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

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.

I get that there are a lot of people here who are really concerned that, without XUL and XPCOM, there will no longer be a reason to choose Firefox over Chrome.

What I think they overlook is that, right now, it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome that no one will take such a recommendation seriously.

I've been using Firefox since back when it was still called Phoenix. I intend to go on using Firefox for as long as it still exists. But it's been a struggle, these last few years. Having to kick over a primary application platform, losing effectively all state save what programs are running, and reboot it every day or two, because otherwise it gets so slow that it's entirely unusable, gets real old real fast. People like to make jokes about Emacs, but even it doesn't do this! My Emacs sessions last months, and die only when the machine loses power or I hose up the environment so badly while experimenting that it becomes unrecoverable without a reboot. And Emacs is thirty years old.

I don't want to switch to Chrome. Its UI sucks and I'm no fan of Google. But if Firefox keeps getting worse, I'll have to. So I am absolutely delighted to see Mozilla making real and tangible progress toward solving that problem. If doing so means deprecating an ancient plugin API that's in any case dangerous and hard to use, I'm fine with that, especially since there is no reason in the world to believe that its replacement will not eventually gain back most of the relatively few capabilities we're losing in the deprecation. Maybe I won't be able to customize context menus for a while. That's fine, if the browser regains the usability it's lost over the last ten or so years.

I understand not everyone agrees with this point of view. That's not a problem. But I should not like this point of view entirely overlooked by those currently proclaiming the imminent death of Firefox.

Chromium isn't, either.

But the extension flexibility was one of the major points for me.

I'll have to pin Firefox to 56.x in my package manager.

I am wondering if I'm lucky but my foxes are always fast, even with 100 tabs. Both on Linux and Windows boxes. You are not the first one who complained about the speed here, so I am wondering whether our difference is due to bad luck or good luck.

I'm extremely worried about Rikai-chan/sama.

Rikaichan allows translation of Japanese words simply by hovering your mouse over. It works much better than entering words into an online dictionary, since nearly every free JE-EJ dictionary uses the same source, and if a conjugation isn't translatable it will cut the word off giving the meaning and then letting you easily highlight the conjugation to figure out the meaning of the two together. Its just much faster than using something like jisho.org if theres a lot of words in a text you don't know. Rikaisama makes Rikaichan even more powerful with a lot of extra features

Everytime I've ever tried the similar plug-ins on Chrome they've all been terrible, missing words, missing conjugation, or just being slow in general. Its the first check I do every time I think about switching browsers.

However with the new Electrolysis on Firefox its completely broken and it seems like the dev might not want to do a rewrite since the plugin works exactly how you would want it and has for a few years now, but especially not if the sandbox changes make the plugin impossible to work.