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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

#261

Post by ytugiuyghvk »

ripdog wrote: post #212
ytugiuyghvk wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Is the Lookupbar (Alt+Del) possible to do with WebExtensions? I think it would have to be recreated in the DOM and inserted into the web page.

There's nothing difficult or complex (or unsupported) about inserting content into web pages. The main limitation of webextensions is that free-form UI modification is no longer possible, the UI can only be modded in specific, allowed ways.

No, but there are several reasons it is suboptimal here.

The lookupbar is associated with the window chrome (ie. there is one per window). Inserting it into the DOM requires emulating this behavior by synthesizing one "bar" in each tab, adding and deleting them at the right time, etc.

Inserted content always has the possibility of interacting poorly with the scripts and styles of the underlying page (or other extensions). Rikai-chan already has problems where its overlays will end of underneath page content.

Inserted content goes below the line of death (https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/). There are other minor deficiencies: you can't get the browser's theme on the bar, etc.

For Rikai-chan, it seems like it'd be nice to allow the background script to write to a page that sits on top of the space that shows the actual page and have the content scripts communicate what should be rendered. AFAIK, the only ways to show something on the screen is to either send it to the content scripts and have them modify the DOMs, or show it in a popup for a button.

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

#262

Post by oblio »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #246
kibwen wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Firefox is less secure and slower because (drumroll, please...) the major architectural changes required to improve on those fronts is completely stymied by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility for addons. Firefox is at last forced to decide between being a bad but very extensible browser or a (hopefully) good but less extensible browser. IMO, the choice is pretty obvious.

But chrome is already a great and less extensible browser, which is the point. If chrome is great and less extensible, and Firefox is good and less extensible, there's little reason to use Firefox unless you just don't like Google.

Firefox's "less extensible" seems to be "more extensible" than Chrome's.

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

#263

Post by kuschku »

GraemeLion wrote: post #251
kuschku wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'r…

For me, I have requested the same since the beginning — just allow me to modify the UI with a markup language.

Or I'll fork, merge all upstream patches down, and work with that.

Currently I have to rely on the AutoHiDPI addon because firefox is otherwise unusable on my system (linux with two screens with very different DPIs).

I also asked for a way to get tab thumbnails done, and to replace the entire bookmark and omnibar system.

But no. Now I'll have to fork Firefox to get a usable browser.

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

#264

Post by Kubuxu »

GraemeLion wrote: post #251
kuschku wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'r…

Yup, this is one of the developers that took it serious [0]. You can see, he started preparing in August of 2015. If other developers did that, this info wouldn't be a problem.

[0]: https://github.com/lidel/ipfs-firefox-addon/issues/20

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

#265

Post by Kubuxu »

mook wrote: post #131
detaro wrote: post #17

November 14th. I really hope they get the promised additional APIs in order until then, but it seems like a really short time (given how they are not 1:1 Chrome yet last I checked). I personally don't mind the switch to much (since I really want better performance, and the beginning of e10s has helped, and I don't care much about non-trivial add-ons), but it's clear the promise of "We'll make new APIs for add-ons tha…

Getting the APIs in place isn't enough, though; there needs to be time for the addons to adapt too (or for new addons to show up to replace the old ones). I'm not sure they have planned enough time for that to happen, but time will tell.

The change was first announced in August 2015 [0]. Some developers decided to ignore all warnings and now the Mozilla is the bad guy.

[0]: 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

#266

Post by richardboegli »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #77
richardboegli wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Pale Moon. It has Tree Style Tabs and will continue to even after Firefox gets rid of XUL

Been a happy Pale Moon user for a while. I hope the project keeps ticking on.

It is going strong and with Firefox removing XUL it is going to get stronger.

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

#267

Post by JohnTHaller »

VoxPelli wrote: post #107
JohnTHaller wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only about 250,000 users use the tab modification extensions that people keep claiming is Firefox's only advantage out of 10s of millions of Firefox users. Addons that greatly alter Firefox's behavior are the main reason for crashes. And maintaining XUL is hampering Firefox future development.

There are plenty of add-ons that extend or alter the UI of tabs. There's eg. 780,000 users of Tab Mix Plus according to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/

I forgot about TMP. Even so, that's still not a ton of users in terms of the total Firefox users. Plus, I'd wager a large percentage of those are TMP legacy users. Way back in the day, TMP was the only way to properly manage sessions and tabs. Firefox now has full session management and you can reload, pin, undo close, close other tabs, and move tabs around to your heart's content. Heck, the most recent review of the extension even says as much.

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

#268

Post by fuzzy2 »

sychophant wrote: post #133
fuzzy2 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, that’s pretty much the other extreme. It doesn’t support Web Extensions or even Add-on SDK extensions.

Do you use any indispensable add-ons that are Web Extension based?

No. However, I am the developer of "Download Cleaner", which is made using Add-on SDK. I think it's a great solution to get started without learning XUL.

I'm sure they had their reasons for deciding what they did. I still think it's a bad decision.

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

#269

Post by GraemeLion »

imron wrote: post #3

I use Firefox because of 2 things: 1) vimperator 2) single process handling multiple tabs (I typically have upwards of 40 tabs open at a time) Firefox is in the process of removing plugins like 1) so that it makes it possible to remove 2). Wonderful.

Firefox is not removing those plugins.

Vimperator has an issue in it's github referring to e10s and webextensions from 2015. It was commented upon a few times through 2015, more in 2016, and obviously more now. Nobody ever started moving forward. Only 10 days ago, a different issue was opened with regards to porting to an entirely new codebase for vimperator that uses WebExtension. They just now are talking about getting in touch with Mozilla for API requests.

Mind you, a year plus ago, multiple mozilla developers were holding office hours blocked out in the day to explicitly talk to e10s and webextension developers. It got scaled back because nobody ever talked to them and paid developers cannot be paid to do nothing for hours at a time when nobody calls in/emails/etc.

Meanwhile OTHER plugins HAVE taken this seriously, but not a lot of them. Certainly not enough. And yes, that means that you are going to have those plugins lose compatibility. But that's not firefox's fault. Mozilla has done everything they can do to help this transition, including paying people to help, pushing it back multiple times, giving numerous conferences, opening up api requests, and communicating on most every forum available on the internet.

It's on the plugin developers now. That's where your anger should be. Not on the company that is doing, finally, what it said it'd do numerous years ago.

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

#270

Post by hutzlibu »

beerbaron23 wrote: post #227
hackuser wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome ... I understand that this is your experience, but what is the basis for saying this is generally true? It's not my experience; theoretically, can't I also say my experience is generally true?

> it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome ... See that's some odd misinformation that's been spread around since Chrome first was released, it was the fastest browser at the time. Well since then, Chrome and Firefox have been going back and forth on which is the fastest. At this moment Firefox is a good margin faster than Chrome since their Electrolysis upda…

"Well since then, Chrome and Firefox have been going back and forth on which is the fastest. At this moment Firefox is a good margin faster than Chrome since their Electrolysis update." In benchmarks, yes.

But in the real world, with many different tabs open, where one badly designed website could screw up your whole surfing experience, not so much.

Even thoug it is possible that they fied that behavior by now. I don't know, because since that repeatedly happened, I switched to chrome.

edit: oh and about specific performance I know and care about at the moment, because I work with those technologies is that: http://kripken.github.io/box2d.js/webgl_demo/box2d.html?500

On my system (Archlinux) chromium runs much faster than firefox.

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