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I cannot continue working on my add-ons

fasezero.com

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Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#201

Post by pvdebbe »

ssdev wrote: post #199

It's time for me to try and deploy everywhere some small WebKit-based browser, like dwb or its clones. Not very sad, but waste of time.

Came to say this. Vimperator cannot operate within constrained add-on sandboxes. Chromium already demonstrates how it works -- you get your vi keys on the page but as soon as you open a new tab and start entering your URL, nothing familiar works as Chromium takes ownership for the new tab.

I dabbled with DWB a few years back. It shows a lot of promise but it wasn't worth the hassle back then. If firefox is sure to go down, then all bets are off.

(Btw, dwb is deemed dying too, on the account of using webkit. uzbl is more maintained but uses webkit as well.)

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#203

Post by yellowapple »

yoasif_ wrote: post #122
syshum wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Clearly, that has something to do with either security or performance, where Firefox has a perceived lag. This is completely false It has something to do with MARKETING and the fact the Google is largest marketing company in the world and has the ability to market chrome far far far more effectively than Firefox IE is crap, so Windows users seek a replacement for IE, use to their only option was Firefox. Once Chrom…

> They they take away my TreeStyle Tabs and a few other Extensions I dont care how much faster it is, FF will be removed my all my systems This is what I don't understand. What would you use instead? Do you see another vendor attempting to recreate XUL-like extensions? Built in functionality like the stuff in Vivaldi doesn't count, since those aren't extensions.

I personally would likely stick to an older version of Firefox until some other browser on the market offers similar functionality. Tree Style Tabs are the one killer feature of the Firefox ecosystem versus other major browsers, at least for my use.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#204

Post by yellowapple »

hobarrera wrote: post #197
yoasif_ wrote: post #113

There seem to be a lot of people that are saying "oh, without XUL based extensions, Firefox is just a (worse) Chrome clone, so I might as well just use Chrome." I think what they might be missing is that Mozilla's conclusion is a lot like the people seem to be thinking here -- even though Chrome doesn't have the fancy extensions that are possible in Firefox, many many more people are using Chrome than Firefox, becaus…

Chrome gained a lot of market quickly because of perceived faster speed. Note that perceived is in great part because they took effort to make it seems faster that it was (it was faster that FF at some point though, there's no denying that). Firefox is now working on well-designed speed upgrade, which will very clearly overtake Chrome. It just takes longer, due to design, and available manpower.

Chrome gained a lot of market because it was marketed well as an IE replacement. Speed was one of the features in the marketing material, yes, but speed alone is doubtful to be the reason why Chrome exploded in popularity the way it did.

I'm excited about things like Servo, too, but not if critical (to my use case) features are removed. I switched from Chromium to Firefox solely because of the existence of Tree-Style Tabs. I really hope Mozilla has a plan to preserve that workflow.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#205

Post by yellowapple »

mschuster91 wrote: post #189
st3fan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile Firefox syncs too. For years.

That does not help if you're using Chrome as your main browser, there's no cross-synchronization. Which I do because it's just way faster, and especially rogue tabs can't shoot down the entire browser including its UI. e10s might be the thing that could save FF, but I fear that it's way too late.

There actually are some cross-sync addons out there, IIRC. Or at least there were; I used to use one when I was still in the process of migrating from all-Chrome to all-Firefox.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#206

Post by yellowapple »

jdormit wrote: post #84
51Cards wrote: post #81

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…

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).

Is Vivaldi free software (as in speech, not as in beer)? Last time I gave it a serious go, it didn't seem to be (and it was buggy anyway, but that was when it was first made publicly available, so I'm sure that's improved, right?).

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#207

Post by yellowapple »

mdekkers wrote: post #164
rvern wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla created Tab Center, which is similar to Tree Style Tabs: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center .

rubbish, will also be incompatible after this change. https://github.com/bwinton/TabCenter/issues/868 Furthermore, "showing tabs on the side" is not "similar to Tree Style Tabs"

To be fair, "showing tabs on the side" is still leaps and bounds better than "yet another browser that squeezes them into the top, end to end, like a god damn maniac". :)

But yes, the "tree" part of Tree Style Tabs is essential, too.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#208

Post by yellowapple »

williamscales wrote: post #32

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.

Similarly, Conkeror (which provides Emacs rather than vi bindings) is implemented as a XUL application, so it's very likely that it, too, will die.

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#209

Post by Nadya »

syshum wrote: post #117
yoasif_ wrote: post #113

There seem to be a lot of people that are saying "oh, without XUL based extensions, Firefox is just a (worse) Chrome clone, so I might as well just use Chrome." I think what they might be missing is that Mozilla's conclusion is a lot like the people seem to be thinking here -- even though Chrome doesn't have the fancy extensions that are possible in Firefox, many many more people are using Chrome than Firefox, becaus…

>>Clearly, that has something to do with either security or performance, where Firefox has a perceived lag. This is completely false It has something to do with MARKETING and the fact the Google is largest marketing company in the world and has the ability to market chrome far far far more effectively than Firefox IE is crap, so Windows users seek a replacement for IE, use to their only option was Firefox. Once Chrom…

>TreeStyle Tabs is the the Main reason I use FF today. I dont understand why browsers have tabs horizontally across the window, it looks stupid and is unusable once you get above 20 or 30 tabs open So you talk about have 100's of tabs open, it is pointless if I do not have TreeStyle or some kind of Vertical Tabs.

I don't see why people like vertical/tree-style tabs. To me it's always seemed extremely messy. Tab groups, searching, and a scrollable context menu at any mouse position, to me, is a much smoother and faster workflow.

Ctrl+Shift+E opens up tab groups and I can begin typing to search. When both my hands are already on the keyboard, this is most convenient [0]. When my hand is already on my mouse, however, I can right click and scroll to open up a context menu of all tabs within my Tab Group [1]. I also have a mouse gesture for opening Tab Groups so that I can switch groups if necessary. I frequently have 300+ tabs open, organized into tab groups of 20-40 related tabs (mostly research/tutorials/google docs for various MMOs I play)

I was actually frozen at FF44 until the Tab Groups add-on functioned properly. And I'll likely be frozen at FF57 [2]. Sadly, my way of tab management never seemed to catch on and the add-ons that enable it soon won't be supported.

For those interested in my tab management, I use Tab Groups and Fire Gestures (almost entirely for the '[Popup] List All Tabs' feature). I bind List All Tabs to both scrolling up and scrolling down, as scrolling up is originally Tab History.

[0] https://my.mixtape.moe/tukpwo.webm

[1] https://my.mixtape.moe/gqlawp.webm

[2] http://fasezero.com/lastnotice.html

Re: I cannot continue working on my add-ons

#210

Post by chr1 »

BrendanEich wrote: post #194
chr1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking brave browser [1], or one of other electron based browsers may be a good way forward, as it will allow easy customizability of the ui, and get all the hard to maintain native parts from chromium. Mozillas browser.html project may be helpful too, but it seems to be a bit too experimental for now. [1] https://brave.com

No need to fork Brave, we will collaborate on extensions APIs as we scale. We're supporting tested chromium extensions that we curate and fetch from our own S3 (essentially a cache backed by the Chrome Web Store). For an extension to get support, we need to rank it as in-demand, and then try adding it to Brave to see what missing chrome.* APIs it might need. https://twitter.com/bravesampson is leading this charge, us…

Great to hear you are interested in colaborating on this issues. muon and react based ui is exactly why i was suggesting to use brave as a base for experimentation.

I was not talking about the type of extension that allow to do some common things based on small api created specifically for that.

I am more interested in extensions that get full access to existing react components, and can modify the browser ui in arbitrary ways, e.g. by adding splitview similar to what cloudy has, or adding proper tabs on mobile instead of carousel.

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