
Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported - Tree1993
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firefox-57-compatibility-milestones/
======
exceptione
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 less-then-smartª people using Chrome. I blame Mozilla
for not doing any smart marketing at all.

____

ª Its fair to call it that way. You use a browser more than a car. Yet people
do research before buying a car and carefully weigh the downsides versus the
upsides. But not for their most important software application in their lifes.

~~~
lucideer
I agree generally with your points, but this doesn't really address the issues
being criticised in comments here. I want to use Firefox (I do currently use
Firefox, despite a lot of limitations), but there comes a tipping point where
the balance of privacy (and apparent "user-interest") and actual usability and
power leads to a not-so-good proposition.

Someone has commented above that it seems like Mozilla management may have
been bought off by competitors and may be deliberately trying to run Firefox
into the ground. I don't believe this, but given the recent decision-making
it's not entirely implausible.

Opera went a similar path ~5 years ago. Most Mozillans don't consider this
comparable as Opera was closed-source (and there's this one-track tunnel
vision people have around that term), but the similarities are stark. A
company with a history of listening to its users and a massive level of
contribution to open standards and interoperability, making a product that
served a niche userbase extremely well, decided that aping it's mainstream
competitor (Chrome) directly would somehow be a good move. Now there's no
discernible difference between Opera and Chrome, and no reason whatsoever to
choose the former over the latter.

~~~
exceptione
I can't rule that out either. It might be that it is in Googles best interest
to kill firefox.

Here is an alternative view I have in mind. The strategy to mimick chrome
makes sense, because the masses think this is how the browser -- or as they
call it the "internet" \-- should look like. Its imho feasible to launch a
television and internet campaign promoting firefox after the transition by
stressing the privacy qualities. Mozilla has a quality other venders don't
have.

By making it a pain free switch a big market share is possible for firefox.

Still, i doubt the current board has this view really in mind. I am thinking
if I should apply for a position :)

~~~
CaptSpify
> The strategy to mimick chrome makes sense, because the masses think this is
> how the browser -- or as they call it the "internet" \-- should look like.

But that's what FF has been doing for the past ~5 years, and how has their
share been doing? Not so well.

Chrome has _much_ more marketing behind it. And it comes from a name that
people know and trust. Most people don't know who Mozilla is. And most people
don't care about avoiding Google. So if I have two browsers, and the lesser
known one is constantly following the other, why would I choose it? I'd rather
take the leading browser. It seems as if the FF one is just playing catchup
the whole time.

I love Mozilla and FF because it respects me. But it often feels like they are
losing that respect just to play follow the leader

~~~
jasonkostempski
Is it still true you can't do extensions for Chrome on Android? If so, they
should just do a commercial showing you can use uBlock Origin with it. That
could get a good chunk to move on Android and if they use it there they might
switch on desktop too.

~~~
pjmlp
Most people, aka normal users, don't care for extensions other than themes, if
at all.

So I doubt it would get any new users other than geek folk.

~~~
jasonkostempski
I'm not talking about showing off extension support, just ad blocking. I hate
extensions myself, I wish content blocking with white listing was just built
right into the browser which is that last real feature any browser needs. Once
people get a few weeks with a good ad blocker they won't ever go back. After
that, if they use a browser without it, they'll think they have a virus.

------
cosarara97
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.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Only about 250,000 users use the tab modification extensions that people keep
claiming is Firefox's only advantage out of 10s of millions of Firefox users.
Addons that greatly alter Firefox's behavior are the main reason for crashes.
And maintaining XUL is hampering Firefox future development.

~~~
VoxPelli
There are plenty of add-ons that extend or alter the UI of tabs. There's eg.
780,000 users of Tab Mix Plus according to [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/)

~~~
JohnTHaller
I forgot about TMP. Even so, that's still not a ton of users in terms of the
total Firefox users. Plus, I'd wager a large percentage of those are TMP
legacy users. Way back in the day, TMP was the only way to properly manage
sessions and tabs. Firefox now has full session management and you can reload,
pin, undo close, close other tabs, and move tabs around to your heart's
content. Heck, the most recent review of the extension even says as much.

------
jdlshore
Okay, I read through the entire comment tree and I didn't see a single top-
level comment explaining _why_ they're doing this. So I'm going to give it a
shot.

If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site
(say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is
janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up.

This is because Firefox's UI uses the same single-threaded JavaScript engine
that web pages do. Ads tend not to be good web citizens, so they cause that
single-threaded engine to run poorly, which causes the _whole browser_ , even
UI elements like scrolling, to run poorly.

To fix this, Firefox has moved to a multi-process model. I believe it's called
Electrolysis (e10s). The UI uses a different JavaScript process than web
pages.

Electrolysis is enabled today.

And yet, if you read the comments in this thread, you'll see a lot of people
complaining about Firefox being slow and janky. What's up with that?
Electrolysis was supposed to fix it!

Well, legacy extensions dig into the internals of Firefox. If you've built
multi-process code, you know that it's very sensitive to race conditions.
Third-party extensions running arbitrary code make it impossible, or at least
prohibitively difficult, for Firefox to run e10s.

So e10s is disabled if you have a legacy extension. This causes Firefox to be
slow and janky.

To fix this problem, Firefox is removing support for legacy extensions.

To be clear, the engineering tradeoff being made here is this:

A) Allow legacy extensions to run arbitrary code. See performance get steadily
worse in comparison to other browsers.

B) Have a fast, smooth, multi-process browser. Hope that the new extension
mechanism is "good enough" and that important extensions are migrated.

You can't have both. Mozilla has chosen B). You may disagree with this choice.
Personally, I think it was the right one.

(You might say that the correct answer is C) run single-threaded when legacy
extensions exist, and e10s otherwise. This is the situation that exists today.
Look at all the people complaining about Firefox's performance. I don't think
this is a viable solution, as people blame Firefox even when it's their
extensions that are to blame. Also, option B) gives extension developers a
reason to migrate and help Mozilla identify needed APIs.)

Apologies if I got some of these details wrong. I've been following Firefox's
migration to a multiprocess model with interest, but I'm hardly an expert.

~~~
Royalaid
This seems to have been poorly communicated by the Mozilla team and it is a
shame bevause e10s is a a real improvement

~~~
GraemeLion
See, I don't think it was poorly communicated by the Mozilla team. I've been
reading their volunteer emails and their public facing blogs, and seeing their
commentary on e10s all along.

What HAS been a problem is that they keep pushing it back because they don't
want to upset the applecart of the legacy apps, and thus, e10s has basically
become stalled by fear. And they didn't really do much to push back on that
until very recently.

I think the main problem is, people look at e10s refactoring for their
extensions, and thought it would never need to happen. That Mozilla would
always just offer a 'back door' for them. I think that the XUL heavy
extensions thought the same thing. The problem is, those two areas are the
areas where a lot of the instability and issues come from, and the only way to
solve those issues is to excise the code completely.

Mozilla's problem isn't communication. It's that people never seem to believe
them, and they kept pushing it back.

~~~
alphapapa
Again, this is not accurate.

1\. Developers are lazy. This includes addon developers. Until there is a
concrete time that their existing code will stop working, there's little
incentive for them to bother rewriting their code.

2\. For extensions which require non-existent WebExtensions APIs, there is
nothing they can do but hope and pray that Mozilla will deign to make such
APIs to enable them to rewrite their whole codebase to use them. If Mozilla
declines, then the addon author can do nothing except watch their extension
die.

It is not a matter of addon authors not believing Mozilla. The ball is in
Mozilla's court to follow through and enable the extension authors.

Now Mozilla has set themselves an arbitrary deadline to disable XUL, using the
excuse that e10s and other XUL-breaking stuff will arrive on that deadline--
which is another arbitrary deadline that _they_ set. Is there a term for this
kind of internal self-buck-passing?

------
imron
I use Firefox because of 2 things:

1) vimperator 2) single process handling multiple tabs (I typically have
upwards of 40 tabs open at a time)

Firefox is in the process of removing plugins like 1) so that it makes it
possible to remove 2).

Wonderful.

~~~
Tree1993
Is there a way we can continue use these classic addon?

~~~
richardboegli
Pale Moon

~~~
fuzzy2
However, that’s pretty much the other extreme. It doesn’t support Web
Extensions or even Add-on SDK extensions.

~~~
sychophant
Do you use any indispensable add-ons that are Web Extension based?

~~~
fuzzy2
No. However, I am the developer of "Download Cleaner", which is made using
Add-on SDK. I think it's a great solution to get started without learning XUL.

I'm sure they had their reasons for deciding what they did. I still think it's
a bad decision.

------
jacquesm
Is there a quick way to check whether or not specific add-ons are supported in
the new version? I'm addicted to tree based tabs (100's of them open at the
same time) and Scrapbook. Without those two I would have a very hard time to
get through my workday.

~~~
ordinary
Here's a list: [https://arewee10syet.com/](https://arewee10syet.com/)

~~~
jacquesm
Scrapbook: unknown :(. Thank you!

------
hackuser
An hypothesis about much of the criticism for this change, and similar
movements of outrage on the Internet. It's amateur social theory and goodness
knows we don't need more of that, but I haven't seen it said like this:

People naturally feel anger in their lives (about home, work, politics,
health, etc.) that is not socially acceptable to act on; to varying degrees,
they need an outlet. It's not a new phenomenon; some go to the gym or play
video games (where some act out on audio channels); some people drink heavily;
some abuse people close to them, or the waitress, or get in a fight at the
bar, or join an angry mob and lynch someone in the streets. When there is a
socially acceptable target, indicated by lots of other people acting out, they
act out too.

Changes like Firefox's attract outrage not because they are wrong but because
they create a social attack surface: People can see that the change isn't
socially secure (e.g., messages about inclusiveness are relatively secure
right now[0]) and thus know that it will be a target for attacks; again, it's
socially acceptable. They attack because it's a vulnerable target; there is
chum in the social waters.

Consider how much of such outrage completely disregards the facts and betrays
a lack of interest in learning the facts. They make no effort to learn about
the facts - I see almost no discussion of the merits or facts on this page -
and you can put the information in front of their eyes and they will ignore it
and attack you: by not joining them you expose your own social vulnerability.

It's very dangerous socially; mass bullying campaigns have serious, real
effects on their victims. Whole nations embrace bad policies, from
discrimination against their own to war, that can kill in the hundreds of
thousands or more and ruin generations. Evil leaders manipulate this
phenomenon.

But also consider the affect it has on innovation, something we should be very
concerned about at HN. It stops innovators from getting too far ahead of
what's already accepted; they will be judged by their social security not its
merits. It kills innovations from those who are socially acceptable; for
example, the Blackberry Passport was the most innovative phone in years, but
it was trashed, including on HN, because Blackberry Inc. was socially
vulnerable, an outcast.

If you read this far, thanks for listening!

[0] To be clear, I'm not disparaging them - I strongly support them.

~~~
nonbel
I don't think so, I think its that Firefox used to be awesome. Now people who
advocated for them feel betrayed when the search is "updated" to yahoo, the
homepage is "improved" to have ads, the menus are "modernized" so you can't
find the settings you used to, the add-on system is "secured" so you have to
modify your workflow, etc.

~~~
hackuser
Thanks for addressing my comment. Of course I can't speak for everyone (and
neither can you or anyone else), but to my general point ...

> people who advocated for them feel betrayed ...

Consider how strong an emotional response that is to a search engine change,
etc., especially from people very familiar with IT and capable of adjusting to
change (changing the default search engine, for example), and in a context
where they see software changes frequently (think of hosted apps like
Facebook!).

I don't think Firefox's changes are enough to explain that emotion; if you'll
pardon the metaphor, they don't contain enough energy to explain the reaction;
the energy must be coming from someplace else. I think the emotion is from
someplace else and about something else.

Also, the comments raised above don't address the merits; they reflect only
anger, which is consistent with my point. (In fairness, it may not be the
context to review the merits of all those changes.)

~~~
l_t
I understand your point, but I think you might be underestimating the
importance Firefox has to some people. It was never just a replaceable Web
browser for me. It was one of the few pieces of software that seemed to be
"made right", built by people who care, and built for people who know what
they want.

I always thought of Firefox as a paragon of power-user design, and I loved it
for that. In terms of hours of usage, I'm sure I've logged more with Firefox
than with any other program in my life. It might not be an exaggeration to say
it's the most important piece of software I have ever(!) use.

So this change, in combination with the overall direction Firefox seems to be
headed, does evoke fairly strong feelings, and I really don't think they are
"actually about something else".

Having said that, I do want to say that I am not angry, and I don't want to
vilify anyone. I'm just concerned, and a bit sad, because the browsing
experience I've grown up with seems like it won't be around much longer.

------
detaro
November 14th. I really hope they get the promised additional APIs in order
until then, but it seems like a really short time (given how they are not 1:1
Chrome yet last I checked). I personally don't mind the switch to much (since
I really want better performance, and the beginning of e10s has helped, and I
don't care much about non-trivial add-ons), but it's clear the promise of
"We'll make new APIs for add-ons that need them" was important.

~~~
mook
Getting the APIs in place isn't enough, though; there needs to be time for the
addons to adapt too (or for new addons to show up to replace the old ones).
I'm not sure they have planned enough time for _that_ to happen, but time will
tell.

~~~
Kubuxu
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...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-
firefox-add-ons/)

~~~
stewbrew
Because the required APIs don't exist maybe?

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

------
aharju
KeySnail[1] extension, which brings customizable Emacs and vi keys to Firefox,
is the "killer app" I use Firefox for and it doesn't have a Chrome
counterpart. Without this particular extension I wouldn't have a reason to
keep using Firefox.

[1]
[https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki](https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki)

------
tomkat0789
+1 Firefox user for the better add-ons. The ones in Chrome/Chromium just
haven't seemed as effective for me. Reading people's comments here, I'm
actually learning about some add-ons I might add to Firefox! (tree style tabs,
Vimperator)

And thanks to Debian, I appear to be using Firefox 45, so I guess the changes
people are talking about won't hit me for awhile?

------
dagenleg
I am honestly starting to believe that Mozilla is trying to run Firefox into
the ground. I am not sure if it's just bad decision making or if the decision
makers themselves had been bought off by competition, but it sure does feel
like this. Why do we need one more Chrome like browser out there? I
specifically use Firefox because it's a) not chrome, b) has better addons. If
you hamstring the addons and make everything chrome/chromium like, what's the
reasons to use FF then?

~~~
bastawhiz
> has better addons

The add-ons might be better, but XUL-based Firefox add-ons are not better.
They essentially give full control of your computer to the developer of the
add-on. There's no permission model. The "APIs" are mostly the internals of
Firefox itself, and when Firefox updates, lots of add-ons break.

Most add-ons can be ported to webextensions. The ones that can't probably
shouldn't have ever been add-ons to begin with.

Lots of other browsers used to do the same thing Firefox does, and chose to
use a webextension-like model instead. Why? Because those screenshots of folks
with half their screen consumed by toolbars, weird popups, overlays in the
browser viewport, extensions that sneakily inject ads into pages, and track
user behavior _still exist_. And there's really nothing Mozilla can do to stop
them.

Do you know how Firefox add-ons get approved? A human sits down and sifts
through the obfuscated source code. I helped build these tools years ago, I
can tell you it's hell. Beyond being error-prone, it causes months-long delays
in add-ons getting approved.

Firefox will be better off for only supporting webextensions.

~~~
dagenleg
But I want the addons to have full control over my browser, that's the whole
point! It's my browser and I've tailored it to myself and my requirements.

The one thing that is striking every time I try to use chrome/chromium is just
how limited the addon functionality is and how much less freedom the user has.
Have you seen "treestyletabs" implementation on chrome? It's a whole other
window that has to be started and placed side-by-side with the browser window
by user because of the addon limitations. There are also some keybindings
which are fixed forever and not allowed to be changed (<C-W>, <C-N> etc).

Of course you can justify the restrictions by bringing up the case of the poor
average user who will get abused by his browser having more functionality that
he will ever need. But the thing is - I really don't care for the "average
user" and its problems. Average user is a beast that is perfectly happy to be
contained in the walled garden, but we already have Chrome and Android for
that.

~~~
detaro
But Mozilla cares about average users, not about making something for power-
users only. That seems to be the big conflict here: power users saying "you've
lost the masses, so make something for us" while Mozilla's mission is making
something that would be good for the masses, and they'd rather fail trying
than failing that mission by abandoning it.

~~~
hlandau
Except this doesn't make sense.

The set of clueless users who would install arbitrary malicious extensions and
the set of clueless users who would download and run arbitrary executables is
basically the same. Yet if they do the latter, any extention sandboxing is
completely and utterly moot. It's the same issue as with mandatory extension
signing; requiring signing for extensions while nothing stops someone from
downloading an unsigned .exe (which could memory-patch Firefox if it so
wished) is absurd.

~~~
yuhong
I think the difference is that they want to try to prevent installers from
installing unapproved extensions, which even many of the software that looks
more legitimate often does. See [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/AMO/Policy/Revie...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/AMO/Policy/Reviews)

~~~
hlandau
Yes, and the point of this is what, exactly?

~~~
yuhong
In particular, all the checked by default boxes to install things like the Ask
Toolbar.

------
sychophant
I use Vimperator. I have not upgraded Firefox since 43.0.4 in order to
continue to use Vimperator. I will not upgrade Firefox past the point where it
does not support Vimperator.

~~~
Tree1993
VimFX works very well in FF51.

~~~
sirn
It's a very different experience.

Some of us who use Vimperator use it not only because of the key binding, but
also for the command-line, ability to modify the UI (e.g. :set gui=none),
ability to put .vimperatorrc in .dotfiles and use it across multiple systems,
and such. As far as I know, VimFX still not capable of all these
functionalities (some due to difference in mission, e.g. not modifying the
UI.)

That said, WebExtensions at its current state still couldn't support all of
VimFX's current feature either.[1]

[1]:
[https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860](https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860)

~~~
hammerandtongs
I use this all day long on Chromium -

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojhcghmfjfneahoeklbjjh)

I also use this in Chromium -

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoil...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoilgiofhhhodbodcfgomelhe)

Note that they do very different things from each other AND that they are
running Chromium which is a SUBSET of the plugin features that will be
available in Firefox (if all goes well).

~~~
sychophant
I have used all of the Chrome based variants of Vimperator. I like Cvim too.

However there is one killer feature for me in Firefox, that is the fact that I
can:

nmap <C-j> 10j

nmap <C-k> 10k

Chrome has these keys already bound and there is no way to unbind them.

I am adamant about using this configuration because it matches my .vimrc - so
I use the exact same navigation in my browser and my (arguably) IDE.

------
ravenstine
XUL has always been pretty terrible, IMO. But it has advantages over Chrome-
style addons. Should Firefox support WebExtensions? I'd say absolutely yes.
Should Mozilla remove XUL support? I'd say probably not. Or at least it should
be optional, as there are clearly some people who want full control of their
browser. I'm not one of those people, but I understand where they're coming
from, and it would be like a food company deciding that they're getting rid of
their other flavors and are just going to sell the one flavor that the
competitor is selling out. Unless Firefox has an edge over Chrome, or even
Chromium, there's very little reason for me to use it. This is coming from
someone who was a Firefox evangelist for years since 2005.

Also, the Electrolysis project taking forever is one reason I ditched Firefox
for Chrome, and I suspect I'm not the only one. It was only late last year
that it finally got released(I think?), and that was a project being talked
about at least since 2010. Chrome had process-per-tab a few years before that,
and there was even word that Chrome was being developed in that direction long
before its release. Firefox took nearly a decade to compete.

~~~
sp332
That's because chrome was built that way from the beginning, and Firefox had
to break their browser into pieces. And while it did stall out for a while,
remember they were completely changing their JS garbage collector at the same
time, which was also a huge amount of work. And both projects kept
compatibility with most addons.

------
yabatopia
My first reaction was to disable automatic updates of Firefox. I'm not against
change, but the whole controversy around this issue makes me a bit wary of
blindly trusting Mozilla.

I want to make sure my browser experience doesn't get ruined because of this
shift. I don't have the time or patience to clean up a messy first release
with webextensions only, breaking my trusted browser add-ons. First seeing,
then believing.

~~~
sp332
You can upgrade to FF52 ESR in March. It will support current add-ons and get
security updates until mid-2018.

------
Jerry2
According to NetMarketShare stats [0], Firefox is now at under 12% of desktop
marketshare... and falling. I've switched over to Chromium (and Safari on OSX)
because I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance
overall anymore. I've also noticed it used a lot more CPU than alternative
browsers... which is an issue if you're using a laptop. Once Mozilla kills off
XPCOM and XUL-based addons [1], there won't be any real reasons left to use
Firefox. Lots of Firefox die-hard users I know have already moved to Palemoon
which will support XPCOM/XUL addons for the foreseeable future [2].

It's amazing to me how badly managed Mozilla is these days. They've been on a
downward slope for the last two years and they still haven't done much to
improve their position. Last week I checked Mozilla's homepage and couldn't
even figure out what their guiding purpose is anymore. They seem to care more
about social issues than about browsers and technology [3]. Unfortunately,
they don't have much future.

[0] [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0)

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-
dev...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-
firefox-add-ons/)

[2]
[https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml](https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml)

[3] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/)

~~~
veeti
> I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall
> anymore... once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons, there won't be
> any real reasons left to use Firefox.

Now, make an enlightened guess as to why they're getting rid of XUL.

------
throwanem
I get that there are a lot of people here who are really concerned that,
without XUL and XPCOM, there will no longer be a reason to choose Firefox over
Chrome.

What I think they overlook is that, right now, it is impossible to recommend
Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome that no
one will take such a recommendation seriously.

I've been using Firefox since back when it was still called Phoenix. I intend
to go on using Firefox for as long as it still exists. But it's been a
struggle, these last few years. Having to kick over a primary application
platform, losing effectively all state save what programs are running, and
reboot it every day or two, because otherwise it gets so slow that it's
entirely unusable, gets real old real fast. People like to make jokes about
Emacs, but even it doesn't do this! My Emacs sessions last _months_ , and die
only when the machine loses power or I hose up the environment so badly while
experimenting that it becomes unrecoverable without a reboot. And Emacs is
thirty years old.

I don't want to switch to Chrome. Its UI sucks and I'm no fan of Google. But
if Firefox keeps getting worse, I'll have to. So I am absolutely delighted to
see Mozilla making real and tangible progress toward solving that problem. If
doing so means deprecating an ancient plugin API that's in any case dangerous
and hard to use, I'm fine with that, especially since there is no reason in
the world to believe that its replacement will not eventually gain back most
of the relatively few capabilities we're losing in the deprecation. Maybe I
won't be able to customize context menus for a while. That's _fine_ , if the
browser regains the usability it's lost over the last ten or so years.

I understand not everyone agrees with this point of view. That's not a
problem. But I should not like this point of view entirely overlooked by those
currently proclaiming the imminent death of Firefox.

~~~
hackuser
> it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so
> poorly compared to Chrome ...

I understand that this is your experience, but what is the basis for saying
this is generally true? It's not my experience; theoretically, can't I also
say my experience is generally true?

~~~
beerbaron23
> it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so
> poorly compared to Chrome ...

See that's some odd misinformation that's been spread around since Chrome
first was released, it was the fastest browser at the time. 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.

So yah, I'm not sure why all this "Firefox is super slow" keeps getting passed
around without anything to back it up. In fact for WebGL Firefox is over 3
times faster than Chrome, so if anything Chrome is actually the old slow dog.

Current benchmark for proof:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0)

~~~
hutzlibu
"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't know,
because since that repeatedly happened, I switched to chrome.

edit: oh and about specific performance I know and care about at the moment,
because I work with those technologies is that:
[http://kripken.github.io/box2d.js/webgl_demo/box2d.html?500](http://kripken.github.io/box2d.js/webgl_demo/box2d.html?500)

On my system (Archlinux) chromium runs much faster than firefox.

~~~
beerbaron23
I ran your box benchmark at 1000 boxes and all browsers were able to sustain
60fps quite easily on my system.

Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, Safari and Opera on OSX

~~~
hutzlibu
Well, that's good, if you system is so fast, than just use more boxes ...
(parameter)

On MY system chrome is still quite ahead of FF. And that was the point, not
that you have a good pc ...

(oh and the benchmark is not from me, but actually from the FF dev team
itself, as part of emscripten ... and they used to be quite faster than all
the others, but apparently not anymore. At least not at the moment ...)

------
baby
I'm really hopping for Firefox to implement something like Tree Style Tabs by
default. It's time for tabs to take their natural side place.

------
tormeh
I recently disabled all add-ons in Firefox. It's a lot more stable and it's
faster as well.

------
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.

~~~
replete
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.

------
FractalNerve
Solution:

• _Mozilla Sponsored Add-On Migrator /Converter that transpiles to equivalent
WebExtension code_

• _Separate lightweight container hosts with DTrace for Core and Extensions_
(not sure if that makes sense, can you help?)

In fact a friend of mine pursues his Dr. degree on Model-Driven "API-
Transpilation" (that's how I call it, albeit limited to CMSs), such that API-
breaks caused by CMS upgrades don't result in high integration costs for add-
on migrations. Having a complete model for the CMS allows him to support
convert add-ons to other CMS too.

Why all the anger? Because API-Breaks cause friction, are avoidable and are
commonly known as the biggest "cost-centers & risk-factors" in the software
industry. Software-Architects should instead try to find a composable
architecture that supports the transition, instead of moving migration costs
to the developers. That would allow everyone else to move over more easily.

The anger caused by the limitations of WebExtentions, are they in fact
unavoidable? HN, you've a collection of the most clever engineers of the
World! Can we find a solution to this?

My question to HN: Do you know an example or show-case of any complex software
that reached similar goals in a way that is transferable or at least advisable
to Mozilla? I am really interested, if there is a way to migrate from old to
new platforms without "API hiccups". Moving (avoidable?) architecture-debts to
a huge fellowship of developers doesn't sound like the way to go. I hope you
know about guidelines that removes such frictions for us HN devs that we can
just follow suit.

PS: I'm a n00b, but incrementally recreating kernel-level APIs on user-land,
then writing an abstraction layer ontop, then exposing a limited set of it via
Java-Script doesn't sound elegant and counter-productive. Why not reuse an
existing kernel and create drivers and bridges or DSLs ontop of that?

Happy Monday and thanks for your time! :)

------
taivare
At least Firefox supports older computers like the old Pentium, I submitted
this comment with. Chrome doesn't ; its my back-up ; win 10 has gone down on
me twice this month.

~~~
yuhong
Firefox now also requires SSE2.

------
stewbrew
They should conduct a survey how many add-ons will stop working, won't be
ported to web extensions, and thus how many users they'll lose -- probably not
that many because the majority most likely doesn't use add-ons but those
people will most likely use anything other people recommend to them. I
personally don't know if I'll continue recommending FF.

~~~
hackuser
> They should conduct a survey ...

They have; I've seen the data on some Mozilla blog but I can't remember where.

~~~
stewbrew
There is [https://arewee10syet.com/](https://arewee10syet.com/) ... ~ 85%
unknown (and that's compatibility with e10s, not with web extensions).

------
yuhong
I just submitted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693705)
. This article has more technical details on how XUL add-on works in
multiprocess Firefox.

------
Grue3
Coincidentally it's also the first release that I'm not going to be updating
to.

------
leesalminen
Is it just me or are Chrome's dev tools superior in every way to FF?

~~~
to3m
My recollection is that both are as bad as each other: spiteful UI with 1
watch window and a fixed window layout. Dear people - start demanding more
from your tools.

Going back on topic, I've stuck with Firefox for years because of DownThemAll
and Firefox Sync. But I stopped using sync a couple of years ago, so that just
left DownThemAll... which won't work after this change. So I'll probably leave
Firefox behind. Safari supopsedly gives you better battery life on OS X, and
Chrome is more popular (i.e., people probably test their stuff on it).

~~~
richardboegli
DownloadThemAll will work now and into the future with Pale Moon.

------
anotheryou
Is there any usage-statistic they base this on? I assume 90% have nothing more
than an adblocker at most installed?

What about the rest? What about users that are switching to firefox from
another browser?

------
chrisper
I installed Firefox a month ago, but it's just so sluggish and laggy. I only
have one extension installed.

Well, today I just switched back to Chromium (but went with Vivaldi this
time).

~~~
jdlshore
Legacy extensions prevent multiprocess support, which causes Firefox to be
sluggish and laggy.

If you disable the extension you installed, you'll probably see a big
difference in Firefox performance.

This is why they're disabling those extensions.

~~~
chrisper
The extension I was using was ublock:origin. When I went to about:support, it
showed e10 as enabled.

~~~
beerbaron23
in about:support is your GPU composting enabled under graphics? I would
recommend to refresh Firefox on that screen as well. Also you can check
"about:performance" to see which extension is fucking you over.

I would recommend using adblock plus instead, as it is many leagues faster
than UBlock Origin in Firefox since version 48 I believe (They optimized their
code with Mozilla a couple months ago). Just make sure you go into the adblock
plus filter preferences and uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising"
problem solved.

------
MiddleEndian
Why?

------
anotheryou
Ugh, I thought we had another year

------
stonogo
This is what a fast release cycle gets you: insufficient feedback and a
snowball effect as project managers double-down on bad decisions. See also:
Ubuntu.

------
Animats
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. That's essentially the same as the WebExtensions
API, but with different names for the API calls.

I'll probably convert my one remaining add-on, but it's not really worth it.

[1] [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0)

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

~~~
Animats
Compare [1] and [2] and see if you can figure out why they are so different.

[1] [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0) [2] [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-
market-share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0)

~~~
hackuser
Thanks, but you'll understand if I'm not taking the test. What is the
difference?

~~~
Animats
I don't know. I suspect that whatever drives that site is broken. But
StatsCounter says 6.75% for Firefox.

[1]
[http://gs.statcounter.com/?chart_type=line&statType=Browser](http://gs.statcounter.com/?chart_type=line&statType=Browser)

