101–110 of 132 posts
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who on earth is downvoting my comments and why? when the developers involved with Selenium suddenly decide to just drop a browser for one of their sub-projects then this might very well indicate a trend - even if it's just that firefox is less actively supported in future.
https://xkcd.com/605/
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Only about 20% of Firefox add-ons have been converted to WebExtension format. One of the headaches is that access to local storage is asynchronous (in the "promise" sense) in WebExtensions. As a result, if you want something based on stored data such as a stored script or a blocklist to happen early, during page load, you can't get it to run soon enough. This breaks Greasemonkey[1] and NoScript.[2] WebExtensions need…
The 20% figure doesn't say that much - you'd need to know how many of the extensions used most often are ported. I can very much imagine there being a long tail of extensions that nobody uses. Also take into account how many Chrome extensions are ported over now that it's easy. For example, the only extension I use that won't get ported over is VimFx, but Vimium has now become available which does exactly the things…
Unfortunately 75%+ of the most used extensions either arnt ported, wont be ported, or cant be ported.
The situation is pretty grim, mozilla really needs to delay this move, web extensions arnt capable of supporting the functionality lots of these addons require, and its not like XUL is even going away in the near/midterm, this is purely an administrative decision.
If they plow forward anyways its going to really, really hurt firefox.
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Firefox is way faster than what? IE6?
Firefox nightly, which will end up as FF57, uses less memory than Chrome and is faster. (Windows, x64). One of the reasons this was possible was disabling the old extension system. Does it hurt? Sure. Was it needed? Yes.
I'm getting the impression that a lot of extension developers are not just complaining about these changes but also making the decision to shut down their development. Feels like it could be pretty bad news for Firefox.
Maybe instead of "will not be fixed" the headline should say "contributors needed?"
I'm getting the impression that a lot of extension developers are not just complaining about these changes but also making the decision to shut down their development. Feels like it could be pretty bad news for Firefox.
I believe that this was communicated by the Firefox team more than a year ago, so it shouldn't be news to anyone who have been maintaining their extension(s). For all those people who developed something and then moved on to something else, it may seem like that year passed really quickly - and the only option left is to drop the extension.
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The 20% figure doesn't say that much - you'd need to know how many of the extensions used most often are ported. I can very much imagine there being a long tail of extensions that nobody uses. Also take into account how many Chrome extensions are ported over now that it's easy. For example, the only extension I use that won't get ported over is VimFx, but Vimium has now become available which does exactly the things…
https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/ Unfortunately 75%+ of the most used extensions either arnt ported, wont be ported, or cant be ported. The situation is pretty grim, mozilla really needs to delay this move, web extensions arnt capable of supporting the functionality lots of these addons require, and its not like XUL is even going away in the near/midterm, this is purely an administrative decision. If they plow forwa…
That said, saying it's an administrative decision really misses the point. XUL support hampers performance, slows down Firefox development, and includes security issues. Those are serious reasons for moving away from them. They might not weigh up to the benefits to you, but you can't deny that they're there.
(1) Slower & crashes more, just more UX problems on websites all around (including youtube!).
And this Selenium thing is just another example of that.
You're really crippled in what you can do in Chrome. As a compulsive hoarder of bookmarks (about 2k last time I checked), it's important for me to have a bookmarks sidebar. Chrome doesn't have one, and it's not possible to add one via an addon.
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Firefox nightly, which will end up as FF57, uses less memory than Chrome and is faster. (Windows, x64). One of the reasons this was possible was disabling the old extension system. Does it hurt? Sure. Was it needed? Yes.
Do you have any evidence this is actually true? XUL is still there, the firefox UI is still written in it and it will be for quite some time to come. I find it hard to beleive disallowing XUL extensions have significantly sped anything up.
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I dunno - I'm a very technical user and I use a pretty vanilla Firefox mostly just because I like/trust Mozilla and don't want to support the web becoming a Webkit / Chrome monoculture. The only addon I use is LastPass. They support the new extension format just fine. I'm looking forward to the architectural changes coming in Servo, etc, which WebExtensions help make possible. I can't be the only user like me.
Ditto here. I use Firefox exclusively and all of my extensions are supported - OneTab, ublock origin, Lastpass. I fail to understand the narrative of "the only thing keeping FF alive is the handful of extensions that can't be ported to Chrome". I don't think the extension API is where this battle will be fought anyway. Performance and reliability are what users care about - is the browser fast to open, are pages fast…