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Firefox 57.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#671

Post by throwanem »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #660
throwanem wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrapbook, that takes me back. Haven't used it in a dog's age. But I would be enormously surprised if it did no longer store saved content under your Firefox profile directory, and back when I used it, it just saved the files there and maybe did some link rewriting. Not really a lot of importing necessary to view the content outside the extension - you'd just need to point a browser at its file:// URL. Not sure how m…

Today I spent some time looking at how ScrapBook stores information. It's a bit of a mixed bag, with some plain text files, some XML, some HTML (besides the saved pages themselves). I managed to figure out how it stores folder structure, bookmarks, saved pages, and annotations. Fortunately there's no database, and no encryption, so I can write a tool to extract the information if needed. The remaining question become…

I'd look at the Zotero standalone, but that's just an offhand guess. Other than that, I got nothin' - except 52 ESR, which is good for security updates until some time next year, and won't get the breaking changes from 57.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#672

Post by kelnos »

nicoburns wrote: post #113
iterati wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right thing to do would have been to work on those extensions BEFORE breaking users' experience.

Totally agree with this. I think it was a mistake on Mozilla's part not to put more effort into extension parity before the switch-over. But I'm relatively optimistic for the future.

They put 8 years of effort into extension parity. At some point you end up deciding that the breakage is less important than fixing foundational problems that cause people to leave your platform in droves due to the lack of ability to fix performance and security problems.

There are a few extensions I use that have stopped working that don't have a replacement (yet?), which sucks, but the tradeoff is well worth it.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#674

Post by kelnos »

MadWombat wrote: post #609
throwanem wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the Firefox backlog? If they'd gone for 100% API parity before the switch, we'd have had to wait another three years for e10s, and I don't know if that would have been survivable. I'm not happy about the situation as it stands, and I don't expect anyone else to be. I would be a lot more not happy about having to switch to Chrome because Firefox had become unusably slow - which it had already more or les…

> I have a hard time seeing how any of that would be preferable. Not to you. But not everyone cares about the same things. I have used Firefox as my main browser ever since it split off from Mozilla Suite. Personally, I have never, in the whole history of Firefox had a problem with its speed. At various points I might have had some problems with stability, some problems with compatibility and some problems with memor…

> Personally, I have never, in the whole history of Firefox had a problem with its speed.

That's... weird. To put it nicely.

I've been using Mozilla since early in its milestone phases, and Firefox since it came out. Firefox was originally a pretty nimble browser, but fairly quickly became super slow. When Chrome came out I couldn't believe the difference in speed. Everything from UI responsiveness to rendering speed to reliability was better.

At some point I moved back to Firefox for a single reason: I had an 8GB laptop and Chrome's memory usage would balloon with the number of tabs I usually keep around, to the point that it made my laptop unusable. I lived with Firefox being much slower in general because its worst-case performance was much better than Chrome's on a memory-constrained laptop.

Since I force-enabled e10s a year or so ago things have gotten much better (despite the bugs). I still use Chrome every now and then for the odd website that chokes on some combination of Firefox plus the extensions I have installed, not to mention Chromecast support. But Firefox 57 is finally now faster than Chrome by default, and the difference is night and day. It's completely inconceivable to me that you suggest that Firefox hasn't had severe performance problems. The fact that Mozilla has been focusing so hard on perf for nearly a decade now is more than enough evidence to me that it's been a huge problem.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#675

Post by kelnos »

throwanem wrote: post #653
HelloNurse wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget the big technical issue: many web extension API features that are needed to port old Firefox extensions do not exist yet (e.g. filesystem access) or are conservatively crippled (e.g. adding buttons, menu items, other GUI elements). Your 2-3 months of frantic effort will start not immediately but in a vague future when the Firefox team feels like improving the web extension API. It is fairly obvious from AP…

"Betraying users"? 52 ESR isn't going anywhere, and I hope you'll forgive me for finding it a strain upon credulity to imagine that any regularly active HN participant could fail to observe even one of the many front-page articles over the past year which have talked about Firefox 57's breaking changes. If it means that much to you, stay on 52 for a year or two, until the extension API and ecosystem have had some tim…

> 52 ESR isn't going anywhere

In 4-5 months, ESR will be replaced by Firefox 59, and support for 52 will end shortly after.

Sure, the old version isn't "going anywhere", but running an unsupported browser these days is pretty foolish security-wise.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#676

Post by unexistance »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #212
eoger wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look here [0] for legacy extensions replacements. [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU...

There's no replacement for ScrapBook, a plugin where I have a decade of stored annotated documents (no hyperbole, my oldest files date from 2007). Ever since I discovered that FF57 was going to kill ScrapBook I had to disable Firefox updates so I don't lose access to ~6GB of stored data. It's a mix of past, present, and future writing research. I know I have access to clumsy workarounds such as copying FF56 to a VM w…

I can relate to this, tho for me it was TiddlyWiki(-legacy), and UnMHT

you can use the ESR[0] release with the extension AND disabling auto-update, and use -no-remote paramater to run multiple instance FF...

So in your case, you can have two instance, one FF running ScrapBook, the other is new-and-shiny FF... I used this setup daily with multiple FF running at my whim, didn't feel clunky

p/s: ScrapBook sounds awesome, I myself did saves PDF version of website, where it still can be indexed/searched properly

[0] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#677

Post by mistermann »

callahad wrote: post #589
agentdrtran wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tree-style tabs won't be around much longer.

Tree Style Tab is available on Firefox Quantum and will be with us for a long, long time. Piro, the author, wrote an excellent article about his experience porting TST to a WebExtension: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/latest/blosxom/mozilla/extension/tr...

I got the new Tree Style tabs installed, but I'm still seeing the standard tabs at the top, is there a way to hide those?

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#678

Post by callahad »

callahad wrote: post #436
seanalltogether wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I just tried that and it changes the private window to light as well. I guess it doesn't matter much cause i don't use private much, but it's weird they have removed that distinction now.

If you want that kind of distinction, it should be pretty trivial (less than a dozen lines of code) to implement a dynamic theme to that effect. We've got an article in the https://hacks.mozilla.org queue about exactly that -- stay tuned :)

Here's an add-on that does exactly that: https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples/tree/master/pr...

It's not currently packaged and uploaded to addons.mozilla.org, but you can try it by cloning the repo, navigating to `about:debugging,` and clicking "Load Temporary Add-on." Select the `manifest.json` file and you're good to go.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#679

Post by kelnos »

Tomte wrote: post #128
iterati wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right thing to do would have been to work on those extensions BEFORE breaking users' experience.

Mozilla doesn't create all those extensions. And the extensions' authors had, what, two years advance warning or so? Criticize the real culpits, not Mozilla.

I think it's a little unreasonable to point blame at a group of people who largely built extensions on their own time, with no expectation of any form of compensation. It's entirely reasonable to decide you don't feel like supporting an extension anymore, and a community to take the reins doesn't just magically appear.

And regardless, there are still a lot of things that the old extensions API let you did that you simply cannot do with WebExtensions.

Having said that, Mozilla did the best they could in this transition. You can always argue that they cut over too soon, and that they should have waited until WebExtensions was a little more mature and covered more use cases, but the reality is you have to draw the line somewhere, and I'm sure they agonized for quite a long time over where that place would end up being. They also know a ton more about their users than any of us random HN commenters do and are way more qualified to make that decision than anyone here.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#680

Post by usrusr »

disconnected wrote: post #287
Tomte wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla doesn't create all those extensions. And the extensions' authors had, what, two years advance warning or so? Criticize the real culpits, not Mozilla.

Look at this from a user perspective: The user diligently updates Firefox, optimistically hoping that this new version will be as awesome as the previous ones that vastly improved performance. Firefox starts and, suddenly, a bunch of things that used to work stop working. Why? Well, essentially, something that they can't hope to comprehend and that they never asked for and had no input on just ruined their browser. W…

The users' perspective, in short: before 57, I had one browser that was fast but lacked all the UI tweaks that I had grown accustomed to over the course of a decade or so (Chrome/Chromium), and one browser that maybe wasn't so fast but had all those UI tweak (Firefox, which I used all the time).

Now I have not one but two fast browsers with a UI that I do not like.

It's perfectly understandable that Firefox devs would love Firefox to be more like Chrome, but that has nothing to do with what the (existing) users want: they already have Chrome available, they are not holding their breath waiting for Firefox to become Chrome.

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