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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

#161

Post by choward »

Animats wrote: post #156

Firefox has 6.6% market share in browsers.[1] By the time Firefox 57 comes out, Firefox may not matter. Supporting Yahoo Search as the default didn't help. Mozilla is dropping not only the old XUL interface, but the new Jetpack/Add-on SDK interface that's only worked right for about four years. Dropping XUL make sense; the mobile version of Firefox never supported XUL anyway. But there's no reason to drop Jetpack. Th…

Yep. Having Yahoo as the default search has left a bad taste in my mouth. I accidentally used it once and it was all ads above the fold. I had to scroll to see actual search results. Never again.

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

#162

Post by falcolas »

kibwen wrote: post #101
falcolas wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be easier to write but they aren't as powerful. There are a number of examples of addons in sibling comments which won't exist any more because Mozilla wanted to make it "easier". Even PG has remarked in an essay that success isn't easy - the people who will really succeed are the ones who put in the effort to do the hard things.

Er, designing an honest-to-god specified extensions API is harder than just telling addons developers to run wild with your undocumented and unstable browser internals. Appealing to PG makes no sense here.

> designing an honest-to-god specified extensions API is harder

Of course it's hard. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

> Appealing to PG makes no sense here.

When the argument is being made that it's better to make it easier on Firefox developers at the cost of the user base, the argument made in PG's essay is pretty relevant.

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

#163

Post by delroth »

Larrikin wrote: post #150
cosarara97 wrote: post #2

IMO Firefox has just 2 things to beat Chrome: better add-ons (like treestyle tabs) and politics (made by Mozilla instead of an ads company). They are burning the first one.

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 meani…

I've been using Rikai-kun[1] on Chrome. It claims to be a port of Rikai-chan, I'm curious in which ways it's inferior (I have not tried the original Firefox addon).

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rikaikun/jipdnfibh...

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

#165

Post by ytugiuyghvk »

Larrikin wrote: post #150
cosarara97 wrote: post #2

IMO Firefox has just 2 things to beat Chrome: better add-ons (like treestyle tabs) and politics (made by Mozilla instead of an ads company). They are burning the first one.

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 meani…

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.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

kibwen wrote: post #142
McCirculaire wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it better? just the two links I'm going to give should be enough to give you pause : http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?... http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v... During 2016, Firefox had 53 code execution CVE reports. Chrome had 2 . Firefox only has around 8% of the browser marketshare. Chrome sits between 44% and 60% depending on the source. So it's not a cas…

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.

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by hackuser »

Animats wrote: post #156

Firefox has 6.6% market share in browsers.[1] By the time Firefox 57 comes out, Firefox may not matter. Supporting Yahoo Search as the default didn't help. Mozilla is dropping not only the old XUL interface, but the new Jetpack/Add-on SDK interface that's only worked right for about four years. Dropping XUL make sense; the mobile version of Firefox never supported XUL anyway. But there's no reason to drop Jetpack. Th…

I've read it is about twice that. How does one know what numbers to believe?

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

#168

Post by dang »

lisivka wrote: post #86

> And the theatre analogy is just silly. It's not like shutting down a theatre because someone got shot in it, it's like enacting a "no guns in this theatre" policy instead. "No guns here" means "Shooters, you will have zero resistance here. Enjoy!".

No flamewars on HN, please.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675485 and marked it off-topic.

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

#169

Post by lossolo »

exceptione wrote: post #12

Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of les…

Your comment is insulting, people are not "less than smart" because have different priorities or different view than you. I am using mostly Chrome because I had a lot of performance/memory usage issues with Firefox and because of security. You forget how someone got access to internal not disclosed list of vulnerabilities in Firefox?

Compare amount of code execution CVEs[0][1]

Chrome = 80

Firefox = 700!

And I don't call Firefox users stupid.

[0]http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...

[1]http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?...

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

#170

Post by aseipp »

icebraining wrote: post #56
greggman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at the CVE reports for each browser. Your taking a > 10x risk running anything other than Chrome. These changes Mozilla is making are to fix that.

If I want to reduce computing security risks I'll use a calculator. Everything else comes with tradeoffs, and for many of us, these aren't worth it.

The answer to "This piece of software has a track record of being more secure than this one, due to its design, and these changes in part help fix that disparity" IS NOT "I'm going to use a calculator now because nothing can be secure so what's the point anyway stop trying to force me to eat my dinner vegetables i'm not listening".

I don't even know why this needs to be said, because it's fairly obvious nobody on Earth actually does risk analysis this way. I mean, unless you're a programmer with some sort of brain worm infestation, who cannot read between the lines, and have an inability to understand how people in the real world do (and must) operate, clearly.

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