I will badly miss vimperator. Yeah 56.0 works smoothly but without ability to use keyboard only that's hollow victory for me.
Typing this in vim after viewing hackers news in w3m shows how desperate I am.
Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
11–20 of 190 posts
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately that's also where I'll stop during at least a few months after Firefox 57 is released. Quantum is ultra fast, but my extensions are more important. Greasemonkey and Stylish, for example, have equivalent WebExtensions, but they're not as polished. Same with DownThemAll. I think WebExtensions should have matured a bit longer, with Quantum, electrolysis, and Photon being made available for all with the old…
You can't have your cake and eat it too. I'm fairly sure that if the Firefox developer team could support XUL with the new internals, they would (just look at the insane backlash for a source of motivation). But they didn't, and there must be a reason. Likely it's due to how integrated XUL is with the internals of Firefox and that couldn't gel with the Rust rewrites.
It's because of the killer combo of increased sandboxing, multi-process architecture and performance constraints.
I think they couldn't keep everything together with the degree of access old plugins had to Firefox internals. So at some point they had to rip off the band aid.
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#13NoScript is identified as a "legacy" extension. But it's the only one I use or care about. Hopefully it will be rewritten to work properly?
To me, NoScript is sine qua non. It's the primary differentiating factor between Firefox and other browsers.
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately that's also where I'll stop during at least a few months after Firefox 57 is released. Quantum is ultra fast, but my extensions are more important. Greasemonkey and Stylish, for example, have equivalent WebExtensions, but they're not as polished. Same with DownThemAll. I think WebExtensions should have matured a bit longer, with Quantum, electrolysis, and Photon being made available for all with the old…
You can't have your cake and eat it too. I'm fairly sure that if the Firefox developer team could support XUL with the new internals, they would (just look at the insane backlash for a source of motivation). But they didn't, and there must be a reason. Likely it's due to how integrated XUL is with the internals of Firefox and that couldn't gel with the Rust rewrites.
Oh I totally understand why Mozilla did what they did. It was the logical step to make Chrome addons available on Firefox, abandon the structure XUL imposed, and migrate to Servo-based components. But while they promised a better WebExtension standard (which I defended at the time), they didn't deliver. They needed more time to improve the API and make sure the most used extensions were ready[1]. Developers needed more time too to totally change the architecture of their addons.
And today, they're not ready. And they won't be in six weeks either.
[1] https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/
Edit: [1] answers "Are we WebExtensions yet?" as Yes. I don't agree.
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#15NoScript is identified as a "legacy" extension. But it's the only one I use or care about. Hopefully it will be rewritten to work properly? To me, NoScript is sine qua non. It's the primary differentiating factor between Firefox and other browsers.
There is javascript.enabled key in about:config that _seems_ to be working as expected but setting it manually every time is a chore.
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#16I will badly miss vimperator. Yeah 56.0 works smoothly but without ability to use keyboard only that's hollow victory for me. Typing this in vim after viewing hackers news in w3m shows how desperate I am.
It's so niche i don't think they will bother.
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#17> Firefox Quantum’s new engine uses 30% less memory than Chrome This is a pretty appealing claim. I'm ashamed to admit that one thing that might keep me on Chrome is the trove of passwords in my sync'd up account. But I'll definitely give Quantum a test drive.
I was like that a few months back, but then I started using 1password to centralize all my passwords (and for security obviously). Makes switching browsers much easier, especially because (I think) Firefox doesn't use OSX's Keychain.
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#18NoScript is identified as a "legacy" extension. But it's the only one I use or care about. Hopefully it will be rewritten to work properly? To me, NoScript is sine qua non. It's the primary differentiating factor between Firefox and other browsers.
It's being migrated: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/08/01/noscripts-migrati...
There's also uMatrix as a replacement.
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#19> Firefox Quantum’s new engine uses 30% less memory than Chrome This is a pretty appealing claim. I'm ashamed to admit that one thing that might keep me on Chrome is the trove of passwords in my sync'd up account. But I'll definitely give Quantum a test drive.
You can export passwords from Google: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/07/10/google-chrome-password-exp... It may also be possible through the data portability site. You can also see them by going to https://passwords.google.com
And also good to know is that Firefox can do syncing just fine.
Re: Firefox 56: Last Stop Before Quantum
#20> Firefox Quantum’s new engine uses 30% less memory than Chrome This is a pretty appealing claim. I'm ashamed to admit that one thing that might keep me on Chrome is the trove of passwords in my sync'd up account. But I'll definitely give Quantum a test drive.
Same here, I have both Firefox nightly and safari but I tend to use safari more still...