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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?
Sadly, it looks like I will be using less firefox. On the plus side I will get some of that missing memory back.
Believe nothing -- Buddha
The Mozilla codebase has proven difficult to maintain - see Pale Moon. So just forking it is problematic.
The Google and Apple submissions are under corporate control and therefore are anti-user and more importantly, can't be forked.
Opera just has never been very good.
Konqueror or Links2 perhaps?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
And probably a plugin that lets me fake my browser's info to sites that ask.
Did that for FF 31 for a very long time, didn't really ever have functionality problems either. IMHO this current versioning system is complete and utter garbage as it no longer has any meaning. Used to be that the ones-digit meant a milestone. Tenths decimal was a major revision, possibly with additonal features ,but the look-and-feel remained largely the same and the user experience was similar enough that training documentation was generally valid. Hundredths decimal was minor, minor tweaks only, usually bugfixes.
most of what I see coming out of FF now is hundredths-decimal changes. Sometimes it's tenths. I'm not even sure when it's ones/units anymore. Maybe FF 57 would count. In short though, I don't really care anymore and I only use FF because I used Netscape and then Mozilla and then FF, so if FF gets too dissimilar to what I'm used to or too similar to other offerings then I probably have no reason to bother keeping with it anymore.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I suppose it'll be something else. There are other options and I'm going to start exploring them now. Maybe FF will get their sh*t together in the meantime.
FireFox stopped allowing key add-ons I use already, because the authors have not created signed versions. So I had to reinstall version 47, where I could at least tell it to accept the fact that they add-on wasn't signed.
If Mozilla doesn't come up with a way of keeping the extensions we have grown to love firefox for, I guess I won't be using FireFox. It is strange that Mozilla would not have taken this into account. I've been playing with Vivaldi and I'm a fan of the browser (as well as his music) Have Vivaldi with Umatrix installed, which is like "NoScript" on steroids. So for me Vivaldi is a good alternative to Firefox.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
NoScript
Because NoScript is migrating to WebExtensions API. I believe that Classic Theme Restorer has already proclaimed that they won't. Don't know about the rest.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
My list, updated from the list I posted to another story. Every add-on is marked "Legacy" in Firefox version 55.0.3 64-bits.
"This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017."
"This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017 and Mozilla drops support for XUL / XPCOM / legacy add-ons. It should still work on Firefox 52 ESR until ESR moves to Firefox 59 ESR in 2018 (~Q2)".
"There is no 'please port it' or 'please add support for it' this time, because the entire add-on eco system changes and the technology behind this kind of add-on gets dropped without replacement."
USE THIS: ghostery-5.4.10-sm+an+fx.xpi Link: Version 5.4.10
Ghostery sells data it collects. (Business Insider, Jun 18, 2013)
Ghostery web site
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.
I'll probably switch to Pale Moon. Even has the old school UI that I like.
Current plugins installed:
NoScript *INDISPENSABLE*
GreaseMonkey
Nuke Anything
DownThemAll
VideoDownloadHelper
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
More Chrome or Chromium profiles until some of the add-ins catch up. Without AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and HTTPS Everywhere the web is nearly unusable. Without TabMixPlus and Xmarks, it's a lot less convenient.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
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).
But right now, it's looking like I'll be switching to Pale Moon.
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.
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."
I used Netscape Communicator 4.7 way longer than I should have. Keep the installer bundle and run until she dies or you find a replacement.
Or find a fork.
Yes, Firefox seem to be adept at shooting itself in the foot, but this time Mozilla will lose a very significant segment of their user base: There is a large user base who depend on the Add-On's which make Firefox so useful. The real showstopper for me is AdBlock Plus. Best we can do now is NOT update and keep checking on "Legacy" items in our Add-On's to which vendors have re-coded. Likely most will not within a decent time frame so I'll probably be jumping ship along with the other heavy Add-On users.
I have already switched to Pale Moon for Windows. I also did the same for my Mac, even though Pale Moon is still experimental on macOS and I needed to do a long search for its latest version. (If you are interested, it is here.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
https://servo.org/ Browsers engines are hugely complicated, and forking then will always be hard, very hard.
Mozilla Firefox is and will remain the best option... with the work being put into servo and features being ported over to firefox we're seeing dramatic performance improvements coming up...
Extensions breaking is always sad, but there is finally a WebExtensions spec, so breakage can be prevented in the future. The reason extensions are breaking is because they historically have been tied to semi-internal APIs; and have been holding back development... In fact the power previously given to extensions could be considered dangerous.
The developers seem to be taking Firefox in a direction that results in a second-class clone of google's Chrome. If I had wanted to use Chrome, I'd be using Chrome. So it looks like, for me at least, the answer to the question is - I'll be looking for something to replace Firefox if what I need stops working. It's really a simple decision. I use software to help me solve problems, not to create more problems.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sorry, a slashvertisment would have nice things to say about the new and shiny not "OMG! They are taking away all my favorite add-ons"
Some people like cross platform browsers because they, you know, use more than one platform.
I used to use opera because it had tabs when others didn't, handled pop ups better, and it was so much faster than any other browser. Now it's just like chrome and safari for speed and everyone has tabs, pop up, and ad blockers now.
Konqueror has had several revamps. In order, they were called Safari, Chrome, and Vivaldi.
If you don't get the euphemism, don't comment. "Life After" is not how it affects your life, it means how things change after an event. It can be significant (life after cancer), or something simple (life after Twinkies).
While agree with the gist of your comment, this little gem leads me to believe the poster is leaning more towards "life after cancer". Or maybe "life after death". Firefox 57 will disable over 95% of my add-ons many of which I just cannot live without [emphasis added].
Respectfully, I disagree. The headline title is intentionally provocative, and the parent makes a funny and relevant point. As a point of reference, I remember my cousin's GF being all sorts of bewildered that my wife and I hadn't yet jumped on the smartphone bandwagon when Apple had released their smartphone. She said, "Oh my god you need one of these. It will change your life." Ehh, maybe it changed her life, but mine is pretty much the same after getting around to buying said device. Personally I bailed on Firefox a long time ago in favor of Chrome. It had a negligible impact on the way I work, but not what I would call a life-altering experience...
I gave up on Firefox a long time ago, after far too many crashes. XUL is pretty badly designed as an extension API. Many had asked firefox devs, nevertheless, about the possibility of maintaining backwards compatability with existing plugins, only requring the new API for new plugins. They said that such major changes were planned to browser internals that the amount of porting it would take for plugin developers just to keep up would mean a major rewrite of plugins anyway.
XUL and friends is a very low level interface, and is extremely unsafe since it exposes so much of the browser internals. This is a serious security problem. It is infeasible for the browser maintainers to verify the safety of these extensions. WebExtensions will improve security greatly. Really, Ive always thought the way Firefox does extensions is foolish for this reason and just asking for trouble.
WebExtensions does have an advantage, its compatable with Google Chrome, so if you do port, your extensions become available to many more people.
yes, it would be nice if there was a way to keep XUL for existing extensions only, and only require Web Extensions for new extensions. But really, XUL is pretty bad from the security standpoint.
DownThemAll is working off of an incorrect premise. (Chunk downloading hasn't been actually faster for a while.)
The reason I use DTA is not the chunk downloading, it's that DTA massively improves the entire process.
But I assume that there are other extensions that also fix the weaknesses of Firefox's download manager (I haven't actually checked), and that's why I don't consider it to be a showstopper issue.
55.0.2 on Linux still runs my two can-not-live-without plugins -- NoScript and Tree Style Tabs.
Chrome, alas, has nothing like Tree Style Tabs. (Yeah, there's a plugin that does that hideous separate window thing, but that's hardly an adequate alternative.)
I'll just have to be sure and disable updates until and unless Tree Style Tabs has a WebExtension version.
Firefox has been increasingly defeatured over the past year or two. And to make matters worse, the FF developers consider that a feature.
The first big one was requiring add-ons to be signed by Mozilla, putatively to protect users (because Mozilla would inspect the code). That was sort of OK-ish at first, because there was a preference that could be set to turn that off, but they did (as promised) get rid of that option in FF 52. The stated intent was that people could be hurt by rogue extensions coming with instructions about how to turn off the signature enforcement. But it turns out that there is still a saving throw; only add-ons require signature enforcement; other types of addons (such as themes) don't, and the ones that do are listed in a file. Maybe the Mozilla people did that by intent, so that someone who wants to run unsigned extensions badly enough can do so. But yes, this means that you can't run your own extensions in your own browser, unless you submit each new version to Mozilla (not necessarily make it public), or you use the developer version.
(This was never implemented for the long-term support versions; these versions are intended for corporate use, and they know that corporations won't allow their code to be submitted for inspection.)
But the really big change, as of FF57, is to get rid of all of the old extensions altogether in favor of "WebExtensions", which use an API supposedly much more like that of Chrome, to make it easier to port addons between browsers. This strikes me as a highly self-destructive act (why use fake Chrome rather than the real thing?), but that's what they want to do. The problem is, as the OP noted, that none of the classic extensions are WebExtensions, so they're basically destroying their ecosystem overnight.
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.
It wouldn't surprise me if some people's pacemakers are controlled by Firefox extensions. Or IE 6 ActiveX controls.
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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.
Precisely.
The people whining the loudest are ignoring the fact that ALL THE MOST POPULAR PLUGINS ARE BEING OR AVE ALREADY BEEN PORTED.
uBlock Origin - already ported.
Stylish - has already been Chrome-compatible for years, so port is painless. Allows you to customize ANY webpage, and make it portable across browsers.
NoScript - the oldest and toughest tool of them all, but the creator is making the effort Should be ready by next year
Everything else is used by a handful of users.I mean, what the hell else is used by your average Firefox follower?
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I hope the teacher gave her a good grade for that. It's not just funny, it's a damn good example of effectively conveying a message.
Just look at the previous Slashdot story which had a well-intentioned fellow who was clearly advocating on behalf of Mozilla, talking about how the new Firefox addon model was just as good as the old, all the major addons had already transitioned to it, and if they hadn't, well it's their fault because they had a year's warning that this would happen.
I don't think he had an answer for the folks who complained that the new addon model made some older addons impossible to implement.