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

blog.mozilla.org

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

#301

Post by hutzlibu »

beerbaron23 wrote: post #287
hutzlibu wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Well since then, Chrome and Firefox have been going back and forth on which is the fastest. At this moment Firefox is a good margin faster than Chrome since their Electrolysis update." In benchmarks, yes. But in the real world, with many different tabs open, where one badly designed website could screw up your whole surfing experience, not so much. Even thoug it is possible that they fied that behavior by now. I don…

Yah and that's why I included 3 very real world heavy benchmarks that run random multiple real world usage patterns for extended periods of time. An those were the benchmarks that Firefox pulled a head of the pack by a large margin. The basic Java Benchmarks like Sunspider and Ocatane that useless tech sites use to compare the browsers test nothing more then the Java engines of the browsers, pushing numbers while omi…

And thanks for the hints, I will look into that ...

" cause at the moment Firefox is almost 4x as fast as Chromium on WebGL2 Unity3D."

That sounds like asm bonus in Firefox .. and not yet activated wasm in chrome ... So that might change, as soon Unity can compile to wasm. (or do they that allready?) But nevertheless, it's good to hear that Firefox still can shine ...

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

#302

Post by josteink »

pvg wrote: post #297
josteink wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the most secure browser available. That's a not a 'might be legitimate' use case. It may be Jesus on a popsicle, but I'm not going to trust something distributed via drive-by-installers, marketed through SPAM and made by the world's biggest data-hoarder and privacy-invader no matter what. It's adware/malware short and simple. Make it 100% FOSS. Remove any technical connection to Google. Don't require Google-lo…

So, like https://www.chromium.org/Home Personally, I'd at definitely consider using Jesus on a popsicle, if the opportunity arose, just to see what it's like. Not that it has so far, sadly.

Chromium still requires you to log into a google account and share your private data with google to sync.

Definitely not an option.

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

#303

Post by Kubuxu »

stewbrew wrote: post #284
Kubuxu wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The change was first announced in August 2015 [0]. Some developers decided to ignore all warnings and now the Mozilla is the bad guy. [0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

Because the required APIs don't exist maybe?

Then they should work with FF team to get those APIs. Many developers just ignored it.

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

#304

Post by replete »

This is terrible!

One of Firefox great features are the add-ons that change the _browser_ experience itself.

I NEED TileTabs, ColorTabs, and a few others that would stop working after this change.

Yes, I understand the ideology of browsers being invisible to the content, but what about our users? I don't think people understand that these add-ons are really productivity tools that aren't otherwise available.

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

#305

Post by replete »

replete wrote: post #304

This is terrible! One of Firefox great features are the add-ons that change the _browser_ experience itself. I NEED TileTabs, ColorTabs, and a few others that would stop working after this change. Yes, I understand the ideology of browsers being invisible to the content, but what about our users? I don't think people understand that these add-ons are really productivity tools that aren't otherwise available.

Power users*.

I guess we're gonna have a fork of Firefox. Pointless.

Would be better to just deprecate it by default and enable via a flag.

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

#306

Post by trome »

Kubuxu wrote: post #264
GraemeLion wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partially because when Mozilla initially said "XUL is going away, what do you guys need?" Everyone just laughed at them and said "No, it's not, you'll never replace it because it is too important in extensions", and then all went away. Where are the specs for what replaces it supposed to come from? And when they asked for those specs and got little answers, what were they supposed to do? Run around screaming "No we'r…

Yup, this is one of the developers that took it serious [0]. You can see, he started preparing in August of 2015. If other developers did that, this info wouldn't be a problem. [0]: https://github.com/lidel/ipfs-firefox-addon/issues/20

IPFS is a one off though, it has multiple paid developers who can spend their full time rewriting their addons at the drop of a hat. Plus that IPFS addon didn't require deep access to Firefox's internals, which many popular addons do.

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

#307

Post by kuschku »

GraemeLion wrote: post #278
kuschku wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I have requested the same since the beginning — just allow me to modify the UI with a markup language. Or I'll fork, merge all upstream patches down, and work with that. Currently I have to rely on the AutoHiDPI addon because firefox is otherwise unusable on my system (linux with two screens with very different DPIs). I also asked for a way to get tab thumbnails done, and to replace the entire bookmark and om…

Did you request this with your plugin/addon developers, or with mozilla yourself through their many methods of contact for this if you are a plugin/addon developer? I don't get why addon/plugin developers not communicating upstream is the problem of upstream.

I communicated it through the bugtracker comments and the comments on the Mozilla blog.

On every announcement regarding this for the past months.

I’ve not gotten any answer, nor has any solution been implemented or suggested.

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

#308

Post by kuschku »

callahad wrote: post #295
kuschku wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, can I use that to add Tab Thumbnails to Firefox? Can I use it to port AutoHiDPI, which changes the scale of the UI depending on which screen the window is on? Can I use this to replace the entire browser history system and omnibar autocomplete with a custom one? Can I use this to replace the entire browser chrome? Some of these changes I need (AutoHiDPI) to use a browser at all. Others I wish for. All of them I c…

Replacing the entire browser chrome is unlikely to happen on the release channel of Firefox, but everything else has potential. Generally, the way forward will be to use WebExtension Experiments ( https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/i... ), which let you run classic-style "bootstrapped" add-ons in Firefox Developer Edition or Nightly. The intended use is for prototyping new WebExtension APIs fo…

That’d require a lot of work from me – at this point it would be easier for me just to switch to Vivaldi, or hardcode my fixes as patches into Firefox itself.

In fact, the per-screen HiDPI setting even has an environment variable on most Linux systems (Qt’s QT_SCALE_FACTORS), but Firefox completely ignores that.

I don’t have the time anymore to rewrite half the UI stack of every single application I use, and then take over maintenance of that. I’ve done that with a few open source projects, but my time is limited. And if I wanted to implement extending the UI properly, I’d definitely have to rewrite the entire stack, similar to what Browser.html does.

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

#309

Post by pvg »

hackuser wrote: post #298
pvg wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox started well before Seamonkey was spun out, and they continued with Thunderbird anyway. But the details of the history of the ambitions don't matter, what matters is that these architectural decisions were made a long, long time ago but their consequences are still there. You can decide you're not going make an app suite, that doesn't magically re-architect the internals of the product you have. Take a look a…

> You can decide you're not going make an app suite, that doesn't magically re-architect the internals of the product you have. I'm not sure how that applies. Firefox wasn't magic; Mozilla rewrote their browser intentionally and put a lot of resources into it. > Firefox started well before Seamonkey was spun out My understanding of that statement is that they didn't drop the old product until the new one was succeedi…

Firefox wasn't magic; Mozilla rewrote their browser intentionally and put a lot of resources into it.

No no, they didn't. Firefox and Mozilla (and even later versions of Netscape) share the same architectural underpinnings. That's sort of the intent and cleverness of it, it's really an entire system for writing cross-platform apps, with its own 'language independent' component model, gui layer, etc. The things that made Firefox possible also made all-powerful Firefox extensions possible. Much of that architecture is still around. In the intervening years, it's become obvious this is not necessarily a good way to build a browser. Which is why they are dropping XUL/XPCOM extensions. If they'd 'rewritten' it, they wouldn't need to do that.

My understanding of that statement is that they didn't drop the old product until the new one was succeeding in the marketplace.

I'm talking about common architecture, not products. If you're unfamiliar with it, just scroll through this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPCOM

If you are familiar with it, I guess I don't understand what your objection is.

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

#310

Post by pvg »

josteink wrote: post #302
pvg wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, like https://www.chromium.org/Home Personally, I'd at definitely consider using Jesus on a popsicle, if the opportunity arose, just to see what it's like. Not that it has so far, sadly.

Chromium still requires you to log into a google account and share your private data with google to sync. Definitely not an option.

To sync what? I use Chrome and never log into a non-web google account. In fact, I'm able to browse the web without 'syncing' anything.
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