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Extensions in Firefox 59

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#31

Post by floatboth »

scrollaway wrote: post #27

Anyone working on this reading the thread? Can we ever expect an extension that will allow the far better tab management that Chrome has? Namely: Being able to scroll between tabs with the scroll wheel, and being able to select multiple tabs with shift/ctrl to drag them/merge them/close them/etc. It's crazy to me that Firefox's original selling point was tab management, and today Chrome's is so much better.

I think you could always scroll between tabs with the wheel in Firefox?

TIL about ctrl selection in Chrome. I bet most people didn't know that either.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#32

Post by vesinisa »

nextos wrote: post #28
msbarnett wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, totally disagree. Instant-persistent-on is a much better and more intuitive experience than old "Cancel, Apply, Ok" settings paradigms.

Oh no, persistency is great. But the problem is how non-functional their implementation is. Say I write a user.js file with a few options. I can't have the typical dotfile model, where removing options from this file will lead to defaults on the next run. I need to unset them. Explicitly. Thus, using a dot file to set up Firefox (user.js) is incredibly clunky and people don't use this much.

Firefox actually retains all the default values for the preferences, and bolds the ones that are set to non-default values.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#33

Post by nathcd »

I have a tangential question for anyone who might know more about tab stuff than me.

Awhile ago, I looked into making Firefox not do any tab management. Basically, always have one tab per window, middle click always opens a new window, normal click always opens a page in the current tab. (I'd like to do tab management with my window manager instead of browser so I can have a consistent tabbing interface across all of my applications.)

The few results I found googling around seemed to be mostly along the lines of "change these 14 prefs in about:preferences, install this addon to stop target:_blank, add these userstyles to hide the tabbar, don't open any internal FF pages, and check back with every new browser version".

Am I missing something that would make this easier, or is this really a thing that's just not really feasible? I can certainly understand that it's not a priority since almost no one needs to disable tabbing, but it also doesn't seem like that farfetched of a use case, nor would I imagine it would require much work to support.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#34

Post by seanwilson »

If you have an existing Chrome extension that relies on just the WebRequest API, how much effort is it to port to Firefox? Do things generally work without significant modifications? Are there lots of gotchas and small differences?

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#35

Post by dbdr »

> pageActions can now be shown and/or hidden automatically for specific pages via pattern matching using the “hide_matches” and “show_matches” manifest properties. This is a nice performance win for users.

When writing an extension that shows a page action only for certain domains/URLs, this allows to replace about 15 lines of javascript code with a single line in manifest.json. Nice!

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#36

Post by Ciantic »

nathcd wrote: post #33

I have a tangential question for anyone who might know more about tab stuff than me. Awhile ago, I looked into making Firefox not do any tab management. Basically, always have one tab per window, middle click always opens a new window, normal click always opens a page in the current tab. (I'd like to do tab management with my window manager instead of browser so I can have a consistent tabbing interface across all of…

I have not done it but it's probably doable with extension too.

When `tabs.onCreated` event is triggered, move the tab out of the window if it has more than one tab.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP... (onCreated)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP... (windows.create see tabId param)

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#37

Post by nicoburns »

orev wrote: post #30
kbenson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referring to? The containers addon does grouping, sorting, color coding, auto group association, and sandboxed cookies. Is there something else you're looking for?

No, the old Tab Groups extension does something different. It allows you to switch between different groups like you can switch between virtual desktops.

I beleive the additions in this release should enable that... there's an extension called konex (or is it conex) which I believe does just this.

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#38

Post by zbraniecki »

scrollaway wrote: post #27

Anyone working on this reading the thread? Can we ever expect an extension that will allow the far better tab management that Chrome has? Namely: Being able to scroll between tabs with the scroll wheel, and being able to select multiple tabs with shift/ctrl to drag them/merge them/close them/etc. It's crazy to me that Firefox's original selling point was tab management, and today Chrome's is so much better.

There's a bug filed to allow for multitab operations and it got assigned not long ago - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=566510

I doubt it'll be in Fx60, but maybe son after? :)

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#39

Post by hartator »

nathcd wrote: post #33

I have a tangential question for anyone who might know more about tab stuff than me. Awhile ago, I looked into making Firefox not do any tab management. Basically, always have one tab per window, middle click always opens a new window, normal click always opens a page in the current tab. (I'd like to do tab management with my window manager instead of browser so I can have a consistent tabbing interface across all of…

Interesting. What do you use for tab management on the OS level?

Re: Extensions in Firefox 59

#40

Post by JohnTHaller »

kibwen wrote: post #4

Happy to see that Mozilla was serious about their intentions to extend the WebExtensions API in post-57 Firefox. I'm also happily surprised at the section about user notification of extension overrides; having a nice UI for this sort of thing is a difficult yet worthwhile problem (and I'm also a big fan of the new Preferences tab in general, it works far better than the old popup window). Hopefully some of this will…

It's funny that vimperator is mentioned every single time Firefox extensions are brought up on HN even though it only has about 11,000 users out of the hundreds of millions that use Firefox.
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