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:

• 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?

Comments

This is way overblown

[Anonymous Coward]

This list is ridiculous because Greasemonkey and Lazarus already have Webextension versions (i.e. they already exist for Chrome) and Noscript has one in the works. There's half the list.

There are certainly a few extensions I'm going to miss but this really did need to happen. Current Firefox performance is awful compared to Chrome. The nightly builds of F57 already have enormous performance gains over the stable build from yanking out huge amounts of legacy code. Webextensions will definitely be less capable than the old system but Mozilla is actively working with extension developers to enable at least some stuff that's impossible in Chrome (i.e. Noscript).

Mod parent UP.

[Futurepower(R)]

Track poor managers: Quoted from the parent comment: "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."

Re:Mod parent UP.

[Man On Pink Corner]

Gotta say, I've heard dumber ideas. It would be very helpful if someone started a site that keeps track of product managers who scramble the UI in popular applications, force-feed operating systems to unwilling users, or redesign websites whose only fault is that people like the way they work now.

Basically a cross between LinkedIn, FuckedCompany, and Rotten Tomatoes, where users post independent "performance reviews." When an exec moves to a new company, we'd know to disable automatic updates for that company's products.

If anyone wants to take a serious shot at this problem, they can count on at least one subscriber.

Re:without my security extensions, play Vivaldi

[Seq]

You're upset that firefox is moving to web extensions, so you abandoned it for a browser that also uses web extensions? And your cited example (umatrix) is also available as a ff57+ compatible web extension.

I'm in the throes of re-writing my extension

[rsilvergun]

I've been putting it off because the APIs aren't completely settled and I don't much relish the thought of doing it twice (my app's a tricky beast thanks to some quirks of Windows pathing among other things). I think that's the biggest problem. Firefox is making all these changes but they haven't really settled them, meanwhile they're rolling them out to production. I'm guessing that since they just don't have the money they used to they haven't got a lot of other options besides what's basically an all inclusive beta program.

Re:Use a good browser...

[dreamchaser]

Some people like cross platform browsers because they, you know, use more than one platform.

Re:Ummm....

[Archangel Michael]

As an old timer grey beard, I can honestly say I have said "I cannot live without" some tech that was great and is now gone without a replacement. I can also confirm, I lived.

I try not to be so hyperbolic about tech I can or cannot live without. "Yeah, it sucks" is my normal reaction these days.