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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 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.
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
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.
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.
-- Seq
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.
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"
I wish I could get some missing memory back. Note to all you young Slashdotters out there: stay off the weed and stay in school, because...um...well I can't remember the reason at the moment, but I'm pretty sure there's a perfectly good reason.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
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.
Switch to Pale Moon. They haven't been using any FF upstream since the Australis fuckfest and its been doing great, just rock solid classic FF without the bullshit. They have done a ton of tweaking to make FF run better, have better support for video formats, security patches, etc and the devs have been great about answering their users and actually listening to them instead of giving them the bird like Mozilla did!
So please ask any extension devs that make extensions you love to switch to PM, that is what I did and you'd be surprised how many of them are now making their extensions for PM. For any extensions that are not going forward you can talk to the PM devs, they are making their own repo for extensions and its growing by the day.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.