Mozilla to Remove Legacy Firefox Add-Ons From Add-On Portal in Early October (bleepingcomputer.com)

Mozilla announced today plans to remove all Firefox legacy add-ons from the official Mozilla add-ons portal in early October. From a report: The move comes after Mozilla updated the Firefox core to use a new add-ons system based on the Chrome-compatible WebExtensions API. This new add-ons API replaced Firefox's old XUL-based add-ons API in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57. All Firefox legacy add-ons stopped working in Firefox 57, but Mozilla continued to support them in the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) 52 branch. Support for Firefox ESR 52 will end on September 5, in two weeks, meaning there won't be any official Firefox version that supports legacy add-ons anymore.

Comments

Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

Download Them All
Chatzilla

Re:Pressing F.

[nmb3000]

Those, plus:

Classic Theme Restorer
LiveHTTPHeaders
Session Manager
Tab Mix Plus

Plus versions of NoScript, AdBlock+, Greasemonkey and Stylus (Stylish) with functionality and UI that's not hamstrung by WebExtensions limitations.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those, plus:

Classic Theme Restorer
LiveHTTPHeaders
Session Manager
Tab Mix Plus

Plus versions of NoScript, AdBlock+, Greasemonkey and Stylus (Stylish) with functionality and UI that's not hamstrung by WebExtensions limitations.

Can someone please specify what limitations exactly (preferably with a link to an unsolved Firefox bug if available)? The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?

Re:Pressing F.

[ChoGGi]

Stylish

There's an active fork, it supports all the forked XUL browsers.
https://addons.palemoon.org/ad...

Re:Pressing F.

[Luckyo]

They get to define what is "clear need".

And there is no "clear need" for anything that is missing in the new implementation.

Re:Pressing F.

[SumDog]

Well some of these can be reimplemented in WebExtensions, but it requires a lot of work. A lot of the original plugin developers just don't have the time; or they may have started on them and are still actively working on replacements; but it could be several more months or a year till they're done.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stylish

There's an active fork, it supports all the forked XUL browsers.
https://addons.palemoon.org/ad...

B O Y C O T T P A L E M O O N !! They actively block NoScript.

Check the Palemoon forums. By the admissions of Palemoon's own developers they admit to actively blocking NoScript because they whine about getting too many complaints that Palemoon+NoScript does not render webpages correctly and the Palemoon developers don't want to deal with the issues.

Re:Pressing F.

[Joce640k]

I suspect 99% of developers are sick of Mozilla breaking their extensions ans simply won't bother.

Only the really famous ones will be updated. Anything new will simply be coin-miners disguised as youtube downloaders.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/http-header-live/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/onemen/ (tab mix option)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-resurrection
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabboo-session-manager

None are perfect, but it is a start

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?

There seems to be little evidence that they made any serious attempt at this at all, beyond the top N very high visibility extensions.

The main advantage of using Firefox, other than not using Google's browser with its questionable privacy implications, was how customisable it was. There have been five major releases with WebExtensions now, and after the first two, not a single thing I missed from before has been fixed. Being able to save files directly to places outside the downloads directory, customising parts of the UI like the bookmark dropdown so they're bigger than postage stamps, disabling things like JS or animated GIFs without reloading the whole page... I'm still waiting for a tab tree extension that actually works properly.

To add insult to injury, my previously 100% stable for years Firefox probably crashes out on startup every third or fourth time I load it, then does some half-baked restore of the tabs from the previous session that apparently closed down properly, then needs restarting again. Either Firefox itself is quite badly broken for the past couple of versions, or one of the much more limited number of extensions I now have installed is destabilising it, but wasn't the point of the new architecture that crippled all those extensions that at least they would be fast and reliable now?

Firefox is no longer my default browser for everyday use as a direct result of this farce, but since I still have to use all the major browsers professionally, it would be nice if they could at least undo some of the damage.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I left Firefox, I tried Palemoon. Ran into issues.

Escaped to Waterfox. Works wonderfully.

Re:Pressing F.

[ChoGGi]

.... Works fine for me

Re:Pressing F.

[arglebargle_xiv]

Oh dear God Mozilla, why don't you just put a gun to your head and pull the trigger instead of putting everyone through this years-long, agonising death spiral.

Re:Pressing F.

[arglebargle_xiv]

Not to mention that, with it's down-in-the-noise-level-and-still-falling market share, why would you bother devoting time and energy to it as a developer?

Re:Pressing F.

[arglebargle_xiv]

Same here, there were old bugs in Palemoon that I hadn't seen in Firefox for years. Waterfox is quite nice.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

> And there is no "clear need" for anything that is missing in the new implementation.

I have a "clear need" of "Clear fields": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clear-fields/

With it, I can navigate with minimal use of a keyboard, which is:
a) comfortable and
b) convenient when e.g. in a sofa watching Youtube / Netflix.

This something even Midori has.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's good then!

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the really famous ones will be updated. Anything new will simply be coin-miners disguised as youtube downloaders.

Well, as I see it, the add-ons are essentially a very focused app store. And, like most app stores, most of it is shit anyway.

So, really, if 'only the really famous ones' are updated, that probably means that the good ones are updated ... if not, it is is so niche barely anybody uses it, or it's malicious.

Sure, yeah, if you have some stupid add-on which plays vuvuzela noises, it might break. But who cares? (I have no idea if such an add-on exists, it's just an example because I remember when those were all over app-stores along with the fart pianos.)

This sounds like they've moved to replace older deprecated ways of doing things, so this will mostly just kill off the accumulated cruft. If it's being maintained, it'll get fixed. If it isn't, it'll be killed off.

I don't see this as a bad thing.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

They were straight up lying. There was never any intention to make web extensions have feature parity with the old extensions and in fact the whole reason for switching to web extensions is NOT because they are somehow better, but specifically because it means they have to support far fewer methods of customizing the browser.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, Anonymous Friend.

Re:Pressing F.

[Luckyo]

As long as no one in mozilla has a clear need for it, they don't have a to care.

Used to be the best browser

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use version 56, because no one has a substitute for DownThemAll. Now Mozilla won't even give anybody DownThemAll anymore.

Re:Used to be the best browser

[Nutria]

deduplicate-tabs, "New Tab in Tab Context Menu", "Amazon Smile Redirect" and "Sort Tabs" are what keep me on FF56.

Re:Used to be the best browser

[tepples]

Two things keep me on Firefox 52:

1. Debian's preference for the oldest supported ESR version
2. The fact that Mozilla still hasn't fixed bug 1325692 that blocks WebExtension-based successors to Keybinder from being able to effectively unbind the Ctrl+Q=quit shortcut on Linux

Re:Used to be the best browser

[SeaFox]

For me the two big ones are:

Torrent Status -- Can monitor and control a torrent client on the local LAN or remote network. Will upload clicked torrent and magnet links automatically to the client (no need to go visit the web interface), and gives a persistent readout of current download/upload usage stats as a toolbar item. I get the impression the monitoring stats is something that cannot be duplicated with Web Extensions from comments by the developer.

Private Tab -- add a private browsing tab to a window full of all non-private tabs. Also can toggle an existing tab between private mode and normal with ctrl-alt-t.

Re:Used to be the best browser

[Anonymous Coward]

This issue is so long-standing - although I never remotely cared personally.
It would be properly solved by a "Confirm exit" dialog which we may then turn on or off.

Re:Used to be the best browser

[tepples]

Accidentally pressing Ctrl+Q while reaching for Ctrl+Tab (or Ctrl+Shift+Q while reaching for Ctrl+Shift+Tab on platforms where the Exit command is Ctrl+Shift+Q) wouldn't be quite so much of a problem if "Restore Previous Session" in Firefox were capable of restoring the data in Slashdot comment composition forms. It is not. After the user reopens Firefox and restores the previous session, any open comment composition forms will no longer exist, and clicking "Reply to This" will open an empty form instead of a form containing the comment whose composition was in progress.

Re:Used to be the best browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Has nobody seriously made anything even remotely similar to DTA?
Surely the WebExtensions APIs expose the file API for mass downloads?
Browsers natively support segmented downloads (download resume) and multi-part downloads. At least I think so, for the latter part. I am sure you can specify an offset for downloads. Yep it does.
I'd be surprised if nothing out there replicated it by now.
I haven't bothered looking myself since I don't download loads of files like I used to.

One I do wonder about is file stream interception downloaders like your downloaders that can get file streams from Flash, video elements or whatever file extension you specify.
VideoDownloader was one I remember using.
Obviously the Flash won't work since sandboxed (and soon to be dead anyway), but I wonder if there is a way to check for ANY resources being loaded as they are being loaded in to the document.
I know there are a bunch of listeners and other things that monitor changes to the document or data, but I am not sure if there are ones for monitoring new connections.
It's an area of JS I haven't really touched on myself besides the basic listeners for input and such.
Anyone know?

Re:Used to be the best browser

[Anonymous Coward]

For 2, you could just use an external system for dealing with shortcuts.
Python, IronAHK or whatever other automation tools.
I regularly block hotkeys from programs I hate. I remember blocking ctrl+Q from Blender because I would ALWAYS hit it when trying to do some subdivisions. FUCK.
Whoever thought ctrl+Q was ever a good idea needs punched in the throat.
Function keys exist for a reason. Use them.

Re:Used to be the best browser

[tepples]

Whoever thought ctrl+Q was ever a good idea needs punched in the throat.
Function keys exist for a reason. Use them.

Ctrl+Q is an imitation of Command-Q on the Macintosh and Apple IIGS. The keyboard shipped with the original Macintosh lacked function keys, and even after ADB became standard, the "extended keyboard" with function keys was an extra cost add-on.

Re:Used to be the best browser

[dryeo]

Form History Control, https://formhistory.blogspot.c... is one way to preserve comment composition forms when FF crashes or is accidentally closed.

Nails in the coffin

[sinij]

At this point they are just hammering additional nails into Firefox's coffin.

Who uses FF anymore ?

[rojash]

Just use Vivaldi

Re:Who uses FF anymore ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use Palemoon on Devuan after ripping out pulseaudio, consolekit, and d-bus. Better yet, do that with Heads OS.

That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[UnknownSoldier]

Joking aside, is it REALLY that much a of a problem to keep Legacy extensions, sorry, "Add-Ons" on a different "space" of the website??? Are they afraid people will get "confused" and try to install them on the new version? Mozilla is losing out on the ability to see WHAT is popular and WHY it is popular. If they were smart they would provide alternative URLs for extensions that work in the new version. Too bad this "telemetry" data doesn't have any value for them.

I get it that they want to push everyone onto the latest shiny. Unfortunately, the harder they push, the more backlash there will be and people just go "Fuck it. I'll just use Pale Moon, etc." where their extensions continue to work.

Guess it is just another sign of Mozilla continuing to jump the shark / nuke the fridge / etc. on slowly becoming irrelevant and losing touch with what people want in a browser.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

"Guess it is just another sign of Mozilla continuing to jump the shark / nuke the fridge / etc. on slowly becoming irrelevant and losing touch with what people want in a browser."

Well, at least they're in good company. IE still sucks hard and Google still hasn't figured out Chrome yet.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the harder they push, the more backlash there will be and people just go "Fuck it. I'll just use Pale Moon, etc." where their extensions continue to work.

Guess it is just another sign of Mozilla continuing to jump the shark / nuke the fridge / etc. on slowly becoming irrelevant and losing touch with what people want in a browser.

The people running Mozilla completely lost their minds a few years ago and it's been nothing but a constant stream of "Fuck You" to users. Somehow, Firefox dropping to single digit market share hasn't been enough to convince them that butchering Firefox is a bad idea.

Instead, they seem to suffer from some sort of bizarre mental illness where the more people reject Firefox the more determined they become to fuck it up and make it useless and irrelevant.

So glad I switched to Palemoon a couple of years ago.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[ilikenwf]

Pale Moon is sad in comparison to Waterfox.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, the plugins available for the latest Firefox are good enough unless you need something specific.

I agree that the Firefox developers are clueless, though, too many added features nobody wants and removed features people were using.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[slyborg]

It's obviously a move to force people off pre-Quantum Firefox. They must have seen that a large population of users wasn't falling for the WebExtension meme.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Google still hasn't figured out Chrome yet.

But since Firefox extensions are broken to about the same degree anyway now, you might as well use the browser that is better in most other respects.

As sad as it is, we are rapidly heading back to a time when pages are written primarily for one specific browser, with perhaps a token nod to a couple of the smaller ones. That's where all the users are, and so that's what developers are targetting, and so the cycle continues.

I haven't worked on a single professional project in a while where Firefox has enough market share to justify more than a very basic level of testing. Everyone wants Chrome, Safari, and maybe Edge or IE11 for business applications if it's the standard desktop browser for some big business customers.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[AmiMoJo]

On the contrary, I'm actually going back to Firefox after being on PaleMoon for years. The new add-on system, improved security/performance and especially the built in privacy enhancements make it worth using again.

PaleMoon is okay but a couple of things piss me off about it. Firstly their update system is broken. Sometimes when you update it forgets your settings and uninstalls your add-ons. Whatever the add-on update mechanism is seems to be broken too. A while back an update deleted a lot of people's bookmarks too.

The other issue is performance. The most recent update fixed a problem with images not loading (!) but it still has problems.

PaleMoon always had poor compatibility with extensions and now that Firefox is ditching the old ones it will only get worse. For example you need a modified version of GreaseMonkey and it's old, and now basically unmaintained as the upstream project drops support for the codebase. uBlock is the same, all the work is on the new Firefox/Chrome extension API.

Alternatives

[slickwillie]

WaterFox and PaleMoon are FF alternatives that support the old add-ons. I wonder if the add-ons will be available somewhere else?

Re:Alternatives

[BlackOverflow]

Grab 'em now while you can!

Re:Alternatives

[Nutria]

WaterFox bills itself as a "free-range, ethical browser". LOL no.

Re:Alternatives

[mi]

WaterFox and PaleMoon are FF alternatives

Yep. I symlinked ~/.mozilla/firefox as ~/.waterfox and the Waterfox-browser started right up. Things "just work" — the add-ons, which Firefox has earlier declared "obsolete", started to work again, etc.

Re:Alternatives

[sinij]

I use PaleMoon myself. While lead dev is an odd duck, and keeps ranting about NoScript, the browser is stable and NoScript does work.

Re:Alternatives

[HaydonBerrow]

Thank you, good idea. I'm trying PaleMoon because I want to use the ScrapBook add-on so that I can work on a train with indifferent wifi.

Re:Alternatives

[antdude]

SeaMonkey (User agent Example: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4) too! https://www.seamonkey-project....

Has anyone noticed extensions aren't updated anymore in them like uBlock Origins (v1.13.8 from 7/21/2017)? :(

many backups will now popup. who do you trust?

[denis-The-menace]

Thank you Mozilla.
The gold rush is now on to create clones of the Add-on website.

Who will we trust now that Mozilla is abandoning the legacy users?
PaleMoon?

Re:many backups will now popup. who do you trust?

[BlackOverflow]

I switched to Palemoon a month before the November, 2017 update that killed the old addons, and I have not looked back. Palemoon is great!

Re:many backups will now popup. who do you trust?

[SeaFox]

Most of these legacy add-ons are not being developed anymore because they are not compatible with the currently-shipping mainstream Firefox and their authors knew this day would come.

It would make more sense to download the XPI files for the extensions you use and you can manually reinstall them as needed, rather than wait for a "grey-market" extension site to appear and have to worry about malware,

That's odd.

[RyanFenton]

That's odd that they'd even want to do that.

Is there any other place those will remain available?

I don't plan on ever using any version of Firefox after the 52 ESR, largely because of the lost functionality of the newer add-ons.

What's the point of Firefox if you can't properly customize it?

Seem really odd to me.

Ryan Fenton

Re:That's odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd favor preserving the add-ons on an archive site or similar, but more for a historical purpose. Use at your own risk or on local sites and plain off-line files.

It isn't the first time we have to move on from software, does it suck yes. I'd rather be running Windows XP which uses 100MB RAM and is faster than any modern Linux or Windows desktop yet ran AAA games and every high end or advanced use.
I don't even like that you can't run 16-bit programs from 64-bit mode.

This is the future where Firefox 52 is headed whether we like it or not.

Firefox is done

[BlackOverflow]

FF is barely at 5% market share and have been steadily falling since they killed the old addons. They will be completely irrelevant in a year or 2.

Re:Firefox is done

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad to see Firefox fall by the wayside. On the other hand I'm happy to see MicroSoft suck it.

Don't be evil

[mi]

based on the Chrome-compatible WebExtensions API

Could it be, the switch is one of Google's condition for financing Mozilla? To make it easier for users to switch to Chrome?

The demotion of Thunderbird may be similarly explained by Google's influence, because the application competes with GMail's web-interface.

But, at least, they no longer have a homophobe running the show so they have that going for them, which is nice.

Re:Don't be evil

[Anonymous Coward]

The demotion of Thunderbird may be similarly explained by Google's influence, because the application competes with GMail's web-interface.

That makes no sense. Thunderbird is an offline email client. No one who uses it is going to switch to a web-based client if Thunderbird dies. Instead they will find a new offline client.

Saying that Thunderbird competes with GMail is like saying cars compete with motorcycles because they both use roads, while completely ignoring the reasons that car drivers chose a car and not a motorcycle.

Re:Don't be evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... if what you are saying was true, GMail would never have taken over. At one point everyone was using offline mail. Now, the vast majority use webmail. By your argument, no one using offline mail would have switched to webmail, they would have found anew offline client.

But that isn't what happened. Offline email is fading into irrelevancy.

Re:Don't be evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that Thunderbird competes with GMail is like saying cars compete with motorcycles because they both use roads, while completely ignoring the reasons that car drivers chose a car and not a motorcycle.

Close, tehcnically cars do compete with motorcycles. This is more like IMAP competes with GMail, thus IMAP and all things IMAP must be eliminated. Or Tesla saying roads have to use a specific colour of paint for their markings because their AI can't read it otherwise and some bonehead enacting it as a law.

In both cases they are forcing labour. If you don't have the resources to comply (aka update), you're screwed. If you're not part of their clubs, you're screwed.

Welcome to walled gardens. You WILL wear their uniform.

Re:Don't be evil

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing one really, really big thing - SPAM. GMail diverted a lot of attention away from local spam prevention in favour of THIEIR solution(s) (spf for example). As a company when you get thousands of emails per day that are nothing but spam, hiring someone to play postmaster is labourious. The politics behind email services within an organization alone are nothing to sneeze at: Does your IT read users mail? How big is your mailbox? How do you sort mail? Why can't you be more like Chaz, delete mail after you've read it?.

People didn't just wake up one day thinking webmail was better then offline mail, quite the opposite. Kind of funny we have websites trying to be web applications with the same damn "features". Only I didn't need a webbrowser to read mail.

Re:Don't be evil

[mi]

Thunderbird is an offline email client.

Though it has an offline mode too, you don't have to use it that way — and I don't, for example. The rest of your post is invalidated by this.

Re:Don't be evil

[dryeo]

What do you do, use something like Thunderbrowse to load gmail.com in a tab?
In this case I believe by online, the poster means using a web interface rather then downloading mail like I do with pop. With the mail downloaded, it is available even without a network connection.

Re:Don't be evil

[mi]

I believe by online, the poster means using a web interface rather then downloading mail like I do with pop

"Online" and "using web-interface" are very different things. Indeed, the concept of being "online" predates that of "web" by quite some years. For example, your Netflix client is, most certainly, operating "online" — but not inside a web-browser.

IMAP4 has largely replaced POP — but even the old POP-only mail programs usually allowed interactive manipulation of e-mail. If you wish to discuss the features and capabilities of Thunderbird further, please, state affirmatively, that you have used it yourself — in the last 5 years.

Re:Don't be evil

[dryeo]

Yes, I use Thunderbird, and up till less a year ago, over dial up. Looking, it appears I've been using it for about 10 years.
To quote the AC poster,

That makes no sense. Thunderbird is an offline email client. No one who uses it is going to switch to a web-based client if Thunderbird dies. Instead they will find a new offline client.

Which sure looks to me that the AC has the definition of offline where the client continues to work when not connected to a network, unlike gmail.com or other web based email interfaces.

They need to do more even

[execthis]

They need to purge all the forum, help, blog, bug, etc. posts related to pre-v.57 as well. Can't count how many times I searched for some info only to find it was about the pre v.57 version so it was completely irrelevant. Out-of-date/inaccurate information is worse than no information at all.

If they kill of Live Bookmarks I will die.

Re:They need to do more even

[Anonymous Coward]

they will, shortly https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...

Re:They need to do more even

[slack_justyb]

If they kill of Live Bookmarks I will die.

They are killing that off too. The code hasn't been maintained in almost a decade and is a super great way to crash your browser for feeds that are using mixed media DTD models. No one stepped up in the last round to want to fix it, so it's getting chopped. Also, it's horrible code, my only guess is that the group that had wrote it, do so in a single night of Red Bull fueled rage.

Re:They need to do more even

[Luckyo]

Well, what do you know. That is literally the last thing that kept me sticking to ESR while looking for alternatives to Firefox.

That makes it really easy to just leave for Chromium derivatives when ESR support for 52 ends. Thanks for sharing this.

Re:They need to do more even

[execthis]

What do you recommend to do without Live Bookmarks? I'm so used to having all my Live Bookmarks in my bookmarks bar and checking all the feeds when I want to read the news. It's so efficient and convenient. I've tried other RSS readers and honestly they don't come close in terms of efficiency and convenience.

Re:They need to do more even

[Antiocheian]

Live Bookmarks will remain in Pale Moon.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Let it be the nail in their coffin. I gave Firefox another try and once again was left wondering what in the hell drugs they're smoking. There is no privacy, very little security and overall screw the user posture. It also reenforced the dependency I have on certain addons that I've used for _years_. No, it's not adblock but things like CertificatePatrol, SQLite Manager, form autofill, lockthetext etc. These are all things Mozilla has taken a direct stance against and quite frankly, really shows how uterly clueless they are.

Get fucked Mozilla. Just change your name to Google Firefox already, no one is buying your shit.

Better on Desktop

[PineHall]

Those numbers include Mobile and Tablets. Firefox does not have a presence on phones or tablets. Firefox has 11% market share on the Desktop. It does have a declining market share but it is not as bad as that 5% number.

Re:Better on Desktop

[tepples]

Perhaps the claim is that Firefox is irrelevant precisely because it "does not have a presence on phones or tablets."

Re:Better on Desktop

[slack_justyb]

Perhaps the claim is that Firefox is irrelevant precisely because it "does not have a presence on phones or tablets."

It does have a mobile browser, however it is horribly crippled by Android. Grab FF mobile, head over to Google, Google's website actively switches you to a pretty crappy site if using anything other than Chrome on Android. Google image search is literally a pain for no good reason on FF mobile. Changing the user agent fixes everything wrong with Google, but then you're just reporting that you're Chrome on Android. It's not just a little, Android goes out of its way to be hostile to other web browsers.

Chrome has top position because of mobile, and it's top in mobile because it actively nixes any attempt by others to use Google's services. And that nixing is pretty darn good at keeping others at bay with how deeply woven Google is in pretty much every website on the planet.

Re:Better on Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't but there's the foundation for it to work if it will so eventually. Even better in the mid term with the Servo engine, and even low end phones getting so much RAM and storage to not worry about adding something heavy like a browser.
There are decades to come. Possibly things won't stay the forever. We have an utterly dominating duopoly on phones. Desktops used to be the same too with 90-95% on Windows and the rest on Mac. Then we got linux on the desktop with perhaps a 2% share, 3%. So there could be new phones with a 2% market share outside the duopoly and Firefox mobile running on a portion of that.

Re:Better on Desktop

[Kjella]

Well, it's search revenue Mozilla is not getting. And if Chrome/Safari wants to change the web standards they're quite real. With 5"-6" slabs being the new smartphone norm people do a lot of real browsing on them, I know I do. Okay so maybe there are other reasons Firefox has no presence there if we're assigning blame, but the double whammy is quite real - their only platform is losing relevance and they're losing relevance within that platform too. I mean if the story was that they were steady/growing on the desktop, but losing overall due to mobile taking over that'd be a kinda positive spin. But saying that if we look at half the market they got double the market share, well... maybe for the math impaired.

Re:Better on Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

I go pretty far out of my way to avoid using Google's services, so I find Firefox to work fine on Android.

Re:Better on Desktop

[Waccoon]

I wonder how much of that 11% is tallied as "Gecko compatible" (ie, all the Firefox forks).

Firefox rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate that we lost some of the great extensions. I am affected by Thunderbird cutting out legacy extensions that helped Calendar not suck. I get it.

Firefox is still the best browser out there. Completely open source, fast as hell, and supports modern web standards. The "Containers" feature is the #1 reason for FF to be my home browser forever; or until something else supports the concept.

!pulseaudio ?

[Freshly Exhumed]

Does Waterfox support ALSA without pulseaudio? I cannot seem to find an answer to that on the Waterfox site. Pale Moon works perfectly with ALSA on the lennart-freed Devuan and Heads systems I support.

Re:!pulseaudio ?

[Shikaku]

https://www.reddit.com/r/water...

This seems to be the best answer sadly: maybe, but apulse would work most likely

Re:!pulseaudio ?

[Shikaku]

Also on Arch Linux: not required for me, but I have it installed, but it's not a dependency for Firefox or Waterfox: https://i.imgur.com/2kZb1MI.pn...

Re:!pulseaudio ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Waterfox support ALSA without pulseaudio? I cannot seem to find an answer to that on the Waterfox site. Pale Moon works perfectly with ALSA on the lennart-freed Devuan and Heads systems I support.

Yes it does. See here:

What's new in Waterfox 52.0.2? ...
  Disabled PulseAudio and enabled ALSA for Linux builds

Re:!pulseaudio ?

[Freshly Exhumed]

Does Waterfox support ALSA without pulseaudio? I cannot seem to find an answer to that on the Waterfox site. Pale Moon works perfectly with ALSA on the lennart-freed Devuan and Heads systems I support.

Yes it does. See here:

What's new in Waterfox 52.0.2? ...

  Disabled PulseAudio and enabled ALSA for Linux builds

Thank you! I DL'ed Waterfox and it properly supports ALSA without PulseAudio, so I'm in the process of installing it on other machines. I think they should tout that on their main page. Cheers!

Can the add-ons be remotely disabled by Mozilla ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible for Mozilla to remotely disable the add-ons in Firefox ESR 52 after they have been removed from the add-on website ?

For example, can Mozilla disable them by adding them to a blacklist which causes Firefox to disable them ?

We need to take action against Moziilla

[xack]

Not some fork project like basilisk/pale moon, we the users must force Mozilla to stop fucking up. The 52 ESR was an escape lane for the Quantum madness, and a lifeboat for those forced to use Windows XP (it has a lot of market share in China still). At the very least I say we have a Firefox classic set up, similar in vein to Seamonkey was a continuation of the classic Mozilla suite. If classilla and tenfourfox keeps old macs going, then there should at least be something for XP and XUL.

Re:We need to take action against Moziilla

[Merk42]

Go ahead, it's FOSS, you'll all band together and make a great browser because you know what is the best and will completely satisfy everyone. Right? Any day now...

Re:We need to take action against Moziilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Any day now...

Done

Re:Can the add-ons be remotely disabled by Mozilla

[nmb3000]

Is it possible for Mozilla to remotely disable the add-ons in Firefox ESR 52 after they have been removed from the add-on website ?

For example, can Mozilla disable them by adding them to a blacklist which causes Firefox to disable them ?

Yes, to some extent, but as far as I know it is only a soft-block and you can always choose to re-enable the addon. This functionality is controlled by the extensions.blocklist configuration entries, including extensions.blocklist.enabled which can be used to disable the feature altogether.

For Firefox 56 at least, you can see the list at https://blocked.cdn.mozilla.net. Not sure about newer versions.

I understood every word in that summary

[Snotnose]

yet have no clue what it means to me. Can one of you web monkeys tell us embedded systems types WTF all that means?

Re:I understood every word in that summary

[jouassou]

Not a webmonkey, but I'll give you a layman's summary.

Firefox launched a new version 57 almost a year ago, which made broad changes to its core and architecture. Some users were very happy: it replaced parts of the rendering engine with some new stuff written in Rust ("Firefox Quantum"), which made the browser much faster. Other users were not very happy: they basically scrapped their entire plugin ecosystem, and adopted a chromium-like plugin API ("WebExtensions").

The upside is that by Firefox aligning themselves with the Chrome ecosystem, it's much easier to port plugins between them, which can be a boon since Firefox is not really that popular these days. But most people that use Firefox for non-political reasons do so because they love its plugin ecosystem, and were thus not happy with the change. Especially because some plugins turned out to be impossible to port, and some plugin authors were not interested in rewriting their projects from scratch.

Some Firefox-forks like Palemoon kept supporting the older plugin API, and Firefox also officially had an "Extended Support Release" that they kept around while waiting for plugin authors to rewrite their plugins with the new API. The last part of the saga is that Firefox has now ended their official support for these legacy versions, and removed the corresponding plugins from their repository.

Fix Bug#1291841 first

[Anonymous Coward]

Bug #1291841 is what's stopping all the cookie-management add-ons from working with the new API. Which in turn is why I, and many others, continue to use "legacy" add-ons and FF 56.

Hey, mozilla.org, how about you make the shiny new add-on API workfirst!

Save your favorite add-ons

[Anonymous Coward]

I've saved my favorite add-ons as files so that I will be able to reload them should I ever have to reinstall Pale Moon.

Waterfox

[Artemis3]

Waterfox the developer mentioned somewhere that he made a backup of the addons.

Re:Waterfox

[Anonymous Coward]

Tobin himself is garbage, I speak from personal experience talking to him.

Waterfox

[Artemis3]

Tobin treats Tor users like garbage, no thanks.
Waterfox it is.

Mozilla to Remove Legacy Firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

High time

Re:Can the add-ons be remotely disabled by Mozilla

[Shikaku]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bloc...

Yes but this is rarely updated, and only for the really awful addons that coinmine or scrape user data in the background without permission or are virus-like.

Don't be stupid

[mi]

Which sure looks to me that the AC has the definition of offline where the client continues to work when not connected to a network

Yes, that is the applicable definition of "offline". And, yes, Thunderbird has offline mode. Which makes it superior to any "webmail" interface for anyone with an intermittent network connectivity. And it offers a compelling set of features even for those with a steady connection.

Which makes it a solid competitor to even the best of webmail offerings, including GMail.

"Phasing it out" would help Google gain market share — just as I said. Whether they deliberately pursue that policy or not — I would not know.

A conspiracy-minded person may suspect that. And he might further suspect, that Brendan Eich's refusal to play along is the real reason he was suddenly outed as a "homophobe".

Uncommited to open source noncommitalment

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source example here: Deprecate legacy API and then less than 1 year later stop supporting it completely.

A fail in any large corporation where upgrading the software on 10,000 computers cost thousands of dollars.

Why not to use add-ons, custom build steps, third party libraries, etc as they will end of life your environment much faster than the core software does. ...now if I can just build a home made transmission to put into my 1 year old dodge charger....

Replaced XUL?

[TechyImmigrant]

Yay for me! I was too lazy to learn what the hell XUL was and how to program in it. Now it's dead. I saved myself from wasting time on a transient technology.

Waterfox Legacy Extensions Database - Issue #303

[Anonymous Coward]

People seem to be developing a comprehensive archive of Mozilla legacy extensions for continued use in Waterfox. Preserving comments and ratings is still important. Will people at Internet Archive and Software Heritage give their part of the larger task appropriate effort?

Waterfox, Its Legacy and Looking to the Future

Legacy Extensions Database #303

Waterfox the developer mentioned somewhere that he made a backup of the addons.

WebExtension

[DrYak]

Can someone please specify what limitations exactly (preferably with a link to an unsolved Firefox bug if available)? The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?

Depends on the extension.

In the case of NoScript : all the necessary functionality has been successfully replicated (though, it took a few days, it wasn't available from day 1 of the XUL-less firefox). The web extension has the exact same capability as the XUL extension.
The thing is, its author took the opportunity to also overhaul the interface and rewrite everything in the new style used by most web-extensions (HTML kind of side bars) instead of OS-like dialog boxes and windows.
Most of the complains nowadays are people who would complain when then the new version isn't a pixel-pefect of the old one.
(there's ongoing details about the UI rework on the author's blog).

FoxyProxy:
Old XUL extension could possibly hook anything in the browser.
For filtering purpose, most modern web extensions can normally filter domains only. For privacy reasons they can't see the full URLs.
Thus some RegEx patterns that you might have used in the older version won't work any more (basically you won't be able to redirect different sub paths of websites to different proxies).
Also, during the initial time, it wasn't possible to transfer the settings from the XUL extension to the WebExt one.
Also here again the author took opportunity to redesign the UI - probably that's where the remaining criticism is nowaday.

Image Zoom :
WebExtensions aren't allowed to hijack direct mouse button clicks. So instead of rightclick, you need to use alt+rightclick to do the wheel zoom thing.

uBlock, FSF's Privacy Badger, HTTPS everywhere, and countless others :
work as-is. Some have been webextension for a long time, some are even available on Chrome, too.

Session Manager :
need full access to the whole session of a tab to save it/re-load it.
Again, most web extensions are isolated from the full state of a tab.
You can't do Session Manager using the API offered by Web Extensions, and the author wasn't motivated to work with Mozilla to add API extensions to make Session Manager possible.
Luckily for me, the build-in session managing of Firefox fills most my needs.

(I strongly suspect that Tab Mix and LiveHTTPHeaders hit the same kind of limitation - like needing access to the raw stream of connection - which aren't available to the API)

But mainly :
old extensions written for XUL 10 years ago that the author hasn't touched since and has completely forgotten about, and which miraculously survived the multiple recent versions bump, won't automagically get converted to Webextensions.

So, lots of people end up with things the worked for them, and suddenly won't work anymore.

Firefox Smites Its Supporters, Again, and Again.

[BrendaEM]

I'm writing browser APIs, catch me if you can. I dare you develop a plugin. It will be obsolete by tomorrow.