821–830 of 836 posts
I just updated - WOW! What an improvement! Compared startup time and scrolling around some over-monetized sites; Behaves just as well as Chrome. Time for a switch again, I've missed FireFox since I started having Chrome as my default browser back in ~2011
If it as just as good as chrome, why should I switch? Especially given how good Chrome Dev tools are.
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"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…
It isn't a matter of "failing to observe": without the necessary API, extensions cannot be ported. I personally looked into rewriting the extensions I needed a couple of years ago, I figured out it was impossible and I gave up. Some very important extensions have fortunately been able to pressure Firefox into supporting them, but the typical Firefox user who depends on some niche extensions has no clout.
If Mozilla could have done both, Mozilla would have done both. They could not. I get that that's super frustrating. I'm not happy about it myself, because the change broke my workflow a little as well - until I engineered my way past that, because I'm a grown-ass adult and I solve my problems, or learn to cope, instead of whining about them - and also because I put myself on the hook for a Firemacs reimplementation that can't land for probably another year at best. That's annoying. I get it.
But slinging vitriol on the subject obtains nothing and aids nobody. It makes the people who do it look like jackasses, it makes the people who do the actual work feel like they can't win and may as well not try, and it makes everyone else embarrassed both on the behalf of the whiners and for their own sake in being associated, however loosely, with a community so full of Tumblr-grade drama. It's embarrassing and stupid and pointless and counterproductive and I wish people would stop. There are better ways to spend the same effort - like, for example, contributing patches to the webex implementation. Hard work, I know, and whining is easy. But that doesn't really play in favor of the whining, either.
(Yeah, I get that you're not really a major example of what I'm complaining about. You just happened to be right here when I lost my patience. All the same, though.)
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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). The addon developers then get the chance to change it or not. If it's broken oh well (eliminating steps 8 throug…
> 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…
but you did exactly that
>Let's just say that we have different priorities.
seems so, your priority became... trying to speed up hoping that people too dumb to care would switch back from chrome despite it's horrendous and unethical marketing while sacrificing everything that made your browser viable
I too am sad that despite the awesome speed, I'm forced to stick with v56 out of necessity for my add-ons. Tab Groups (which was originally a first-class Mozilla feature called Panorama) absolutely changed my browser workflow, and I can't imagine regressing... The new APIs won't support replacement any time soon, and the dev has already given up, since they'd already had to run a fundraiser once to add Electrolysis s…
WebExtensions were specifically announced alongside Electrolysis. This is not Mozilla's fault.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170128013037/http://fasezero.c...
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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…
Is the Web Scrapbook extension compatible with the files it generates? It seems to have a lineage (via Scrapbook X) that descends from ScrapBook. https://github.com/danny0838/webscrapbook
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7btuln/so_long_and...
The Firefox team has specifically said they won't add support for the foreseeable future.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246236#c113
More here: https://github.com/danny0838/firefox-scrapbook/issues/209#is...
Losing several hundred thousand users¹ probably isn't in the team's best interest; so hopefully they will make it a priority to revisit this, but I have a feeling there are resource limitations that will make this by design won't fix.
¹ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU...
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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 the…
Here's hoping Hacker News Enhancement Suite becomes available soon. https://github.com/etcet/HNES
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> 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".
Nor were they userspace: http://dblohm7.ca/blog/2017/11/16/legacy-firefox-extensions-...
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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 exten…
> 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. This is simply not true as there had been many popular UI-centric extensions that just can't be replicated as webextensions due to lack of API support. "Advanced UI features belong in extensions, not in main" had been the Firefox mantra for many years and negativity ab…
When I discovered Classic Theme Restorer, Tab Mix Plus and similar, I was already a semi-pro user and I still found them intimidating.
There were a lot of checkboxes and they changed around a lot of things and I didn't yet know how to create a separate Firefox profile where I could've actually just wildly tried different options without the fear of something breaking irreversibly.