Once this happens I will leave Firefox after being one of its strongest supporters for years. What makes Firefox worth it is the level to which I can customize it and this will knock out 5 of my must-have add-ons in one shot. When you do that you have nothing but a Chrome clone left and why use a Chrome clone when you can use Chrome. I hate Chrome because I feel locked in on UI design (old-school user here). Once FF takes away my options guaranteed I'll abandon it.
I cannot continue working on my add-ons
81–90 of 218 posts
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#82I completely rely on Firegestures, the premiere mouse gesture addon.
Mouse gestures are in my muscle memory. I can't live without them, and every single Webextensions Chrome mouse gestures addon either:
a) Sucks. Doesn't work at all on internal pages including new pages (which is not a blocker, but sucks), and more importantly doesn't work _well_ ANYWHERE. Inconsistent behavior, poor performance. Just unacceptable.
b) Is actually literally malware. Once Chrome extensions get popular, a shady Chinese or Russian consortium buys them up, adds user tracking, and silently updates the extension so your every move is followed.
Chrome has been around for almost 10 years now, so I'm absolutely convinced that Webextensions are unable to support _GOOD_ mouse gestures.
Now that Firefox will shortly become hot stinking Chinatown garbage, my only hope will be Vivaldi, a browser using Blink (Chrome's backend). Its mouse gestures are really close to being usable-- it only lacks configurable mouse button chording.
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The recent 51.0 update killed Vimperator, so I switched to Firefox ESR to gain some time while I search for a replacement.
Ditto! Unfortunately, it appears that there will be no replacement any time soon, if ever. I am not 100% certain on the details, but apparently, the new WebExtension APIs make certain browser window manipulation impossible. So looks like we're stuck with ESR in short-to-mid term future.
Sadly, I mean a replacement for Firefox altogether. The only plugins I use are Vimperator and uMatrix. I'm posting this from Qutebrowser and I'm very impressed. I just hope I can get uMatrix functionality.
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#84Once this happens I will leave Firefox after being one of its strongest supporters for years. What makes Firefox worth it is the level to which I can customize it and this will knock out 5 of my must-have add-ons in one shot. When you do that you have nothing but a Chrome clone left and why use a Chrome clone when you can use Chrome. I hate Chrome because I feel locked in on UI design (old-school user here). Once FF…
If the only reason you hate Chrome is being locked into the UI, you should switch to Vivaldi. Sure, it's a Chrome clone, but the UI is super configurable (and as far as I'm aware, it doesn't do any opt-out user tracking).
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#85This is going to kill pentadactyl, which is currently the only reason I'm using Firefox. For those who aren't familiar, pentadactyl is a Firefox extension that transforms the user interface to make it more minimal and vim-like. You get to use standard vim bindings to navigate the web and it even gives you a vim-like command line interface to the browser's functionality.
Horrible news. I use Vimperator, used to use Pentadactyl. The latter forked from the former, but they are still very closely related. Like Emacs and XEmacs.
They are addictive. They turn Firefox into a different kind of thing. I rely so much on custom commands like:
command -nargs=1 proxy set! network.proxy.type=
command -nargs=+ -complete=url site open google site:
map s :site
I'm really afraid of Firefox breaking Vimperator long term. Alternatives are not that nice, and niche browsers tend to be brittle and insecure.
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#86Firefox has three APIs: XUL, Jetpack, and WebExtensions. XUL has been on the way out for years, and never worked in mobile Firefox anyway. (Almost nobody runs mobile Firefox, so that turned out not to matter much.) Jetpack was introduced in 2013, and by 2014, it was actually usable. It's not clear when and whether Jetpack add-ons will stop working. Mozilla's developer documentation is so confused that you can't tell.…
Encouraging all of your addon developers to create addons for your biggest competitor? How is that a good idea?
It isn't. But, you know... open-source. Developers make stupid decisions all the time.
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#87Ok, so, the only way I seem to be able to vote against this is by not using firefox anymore. Then that's what'll happen.
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#88Just curious will the new Web Extensions style allow add-ons like Classic Theme Restorer [1] and Tree-style Tab [2] that change the Firefox UI? [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
The Classic Theme Restorer page says "CTR will stop working on Firefox 57 (release) when Mozilla drops support for XUL / XPCOM / legacy add-ons, but it will still work on Firefox 52 ESR until Firefox 59 ESR replaces it in 2018 (~Q2)."
It's really sad to see how far Mozilla has taken Firefox from its roots. Extensions are really the only reason I still continue to use Firefox and now Mozilla has set the date that I'll be moving on to Chrome into stone for me.
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#89I am not familiar with Web Extensions, but I am familiar with the fairly common event in which application vendors severely change functionality, with significant downstream effects. Such behavior seems more common amongst open-source products. Consider Python 3. Asterisk's scripting language. Perl 6. Incompatible version changes drive away users and developers. The uncertainty that comes along with a planned update…
I don't think Perl 6 is (yet) considered "the way forward," to the extent that Python 3 is.
I believe that, early on, Perl 6 was intended to be the next version of Perl in a more traditional sense, with an upgrade path and compatibility mode and so on, but with the time lag before the 1.0 release and increasingly radical design changes, at this point Perl6 and Perl5 are different languages, which share a name for historical reasons.
Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it syncs with my desktop Chrome install and especially the password manager. If there's one thing that sucks it's typing secure passwords into a phone.
Mobile Firefox syncs too. For years.
But most important: addons like ublock work on FF mobile as opposed to Chrome. Huge time, functionality and bandwidth saver!