Nunya666]

...any email in my RSS feed from /. that contains Mozilla or Firefox in the subject.

I've moved on to Pale Moon, and I'm tired of hearing about Mozilla's self-induced death-spiral.

FireDot OR SlashFox

[Anonymous Coward]

FireDot OR SlashFox pick one and go for it....

A Painful But Necessary Transition

[rsmith-mac]

I know this must've been a hard decision to make at Mozilla but I feel it's not the right one.

You do a great job of outlining the pros and cons. That said, I do have to disagree that this isn't the right move. I would argue that it is in fact the right move; it's just that the right move is the most painful move.

Firefox is a wonderful browser. But I fear we're losing sight of just how limited its legacy core is. Legacy Firefox offers no threading, no privilege separation, and no meaningful isolation between tabs or windows.

The browser-as-an-OS concept is no longer a gag, but the actual reality of how browsers work. Browsers are expected to do everything from executing code (JS) to graphics (WebGL) to video (HTML5, etc). Furthermore they are being treated as a multitasking operating system - via multiple tabs - with those tabs all competing for resources. Worse, some of those tabs may be hostile to the system or to other tabs.

This is something Legacy Firefox is ill prepared for, and in doing so it's the odd man out among the major browsers. Legacy Firefox is the MacOS Classic of browsers; a time-tested piece of software with parts going back to the earliest days of the Web. But like OSes 15 to 20 years ago, the world has moved on; it's akin to MacOS Classic going up against MacOS X/WinXP/Linux. The lack of real, preemptive multitasking and security has become a major liability, and becomes downright embarrassing when you realize that Microsoft of all companies was doing things like putting their browser in a low-privilege context a decade ago. Similarly embarrassing is the fact that a single runaway tab can take out the whole browser!

But all is not lost. Firefox can and is being upgraded with electrolysis (e10k). e10k Firefox has taken far too long to be developed - Mozilla should have been working in earnest on this a decade ago - but at long last it's here. And it finally brings with it all of the threading and isolation features that will make the browser safer and more reliable. Or more to the point, it will make the browser competitive in these respects with Edge/Safari/Chrome.

However just like giving up MacOS Classic meant giving up the OS's legacy applications, there is a price to pay for giving up Legacy Firefox: XUL and legacy add-ons. XUL is incredibly powerful, but the Moz devs have laid out a very good case for why it (and the rest of the legacy add-on system) can't be used with e10k Firefox. There's no concept of threading or safety; it's an API that has an unsafe level of access to the browser and can't handle being split up among threads. Its power is why we power users love it so much, but that power is dangerous. Worse, maintaining that power ultimately gets in the way of operating the browser with a safer multi-threaded environment.

And I won't dance around the issue: losing XUL and the legacy add-on system is going to be painful. Just losing the Classic Theme Restorer alone is going to be complete and total hell for this crowd. Never mind the other add-ons that enhance privacy, block ads, and do so many other nifty things. And not all of those add-ons can be remade for e10k Firefox, since they rely on a level of power that will no longer exist.

But you know what? It has to happen. Just like with MacOS Classic, at some point we have to stop using an archaic, unsafe environment origially designed around unitasking in order to move on to something better that can actually fulfill our needs. Even if we were to explicitly design/limit Firefox to Slashdot-level power users - and I would argue that doing so would ultimately be the end of the browser - it's still not in our interest to be using a browser that, at the end of the day, relies on cooperative multitasking. It's a crappy (if not horrific) execution paradigm for the real world. And while I admire the Pale Moon devs for what they're doing, Pale Moon just prolongs the problem. We still have to face this demon some day, if not today.

Is it goi

Re:A Painful But Necessary Transition

[iampiti]

I agree with most of what you say. Very nice post btw.
Yes, sometimes painful transitions are necessary and I undestand the reason why compatibility with the old extensions has to go but what it hurts me most is that they can't even be recreated for the new APIs. This is gonna be a huge blow for Firefox.
Btw, are you involved with Firefox in some way? You seem to know a lot.

Re:A Painful But Necessary Transition

[rsmith-mac]

Btw, are you involved with Firefox in some way? You seem to know a lot.

Nah, just a frustrated user. But also one who has also already gone through this song & dance once before with MacOS Classic, and is keen to avoid the same waffling on this transition.

Re:A Painful But Necessary Transition

[0111 1110]

Well for me Firefox has never been about performance. It was about customization (and because IE has always sucked). When Chrome came along it was certainly an improvement on IE but it still could not do many of the things that Firefox + XUL extensions could do. It just did not have the same feature set. For me Firefox is fast enough as it is and I don't think a browser needs to use more than a single core or even more than a single thread. Well unless its only point is to compete in benchmarks. The only performance problem that I see Firefox having is memory leaks. That has always been its Achilles heel. Especially since the devs always blame the extensions. Now that they are killing the extensions maybe they will finally be able to fix the leaks. But whatever. I can just restart the browser as often as possible.

I use the browser because with XUL extensions it does what I want it to do and with those extensions it can do things that no other browser can. Whatever Mozilla does in the future it will have to be able to compete with FrozenFox/XULFox (nonupgraded Firefox) and Pale Moon or whatever the Pale Moon project becomes. In terms of competing with a XUL extension boosted feature set I don't think they have much of a chance and they definitely don't care. Their only goal seems to be being the best Chrome clone they can be and at that they are certainly going to be successful I think: to the point that they may eventually find it easier just to switch entirely to the Chrome codebase and put a slightly modified FireChrome UI on top of it.

There may be people who are disappointed with Firefox and want to switch to say Chrome because it is faster or more efficient at benchmarking or whatever but I am not one of those people. Nor do I care whether or not the browser functions as its own standalone operating system which I regard as a silly idea. I don't have a problem with tabs 'taking over' my browser, but maybe that's because I use noscript so that javascript cannot bend me over and have its way with me so easily. Perhaps the biggest problem with killing the more powerful (and they are) XUL extension standard is that Firefox will be no better than Chrome when it comes to extensions. So what is the point of using it then? Brand loyalty? Fuck that. After this Firefox will be Chrome. There will be no reason at all not to use Chrome at that point. The UIs are already almost identical. Now the extensions will be identical as well. So please tell me what is the point of Firefox even existing at that point?

Re: A Painful But Necessary Transition

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't give a fuck that "a single tab can crash the browser" in pre-Failstralis Firefox, because guess what? It still can in the current one!

Your post is just undiluted Mozilla apologism. Piss off, shill, and enjoy your Mozilla Chrome.

Re:A Painful But Necessary Transition

[rsmith-mac]

So please tell me what is the point of Firefox even existing at that point?

Because we need someone who isn't an OS vendor or an advertiser making an open source browser and to champion open standards. But that does us no good if it results in an inferior browser.

Apple is indifferent, Microsoft would rather we go back to IE6, and Google would just as well take over the whole web and track your every move (and then they'd pull an IE6 on us just to be extra evil). Firefox is the outsider, the rebel.

There exists a suitable balance between customization and performance somewhere. But right now Firefox is increasingly intolerable because if you use add-ons, one tab slows the whole thing down. NoScript, Ghostery, uBlock, Anti-Adblock Killer, etc are all great. But all that work they do comes at a cost of further bogging down the single process. e10k means multiple processes, and that means we can layer on these things and have them going on in multiple tabs without grinding away on a single core in the age of 8-core workstations.

Re:A Painful But Necessary Transition

[Anonymous Coward]

XUL is incredibly powerful, but the Moz devs have laid out a very good case for why it (and the rest of the legacy add-on system) can't be used with e10k Firefox.

No they haven't. XUL can be used with e10k Firefox, I'm doing it now and have been for at least a year. The only addon I use that stopped working is FireShot; it was working in FF 51, I suspect it would work fine in 52 if they'd flag it compatible on a.m.o. All the rest of my addons still work under e10k with multiprocess enabled, even the ones labeled "Not compatible with multiprocess."

There's no reason XUL can't be used with e10k Firefox, they've just decided it won't be, and that (to me) is very different and very disappointing. Addons are the only thing keeping me on Firefox. If mine quit working, there's no remaining reason for me not to switch to Chrome.

I love Pale Moon

[TheOuterLinux]

Pale Moon is like Firefox before they put all the crap needed to please the eye candy, "64-bit is the best" morons. Remember when you clicked on Firefox and it only took and instant to open? Pale Moon. If your "state of the art" browser opens fast, one of a few things are happening: 1.) you're running it on a Mac and failed to realize closing a window and quitting an app aren't the same; 2.) you're running Chrome but forgot to take into account that it's Google (spy king) and they always have processes running for it regardless. Mac and Windows do this (check Activity Monitor); 3.) You aren't using any add-ons worth a flip or at all, especially those involving privacy and ads; 4). You're running Min or Midori but never need flash or anything more than the but in Adblock Midori has; or 5.) Your running Pale Moon. It's awesome and stays updated. The only downside is some builds for some systems have gstreamer built in and some don't. MP4 video works on all of them though. And if you need PDF.js (not included by default), go to the forum's Mac section and there's a link for an add-on that will install it. Actually, probably just search Pale Moon in the add-on browser and it'll show up, maybe. I run on Mac and Linux because Firefox is killing my MacBook with RAM and CPU usage and Pale Moon touches ~700MB when having a bunch of tabs open and video loading, which is at least half of what Firefox does. Is eye candy that important to people?

Re:I love Pale Moon

[knorthern knight]

> The only downside is some builds for some systems have gstreamer
> built in and some don't. MP4 video works on all of them though.

As of version 27.1.0, linux Pale Moon defaults to using ffmpeg directly. No need for Gstreamer plugins as middle-men. The current roadmap is for Gstreamer code to be removed entirely by version 27.2.0. BTW, libav is touted as a "drop-in replacement" for ffmpeg, so it may work in place of ffmpeg.

Re:I love Pale Moon

[TheOuterLinux]

Oh ok. I was wondering about this because I haven't seen gstreamer builds in a while. Works great on my Mac and ok on my Linux. I am a little confused as to why flash doesn't work on my Linux machine with Pale Moon (using 27.0.3) but at the same time, kinda glad.

Use the tags, Luke

[Tenebrousedge]

This is slashdot. Learn how to hyperlink properly.

Re:Use the tags, Luke

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot, most of us can figure out how to highlight a URI, right-click, and Open Link In New Tab.

Re:Use the tags, Luke

[Tenebrousedge]

And the problem with that is, that on Chromium on Linux, if you double-click on the URL to highlight it, and then right-click to open in a new tab, then it appends 'Reply to this' with percent encoding to the end of the link, which does not result in a valid HTML document. Additionally, as I said, this is not a luddite forum. If you can't manage a minimal level of markup, kindly fuck off.

Re:Use the tags, Luke

[Anonymous Coward]

Chromium

someone isn't using FF on a FF article. /joke

Re:Use the tags, Luke

[tepples]

Which Android keyboard app do you recommend for adding "a minimal level of markup" without having to spend most of the time juggling the lowercase letters, numbers and basic punctuation, and additional punctuation pages?

Re:Use the tags, Luke

[Tenebrousedge]

I use the 'hacker's keyboard' on mobile when I need a full keyboard -- usually something involving the terminal. The idea of a keyboard app with built in buttons for html tags is interesting though. Which ones would you like, ideally?

Mozilla basically forced me to switch to Palemoon

[mike2006]

I am now happy they did. I had been with FF since the beginning but they turned into a slow anti-privacy memory hog. I get the feeling they are producing the browser for themselves and not for the end users. Kind of like a bunch of kid developers saying hey Mom look what I just made with no care in the world about the ramifications of the changes to performance and productivity.

With each FF update I ended up with a time consuming list I had to go through in about:config and installing classic theme restorer, among many other things. This all just to get the browser back to where it used to be. But these last few updates broke some of my add-ons including Firebug and Firepath leaving no real solution in the developer edition replacement.

So that was it and forced me into using Pale Moon full time. Oh what a difference. I now have what looks like the normal Firefox, without the memory or performance issues and all my Firefox add-ons work. More importantly the interruption to work flow problem solved. This was all done with very little effort. The Palemoon updates also did not break anything or cause any issues or problems in work flow.

Good job Palemoon team.

Re:Deletion disorder is a treatable mental conditi

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla isn't getting rid of the old extension model because they want a slim Firefox with fewer features. They're getting rid of it because it's broken by design and that's been known for years, and they finally have the APIs built up for a reasonable replacement.

The Future of Pale Moon

[0111 1110]

The Future of Pale Moon

Thought this would be a relevant link to the only (customizable) alternative to FrozenFox 52.

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tell it to the person that is still using it.

Alternative Browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Uzbl (https://www.uzbl.org/) will finally get some more love. I've been wanting to use it, but never bothered with the steep learning curve. I think one day of browsing the ad-ridden internet will convince me to convert. If I can't download whatever media or image a page is displaying then I'm not using that browser.

I wonder if Mozilla got any kickbacks to not create a better add-on API or if they were just lazy.

Re:Alternative Browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Uzbl (https://www.uzbl.org/) will finally get some more love. I've been wanting to use it, but never bothered with the steep learning curve. I think one day of browsing the ad-ridden internet will convince me to convert. If I can't download whatever media or image a page is displaying then I'm not using that browser.

I wonder if Mozilla got any kickbacks to not create a better add-on API or if they were just lazy.

Edit: Not sure how I screwed up the link but I fixed it.

Re:Deletion disorder is a treatable mental conditi

[Anonymous Coward]

>All of those who think taking settings away and denying user choice constitutes a better user experience or who truly believe everyone appreciates your nonsensical unproductive abstract notions of art that make software painful and unusable...There is a cure. You can be saved.

These are the same people working in Apple too. Hi iPhone7

Re:Deletion disorder is a treatable mental conditi

[Dagger2]

Except they don't. Their replacement is WebExtensions which isn't even close to being a reasonable replacement.

Verify?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this true? Is it the same with NoScript?

I haven't been impressed with Chrome, but I might choose Pale Moon over Chrome if blocking is incomplete.

The Reason why Mozilla is doing that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla - has one big problem!

The issue is that they are always in attack mode and are willing to fight! They are doing that since day one. Mozilla tried to fight against IE and have been able to break it's dominance a bit with useful and cool features.

Then Chrome arrived. Moz tried the same strategy too, but it was not working as it used to work in the past. So they have been thinking about something else. Beat them with their own weapon. If Mozilla would walk away from their attack mode and would accept things as they are, it would not have ended like that. But their latest plans/goals are also a total failure. So why still going on with that. Moz had a nice market share during Firefox until version 20 or something like that. Enough to shove it into Google's face and make them realize that they are not winning to 100%. But even that was not enough for them. Moz wanted to become number one, no matter what it has to be done to reach that goal. For this they are sacrificing user's interests.

History has showed it that crusades never will lead to success. We had already crusaders being beaten up for being ignorant and power hungry. And that's what Mozilla is facing too. They are crusaders on a conflict for influence and breaking the dominance of Google Chrome. But if they betray the own user base for this fight, they are nothing better than the enemy Moz want to take out.

Learn history Mozilla, we already have been there. Crusades never will lead to success. We had a believe driven crusade which failed. We had a war driven crusade which failed (luckily). What makes you believe that you win your crusade?

Re:The Reason why Mozilla is doing that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Also to count into is the following:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firefox-57-compatibility-milestones/#comment-223542

Jorge made it more than clear that ui customization is no longer a supported functionality! The game is over, it is clear that the future is Chrome similar. Nothing left which can be done against!

Mozilla mentions also quite often maintenance or security reasons for removing features.. but the truth behind which everyone knows is the following:

Maintenance is a reason, but not the biggest. The thing is simple users are representing the biggest part of the market share. Chrome owns the largest percentage of the market share.

So what do companies do which try to gather a large part of that users too? They restrict and remove features from which they know that simple users are not going to accept them and refusing to use a browser with such features inside.

Opera has done it. Mozilla has done it. Even Microsoft has done it partly with Edge - even if they can't remove much features as they do not had many in the first place. Everyone adopts that new simplicity trend because big companies show that they earn that way money and gather large influence. Even an Open Source company like Mozilla is not willing to ignore that.

Ask a simple user if he would use a software with customization and tons of accessibility features inside. The answer is a clear no-brainer. And what are you doing then to gather that users? Kill features and restrict the feature set until a point that these users switch over.

Saved money is a nice side effect, but not the main reason of all that. Like it or not, we experience a 180 degree shift of priorities. And in most cases advanced users are the one's who lose everything as it is not possible to earn enough with users like us today.

Why XUL at all ?

[v1nce29]

The real question is : Why didn't they teamed up with gtk and used gladexml for UI from the very start.

My sincere hope

[Anonymous Coward]

I sincerely hope that the people pushing this "chromification" FUD and who value nothing about Firefox except their precious addons *finally* get the hell out of Dodge and stop trying to wag the dog. You've been bitching and moaning about these things for so long that you don't realize that you've been a big reason that Firefox is a useless lump precisely BECAUSE of your stupid addons. You've gone from being an insanely critical powertripping minority to a literal ball and chain dragging Firefox down with you. And now that the writing is finally on the wall for Firefox (and by extension your treasured addons), you fight tooth and claw to make Firefox useless for everyone but yourselves. Seriously, go jump ship to whatever browser you think is better already, you counterproductive, spoiled, self-important princesses.

I need a new plugin.

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

To tell me which installed plugins are going to die.

Multi-process operation is a bad idea

[gantry]

I tend to browse with a lot of windows and tabs open. In this use case, Firefox typically consumes 100% of CPU for one core. If it becomes multi-process, it would end up consuming 100% of CPU of every core.

If the long-term plan for Firefox is to dump XUL and migrate to WebKit or one of its forks, then I have to wonder what would be the point of the resulting product. Users might as well migrate to Chrome, Safari, or Opera.

Multi-platform?

[tepples]

People need to quit building full programs in a lightweight scripting language, and go back to native fat applications.

And watch you become unable to use "native fat applications" made for an operating system other than the one your device runs.