Live data from Hacker News

I cannot continue working on my add-ons

fasezero.com

91–100 of 218 posts

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#91
Classic Theme Restorer, Tree Style Tabs and Tab Mix Plus are the three extensions that add up to differentiate Firefox from Chrome for me.

Unmodified Firefox is just an inferior clone of Chrome. Firefox is pointless without its UI-altering extensions.

Quite amazing.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#93

I 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…

I'm with you. I was hooked on mouse gestures after using Opera 12. They came built into the browser, and you could tell. Gestures worked everywhere-- on a new tab, on a loading page, even on the browser window outside a tab.

Now I'm using Firefox plus a dozen extensions to poorly replicate a base Opera 12 installation. The e10s update already broke some FireGesture in some minor ways (e.g. wheel gestures scroll the page content now). Other extensions stopped working completely.

Time to give Vivaldi another shot...

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a fork of a large browser is extremely difficult, especially for coordinating and merging vulnerability fixes.

Do no other extension developers have this issue?

Yes, I've faced similar issues in the past, and had to update my add-on to get it working again.

Now it looks like it will once again break (this time permanently).

I'm in the same boat with other folks. Why use Firefox if it's just a poor man's Chrome clone?

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#95
post #71
post #45

Firefox 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.…

> Almost nobody runs mobile Firefox, so that turned out not to matter much. FWIW, I love mobile Firefox and I really don't understand why folks use Chrome instead.

Because Firefox is slow and pages are sometimes broken because nobody uses Firefox mobile. I also used Firefox Mobile for the sake of using uBlock Origin. But since I discovered Adguard for Android I can keep using Chrome (beta) which is way faster and it also supports web compression for http content (also speeds up).

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#96
I use Tab Groups constantly, I switched from Chrome to firefox almost entirely for Tab Groups. Runs terribly on my machine, I'll be back on Chrome the second Tab Groups are gone, unfortunately.

I've been worried since web extension only announcement we were heading for something like this.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#97

This 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.

And it's going to kill TabGroups too. And a lot of other addons from other authors will probably suffer the same fate.

The author of the posted article is the author is TabGroups.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#98

This 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.

And it's going to kill TabGroups too. And a lot of other addons from other authors will probably suffer the same fate.

The author of the posted article is the author is TabGroups.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#99
post #71
post #45

Firefox 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.…

> Almost nobody runs mobile Firefox, so that turned out not to matter much. FWIW, I love mobile Firefox and I really don't understand why folks use Chrome instead.

Also use Mobile Firefox because Chrome is 'sticky' on android, 'oh you signed in by clicking the dialog when you where tired, let me sign you into everything else and re-enable sending your web history to us as well', I disable it then accidentally turn it back on and they don't have a 'I want to turn this feature of permanently' option its always 'suspend' not 'disable forever'.

So I switched to Firefox on Android, it's not 'quite' as smooth but Ublock Origin works great so on balance I like it better.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#100
post #71
post #45

Firefox 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.…

> Almost nobody runs mobile Firefox, so that turned out not to matter much. FWIW, I love mobile Firefox and I really don't understand why folks use Chrome instead.

As a die-hard FF mobile user....

FF is slow, pages rarely load the first time and I constantly have to manually reload, the interface for making config changes are requires sooooo many clicks. I have no real experience if chrome is better because I never use it, but FF mobile has some real warts

Post reply on HN