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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The respected Firefox add-on developer Quicksaver announced yesterday that he won't update any of his extensions anymore because of Mozilla's decision to move to WebExtensions exclusively. Quicksaver, responsible for add-ons such as Tab Groups, OmniSidebar, FindBar Tweak, Beyond Australis and Puzzle Bars, had four of his five add-ons for Firefox featured by Mozilla in the past.
If you open any of the author's add-on pages on the Mozilla Add-ons repository, you will notice an important announcement on the page. It reads:
IMPORTANT: The add-on will not receive any more updates and will stop working by next November with Firefox 57.[...] Quicksaver posted an explanation on his website that reveals why he made the decision to stop add-on development. There are several reasons, but the core reason given is that at least four of his five add-ons rely heavily on functionality that will either not be provided by WebExtensions, or would require him to rewrite the extension almost completely.
[...] Quicksaver is not the only author who announced that he will stop working on add-ons for Firefox. Add-ons like New Tab Tools, Classic Theme Restorer, Tree Style Tabs, Open With, DownThem All, KeeFox and many others are likely also not going to make the cut.
Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/28/firefox-add-on-quicksaver-quits/
(Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Monday January 30 2017, @03:08PM
It's hard to imagine that not too many years ago I was able to compile FF on an old x86 Gentoo system with like 768 MB of RAM. Now I think it requires like 8 GB of ram to compile, and from where I sit virtually nothing has improved, and it's the slowest program I use. It's a browser FFS. All we want is a good lean browser, but the Mozilla developers are apparently self important a-holes that think they're writing a fucking OS or something. Actually, if an OS were that bloated I'd abandon it frankly.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Monday January 30 2017, @03:44PM
As of last year I still compiled FF on my Pentium 3 laptop with 512Mb of RAM, and the requirements haven't changed much. I now compile it on another system, but still use it on that PC. It sounds like your OS/system might be the inefficient issue.
(Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Monday January 30 2017, @07:35PM
Wow...I beg to differ. Check out the "detailed requirements" here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Simple_Firefox_build/Linux_and_MacOS_build_preparation [mozilla.org]
Among other things you can't compile on 32 bit systems at all:
"As of early 2015 it is no longer possible to do a full build of Firefox from source on most 32-bit systems; a 64-bit OS is required."
And note the RAM rquirements;
"2G RAM with an additional 2GB of available swap space is the bare minimum, and more RAM is always better - having 8GB or more will dramatically improve build time."
Trust me, they aren't kidding. When I was finally forced to move to firefox-bin the compile ran out by memory and swap and locked the whole system up.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:14PM
I'm curious what they mean by "most 32 bit systems". I now compile on virtualbox in a 32bit vm for the laptop and Firefox still compiles (did this just yesterday). Maybe because I'm using Clang on FreeBSD and not GCC on Linux? I have a shit ton of swap on the laptop though (yes it's ungodly slow), but I don't think it was above 2gb which means it should have crapped out.
I'm going to have to dig out my laptop to see if this works because I'm curious now :)
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday February 01 2017, @04:05AM
I assume on the Windows side they now require something that is no longer 32 bit. Visual Studio perhaps? Any version of OSX that's 32 bit probably had support dropped ages ago. But I don't see any reason it shouldn't work on a 32 bit Linux or BSD system, though if they are serious about the the amount of RAM then there might be some issues there.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tempest on Tuesday January 31 2017, @06:56PM
Maybe my computer doesn't meet the requirements, but it does still compile and run.
System: FreeBSD 11.0 / 4Gb Swap
Hardware: Pentium 3m / 512Mb Ram / 80Gb Hard drive (ide)
Firefox 51 options: GTK3 / ALSA / FFMPEG / CPU Optimizations
Memory was mostly like this:
RAM Wired - 81Mb
RAM Inactive - usually between 200Mb and 120Mb
RAM Free - sometimes as high as 100Mb
Swap usage grew from 3Mb to 16Mb
I didn't expect anything noteworthy, since it works in a 32bit VM and my laptop has 4Gb of swap. I ran a split console with top during the compile and was surprised that even 3 hours in swap wasn't really even used. The hard drive lights would only occasionally blink as expected. There was a point near the end where swap went to 500Mb+ chugged along for a while, then went back down. Think I'll stick to compiling in my VM though.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday January 31 2017, @08:59PM
Wow. Thanks for both replies! Based on that, I'm not sure why I had so much of an issue with that. I now have 2 GB of physical RAM on that machine, so maybe I have to try it again at some point...especially because the Gentoo 32 bit firefox-bin (for me anyway) seems to have a lot of really odd bugs that I've never seen in any other versin of FF.
Thanks again!
(Score: 2) by tempest on Tuesday January 31 2017, @09:57PM
I use Gentoo as well and honestly I think we all end up with "mystery issues". I have two Gentoo systems where one compiles Terminology, and one doesn't and I still can't figure it out. MP4 didn't work in Firefox 50 for me, and in 51 it works again :-/ The document you linked seems pretty adamant about 32bit compiling not working, so I'd suppose in most GCC/Linux scenarios it won't work?