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Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

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Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#251

Post by GraemeLion »

kuschku wrote: post #250
GraemeLion wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is not a secret. This has been discussed repeatedly for at least 5 years now. The current XUL methodology CANNOT sustain, and everyone knew this. But everyone also knew Mozilla was famous for putting off being confrontational, so nobody actually thought this was going to happen, so nobody really communicated with mozilla on what would be needed to avoid this happening. Now Mozilla has finally set a date (whi…

> The current XUL methodology CANNOT sustain, and everyone knew this. Yet we still don't have a replacement for even a tenth of what it could do today! Once Firefox 57 is released, I'll lose the ability to use Firefox at all, and won't be able to regain it for several years. Just because no one though to consider what APIs one might have to provide before deprecating the old ones.

Partially because when Mozilla initially said "XUL is going away, what do you guys need?" Everyone just laughed at them and said "No, it's not, you'll never replace it because it is too important in extensions", and then all went away.

Where are the specs for what replaces it supposed to come from? And when they asked for those specs and got little answers, what were they supposed to do? Run around screaming "No we're serious this time, we really are going to drop this, and we really need you guys to work on getting requirements voiced? And also it'd be great if you took us seriously about e10s too!"

One of my favorite extensions is vimperator. There are comments going back over a YEAR that there would be problems with e10s and XUL, and they were always just pushed off and ignored because it wasn't a current situation. I've got two or three other extensions whose github issues section mirrors the same situation. Some of them thought Mozilla would put in a "allow me to run dangerous addons" button and leave the code in play, but if add on developers can do that, then malicious add on developers can too.

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#252

Post by jdlshore »

4bpp wrote: post #248
jdlshore wrote: post #206

Okay, I read through the entire comment tree and I didn't see a single top-level comment explaining why they're doing this. So I'm going to give it a shot. If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up. This is because Firefox's UI uses the…

Thanks for the lengthy explanation, but my impression is that most people's assessments in here are of the form "Firefox is slow, but it has better addons". The choice you present therefore actually boils down to A) Continue being slow and have better addons; B) Become fast at the expense of worse addons (probably worse than Chrome rather than merely the same, as more users generally means more developers). Is it rea…

> Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage...?

That's the bet-the-company question, isn't it? Only history will tell, but I think the judgement of Mozilla in this matter is better than that of the commenters on this website, who have less data, represent a minority of users, and are prone to complaining.

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#253

Post by jacquesm »

ordinary wrote: post #215
jacquesm wrote: post #78

Is there a quick way to check whether or not specific add-ons are supported in the new version? I'm addicted to tree based tabs (100's of them open at the same time) and Scrapbook. Without those two I would have a very hard time to get through my workday.

Here's a list: https://arewee10syet.com/

Scrapbook: unknown :(. Thank you!

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#254

Post by 4bpp »

jdlshore wrote: post #252
4bpp wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the lengthy explanation, but my impression is that most people's assessments in here are of the form "Firefox is slow, but it has better addons". The choice you present therefore actually boils down to A) Continue being slow and have better addons; B) Become fast at the expense of worse addons (probably worse than Chrome rather than merely the same, as more users generally means more developers). Is it rea…

> Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage...? That's the bet-the-company question, isn't it? Only history will tell, but I think the judgement of Mozilla in this matter is better than that of the commenters on this website, who have less data, represent a minority of users, and are prone to complaining.

What evidence, short of Mozilla going ahead with it and Firefox market share tanking over the course of a few months, would be sufficient to persuade you that this is a bad move?

(I do imagine that there should at least be ample precedent out there for the "management of ~10% market share company decides to sacrifice strong point of its own product to pursue the strong point of the market leader instead" pattern. I can think of several failed examples, but no successful ones - are there any? If not, I believe that should count as evidence that this is a common bias in company judgement.)

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#255

Post by pseudalopex »

jdlshore wrote: post #206

Okay, I read through the entire comment tree and I didn't see a single top-level comment explaining why they're doing this. So I'm going to give it a shot. If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up. This is because Firefox's UI uses the…

WebExtensions are multiprocess-compatible by design, but so are Jetpack SDK extensions unless they use certain APIs. The main rationale for WebExtensions was to make it easier for extensions to support multiple browsers -- implicitly, because new extensions were increasingly Chrome-first or Chrome-only.[1]

The problem is less the end goal and more how Mozilla is handling the transition. Developers have identified missing APIs, but they don't know when or if they'll be implemented.

Option D: Define "good enough" in terms of specific features. Tell developers they'll have six months after that to migrate. Put out an ESR that fully supports both old and new APIs to give users a smooth transition. If you don't have the resources to do that, explain the tradeoffs in detail and apologize profusely.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#256

Post by jdlshore »

4bpp wrote: post #254
jdlshore wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage...? That's the bet-the-company question, isn't it? Only history will tell, but I think the judgement of Mozilla in this matter is better than that of the commenters on this website, who have less data, represent a minority of users, and are prone to complaining.

What evidence, short of Mozilla going ahead with it and Firefox market share tanking over the course of a few months, would be sufficient to persuade you that this is a bad move? (I do imagine that there should at least be ample precedent out there for the "management of ~10% market share company decides to sacrifice strong point of its own product to pursue the strong point of the market leader instead" pattern. I c…

Market data from a reputable source, preferably one with extensive experience in the browser market, showing:

a) Favoring extensions over browsing experience (rendering speed, jank, etc) is likely to improve Mozilla's market share.

b) Market-relevant extensions are not going to be ported to WebExtensions.

Speculation and personal preference is not persuasive.

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#257

Post by tw04 »

exceptione wrote: post #12

Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of les…

There are still tons of technical people (myself included) who use Chrome because Firefox became bad. The only reason I even have Firefox installed at this point is for extensions like DownThemAll - which will disappear after this move.

The years of firefox memory leaks completely turned me off the product.

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#258

Post by jdlshore »

Royalaid wrote: post #213
jdlshore wrote: post #206

Okay, I read through the entire comment tree and I didn't see a single top-level comment explaining why they're doing this. So I'm going to give it a shot. If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up. This is because Firefox's UI uses the…

This seems to have been poorly communicated by the Mozilla team and it is a shame bevause e10s is a a real improvement

They originally announced this plan, along with the reasons, in August 2015:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#259

Post by 4bpp »

jdlshore wrote: post #256
4bpp wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence, short of Mozilla going ahead with it and Firefox market share tanking over the course of a few months, would be sufficient to persuade you that this is a bad move? (I do imagine that there should at least be ample precedent out there for the "management of ~10% market share company decides to sacrifice strong point of its own product to pursue the strong point of the market leader instead" pattern. I c…

Market data from a reputable source, preferably one with extensive experience in the browser market, showing: a) Favoring extensions over browsing experience (rendering speed, jank, etc) is likely to improve Mozilla's market share. b) Market-relevant extensions are not going to be ported to WebExtensions. Speculation and personal preference is not persuasive.

Regarding b): at least the author of DownThemAll!, which has ~1.2m users per [1] (which makes it the non-adblocker plugin with the highest number of users I can find), has come out saying they won't [2].

...and regarding a), I don't think that's all there is - FOSS projects at this point have a quite long track record of changes that were championed by the marketing crowd over the skepticism and outright opposition of the "fanatic techies" of the kind found here, such as KDE's Plasma Mobile and Mozilla's own phone OS, which turned out dead in the water exactly as the "unrepresentative" crowd expected.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/downthemall/

[2] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-addons/2016-December/...

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#260

Post by Certhas »

exceptione wrote: post #71
lucideer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree generally with your points, but this doesn't really address the issues being criticised in comments here. I want to use Firefox (I do currently use Firefox, despite a lot of limitations), but there comes a tipping point where the balance of privacy (and apparent "user-interest") and actual usability and power leads to a not-so-good proposition. Someone has commented above that it seems like Mozilla management…

I can't rule that out either. It might be that it is in Googles best interest to kill firefox. Here is an alternative view I have in mind. The strategy to mimick chrome makes sense, because the masses think this is how the browser -- or as they call it the "internet" -- should look like. Its imho feasible to launch a television and internet campaign promoting firefox after the transition by stressing the privacy qual…

Also remember that for years people have crucified Firefox for being technically inferior to Chrome. They claim to just use the better browser. And the technical argument they are making, that having so much of the browser exposed made keeping up so much harder (with multi process just rolling out now), makes a lot of sense.

Looking at the decisions made maybe the problem is that they made the multiprocess jump first. If they had said two years ago: we are going multiprocess and we need to deprecate XUL plug ins to do so, it would have gone over a lot better.

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