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Firefox 57.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#751

Post by kissickas »

nnethercote wrote: post #568
kissickas wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vimperator :(

I've heard that Vim Vixen is decent, though I haven't used it myself. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/

From research I also found Vimium-FF and Saka Key. I just dread the whole process of trying each one out (I'll probably just settle for the first or second one I try) and subsequently re-customizing everything. It took me hours to get Vimperator where I wanted it (between the learning curve and modifying settings) and to lose that is like losing my .vimrc file.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#752

Post by Sylos »

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…

1) Mozilla isn't retarded. They've done market research on this.

For example, in Sep. 2015 around 40% of users did not use any extensions at all. Another sizeable number of users is going to have their ad blocker and nothing else. Even with 2, 3 or 4 extensions, it's unlikely that you're going to experience a breakage, and if you do, it's likely that you'll find a replacement.

Average users rarely use unpopular extensions and popular ones either are maintained or will have a replacement made. There are some semi-popular ones that currently can't yet be fully recreated, but those are the types of extensions that change so much about the browser that average users won't be using them anyways.

2) Users aren't retarded. I know, we like to act like they are, but only the most cynical are going to switch browsers, because of this. Out of spite. It does not make any sense to switch to a different browser, just because the browser that you're used to has become different. Nor does it make sense to switch to Chrome, which is still by far less extensible than Firefox 57, just because Firefox has become somewhat less extensible.

3) The core of the API is more than stable. It's Chrome's extension API, that's been battle-tested in Chrome for years. Most extension developers will not need more than that. And it's most definitely not missing a ton of function, especially not things that non-power-users need.

4) Their market share is not anymore shrinking. It's been growing again since the release of Firefox 48. That was the release which shipped the first iteration of multiprocess. They could not have shipped multiprocess as early as that, if they did not know legacy extensions to be deprecated now with 57. Because the majority of legacy extensions are not multiprocess-compatible and neither would have been updated to be.

AMO would be reverse Russian Roulette where only roughly 1 out of 6 extensions will not kill your performance. That's just as well something you can't expect average users to understand and it would be like that for the next few years still.

So, yeah, they did rush this, but it was to save their market share. Had it continued to drop like in the half year before Firefox 48, we'd now be deep into negative user numbers.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#753

Post by mook »

hendersoon wrote: post #713
Yoric wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW, Firefox 57 is currently looking like a net loss in terms of security and privacy. A significant number of the extensions people have previously used for blocking or restricting potentially intrusive or dangerous behaviours seem to have been lost, in some cases without equivalent WebExtension alternatives being available. First, I'd like to put things in context. When you write "Firefox 57 is currently looking…

100%? Your arrogance is frankly infuriating. Firegestures had 270k users, according to AMO. A quarter of a MILLION people. You broke mouse gestures entirely on MacOS and Linux, and didn't allow them to work well on Windows (DOM needs to load before gestures can be used because you force script injection, don't work on internal pages, don't work on top of browser chrome, etc).

Playing the devil's advocate: the top two most popular extensions (as listed on [1]) are Adblock Plus at ~14 million, and uBlock Origin at ~4.2 million users. That means Firegestures has about 2% of the top extension, and about 1.5% if you combine the two (assuming not many people use both ad blockers at the same time, especially since they use the same lists). That's just the people with those extensions. And it appears that that's active daily users (as opposed to people have downloaded it at some point in a Firefox that is no longer being used).

I do agree that Mozilla has handled the transition terribly; they should have made the API available first before removing everything. That way they would at least have the excuse of it being the add-on authors not cooperating. The way they've done it, before actually making the things possible, just makes it look like they're arrogant.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?sort=users&...

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#754

Post by Yoric »

qplex wrote: post #749
xtraeme wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah, well, sure, in that case, randomly breaking add-ons all the time would indeed have made our life easier. But everybody else's life would have been much worse, so we decided not to do that :) This is the part that I think you are going to get the most flak for. People are willing to deal with temporary setbacks if the changes can be brought in at some point. Permanently breaking things and calling that better wi…

I have to agree with this. If you provide an API you'd better commit to it. A lot of work is being wasted because of this. "Do not break userspace".

Indeed, if you provide an API you'd better commit to it. The difference is that before WebExtensions, there was no API. Everybody was just hooking into the internals.

That's not "do not break userspace" – which makes sense – that's "do not change anything, ever" – which is project suicide.

Now, with WebExtensions, there is a difference between the API and the internals, so we can commit to something. And, while there is a cost to this change, that's definitely a much, much, much better base for developers on both side of the API.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#755

Post by 0x49d1 »

Santosh83 wrote: post #655
aquadrop wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've switched to multiple processes model, but you don't have "task manager" as Chrome. Do you plan to implement it in the future?

about:performance is a somewhat similar substitute for now. You can see stats of the various processes and close or reload tabs.

Yes.. Somewhat. For example can't see how extensions are doing from there.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#756

Post by Yoric »

xtraeme wrote: post #668
Yoric wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate to be the person to say this, but perhaps a better approach would have been to simply create a build pipeline that iterated over the addons on AMO to find the ones that use functions from the changed API and bulk send out an email about the changes to the authors (this eliminates steps 5 through 8). This would have automated steps 5 through 8, but not significantly reduced the problem. > The addon developers…

> Ah, well, sure, in that case, randomly breaking add-ons all the time would indeed have made our life easier. But everybody else's life would have been much worse, so we decided not to do that :) This is the part that I think you are going to get the most flak for. People are willing to deal with temporary setbacks if the changes can be brought in at some point. Permanently breaking things and calling that better wi…

> I have no problem if the Mozilla Foundation or the Firefox team has different priorities, but say that rather than telling technical people the reason for the changes is because XUL or XPCOM are somehow so hideous the team had no choice. It smacks of dishonesty when everything that you have described here is a problem with procedure not anything technical.

Well, some of our priorities with WebExtensions are (not necessarily in this order):

- stable, documented, future-proof API;

- improving security;

- improving performance;

- improving privacy.

You are, of course, free to consider these things "not anything technical", but they were impossible as long as add-ons weren't based on an API at all.

So, again, while I fully realize that there is a cost, I believe that we're moving from something unsustainable to something sane, which makes it better in the long run.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#757

Post by 0x49d1 »

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...

Nice extension, but no search for tab option. For now I use Firefox built-in option to search for tab: open new one and start typing the title of tab, I want to find. The drawback: that search is VERY dumb and you have to exactly type the proper name, no fuzzy logic or smth at all.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#758

Post by Yoric »

hendersoon wrote: post #713
Yoric wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW, Firefox 57 is currently looking like a net loss in terms of security and privacy. A significant number of the extensions people have previously used for blocking or restricting potentially intrusive or dangerous behaviours seem to have been lost, in some cases without equivalent WebExtension alternatives being available. First, I'd like to put things in context. When you write "Firefox 57 is currently looking…

100%? Your arrogance is frankly infuriating. Firegestures had 270k users, according to AMO. A quarter of a MILLION people. You broke mouse gestures entirely on MacOS and Linux, and didn't allow them to work well on Windows (DOM needs to load before gestures can be used because you force script injection, don't work on internal pages, don't work on top of browser chrome, etc).

Please read the thread before you chime in. We were talking about security add-ons. Mouse gestures are not security.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#759

Post by Yoric »

analogic wrote: post #624
Yoric wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're pretty much describing what Firefox has been doing for the past few years. At some point, however, the rest of the world keeps moving and, no matter how painful for everyone involved, it becomes unfeasible to wait for all add-ons to be ported (or even portable).

not all, just mine

:)

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#760

Post by 0x49d1 »

Very nice release, congrats! Are there any plans to improve tab search option in AwsomeBar? For example now you have to really precisely type the name of the tab to switch to it. You can add some kind of fuzzy search logic to find the tab on relatively relevant typing. With >10 tabs open that would be really useful.
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