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AskSlashdot: How Do You See Your Life After Firefox 52 ESR? (mozilla.org)
Artem Tashkinov writes: Soon to be released Firefox 56 says that out of 35+ add-ons that I have installed only a single one is a proper WebExtension which means that Firefox 57 will disable over 95% of my add-ons many of which I just cannot live without and for most of them there are simply no alternatives. This number of add-ons sound like an overkill, but actually they are all pretty neat and improve your browsing abilities. That's the reason why I'm using Firefox 52 ESR, which still fully supports XUL add-ons, however after June 2018, it will stop being supported.
Let's list the most famous ones:
Let's list the most famous ones:
- DownThemAll is still largely irreplaceable since you can download from many parts of the internet much faster if you split the downloaded files in chunks and download them simultaneously;
- GreaseMonkey allows you to fix or extend your favourite websites using JavaScript;Lazarus: Form Recovery has saved my time and life numerous times; it regularly backups the contents of web forms and allows to restore them after browser restart or accidental page refresh;
- NoScript: allows you to whitelist JS execution only for websites that you really trust; JS has been used as an attack and tracking tool since its inception;
- Status-4-Ever and Classic Theme Restorer return Firefox to the time when it was a powerful tool with its own identity and looks, and not a Chrome clone;
- UnMHT add-on allows you to save complete web pages as a single MHT file;
So what will you do less than a year from now?
I now know what a slashvertisement for Firefox 56 looks like
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I run seamonkey so hopefully the Firefox team won't break the base code so badly that Seamonkey can't be built.
But since they're trying to actively kill the plugin development community, it's possible there just won't be much to install in Seamonkey.
We need to keep track of who is in charge at Firefox so we can make sure they never get our business again, no matter what project they migrate to like locusts when FF is dead.
It's been about a year, and Firefox hasn't given me a single reason to come back.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
How Do You See Your Life After Firefox 52 ESR?
If my life was significantly different after a new release of any software, I think I'd see my life as re-evaluating whatever life choices made that software such a significant part of my life.
Maybe FF will get their sh*t together in the meantime.
Don't bet on it.
Because old Firefox addons were the only reason left to use Firefox. It is simply not a very good browser anymore.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I've been using Firefox for a long time, since tabbed browsing was a killer new feature. I've seen it convulse with pointless UI changes, copying Chrome visually (and even their ridiculous versioning scheme) but presumably failing to understand *why* Chrome was eating their lunch. I watched as idiotic deals were made with Pocket, integrating more cruft no one wanted directly into the browser.
Now, Firefox is breaking backwards compatibility. I totally understand *why* they might like to do this, but that really makes no difference to the user. Functionality which was once there is now no more. If they were going to break compatibility anyhow, maybe they should have bitten the bullet and written an entirely new browser like MS did with Edge, so they wouldn't have to make any compromises going forward. Now, instead, we get the worst of both worlds: the historical cruft of an old browser AND broken backwards compatibility.
At this point, I suspect I'll just jump to Chrome, which is what Firefox ultimately seems aiming towards anyhow. It was mostly simple inertia that was keeping me on Firefox, and now I've been forced into some sort of action. Might as well pick the better browser at this point.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
One of my children wrote a school report about hyperbole a number of years ago. She started it with the sentence "Hyperbole is the best thing ever."
I was very proud.
However, the Palemoon site only has Palemoon explicit addons/extensions. When Firefox drops support for current addons, one would expect them to delete them all from their site as well. Someone better mirror before they are gone forever.