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Firefox 57, which is slated for release on November 14, will "only run WebExtensions", according to Mozilla.
This is expected to break compatibility with many existing Firefox extensions, and in many cases there aren't WebExtensions-compatible alternatives available for these extensions.
During some recent discussion at Slashdot, it became clear that some users have nearly all of their extensions classified as "legacy", and susceptible to breakage.
Members of the SoylentNews community, if you use Firefox, how many of your extensions are set to no longer work with Firefox in the near future?
If Firefox 57 breaks compatibility with your existing extensions, will this finally be enough for you to discard Firefox and find an alternative browser to use?
Will this extension breakage, and subsequent loss of users, effectively end the viability of Firefox as a modern web browser?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:20PM (19 children)
It would probably for me. Firefox remains usable for me because of Vimperator. If I had to actually use the mouse to navigate it I'd quickly lose interest. Toggling back and forth between work and the browser while using the same key bindings has been a boon to my productivity for a decade.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:48PM (16 children)
I stopped using Firefox a few months ago for two reasons.
First, because the thing was leaking memory like a sieve, gigabytes at a time, and Mozilla didn't fix it before deciding they were no longer going to support one of my higher end machines (a 2008 8-core[Dual 4-core Xeon]/Mac Pro running 10.6.8 @ 3 GHz.) I maintain that if your product, free or not, has major bugs, you're still on the hook to fix it. If you don't, then I'm going to avoid your stuff. And tell others what irresponsible coders you are.
Second, because Firefox is slow, even on my totally up-to-date machines. The difference between Firefox's responsiveness and other browsers is profound. So not only irresponsible coders, but lousy coders.
Yeah, I lost the use of some great extensions, and frankly, some better thought-out features that are built-in. Firefox is definitely replete with features. But my time is worth more to me than those features.
It all boils down to taking care for your users. If you ignore efficiency, that's consuming their time unnecessarily, and it's disrespectful. If you abuse their resources such as CPU or memory, that's slowing them down and putting their other stuff in a bind, which is also disrespectful. If you leave major bugs in your code and refuse to fix them while obviously spending lots of effort on new features, that's an obvious expression of "you're worth too little to us to do our job right."
So today, they've decided to destroy a good part of the landscape that made their browser more useful. I can't say I'm surprised given their previous behavior, but it's not going to affect me. Because beyond a certain point (which is probably too lenient anyway) I simply won't put up with the attitudes the Firefox project embodies... unless I am absolutely forced to by lack of a better alternative. And in browsers, there is no such lack.
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:59PM (14 children)
As an anecdote, even on my workstation (40 cores, 64gig RAM), Firefox runs itself into the ground every few weeks with only ~20 tabs opens.
And yeah, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the plugin breakage is what will be the final straw for me I expect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @02:57PM (11 children)
That's nothing chrome only needs one page open to grind to a halt.
It's still astonishing to me that the Fx developers have their heads do far up their assets that they can't bother to listen to the users.
Most changes just make things worse and they don't care.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:40PM (5 children)
Well, just looking at the Mozilla leadership [mozilla.org] explains everything.
In particular, look at the Chief Innovation Officer. You'd think that if any position should be held by someone technical, it would be this one, right?
Well, let's see:
You still wonder about the priorities at Mozilla?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Sunday August 13 2017, @08:44PM
To be fair, she has nothing much to do with Firefox. She's apparently there to satisfy a quota for Mozilla.
The guy in charge of Firefox: Mark Mayo [mozilla.org] knows nothing about browsers either:
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:04PM (3 children)
"Well, just looking at the Mozilla leadership [mozilla.org] explains everything.
In particular, look at the Chief Innovation Officer. You'd think that if any position should be held by someone technical, it would be this one, right?"
This may surprise you but innovation does not necessarily require "someone technical". More interesting is the bio you posted which states that this person in fact did innovate something respectable in the realm of technology without a technical background.
So, I think you have a problem with this person being both a woman and successful.
Grow up, dude.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:39PM (1 child)
You think wrong. I don't care at all about her gender. And there's nothing in my post that hints otherwise. I also don't mind her being successful; for example, I don't have a problem at all with her having been the CEO of Spiegel Online. Indeed, this position was very much in line with her education and previous experience, so I guess she probably was a very good fit for it. But Mozilla isn't providing a journalism platform, it's making a web browser.
The one whose prejudices are showing here are you: In your view, if someone is critical, and a woman is involved in any way, then the true reason of the critique must be because it's a woman.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @04:14PM
i can't imagine how anyone could read the list of accomplishments she had, and then think she is suitable for a CIO role at Mozilla.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 14 2017, @02:50AM
The person in question did nothing relevant in the realm of technology to have that position. And someone non-technical are usually to clueless to make the right decision on what projects that should have resources.
Oh, and the browser shows as others pointed out.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday August 14 2017, @02:56AM (4 children)
Ah yes, Chrome/Chromium. I once had an xterm gobble gigs and gigs of memory (I like big scrollback buffers, and I cannot lie). Couldn't find which of my gazillion terminals would've gotten that ridiculously large. Installed pstree. Turns out the offending xterm was the one I'd started Chromium from (and was now hiding under the browser). Gazillions of warning printouts had piled up over some weeks. Taught me two things - code quality is questionable in that browser, and more importantly, start it in the background and close the terminal!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 14 2017, @08:05AM (3 children)
Or simply don't configure xterm to save an unreasonable number of lines.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday August 14 2017, @08:13AM (1 child)
> Or simply don't configure xterm to save an unreasonable number of lines.
Madness!
If you can't accidentally dump a kernel or ten into your terminal without losing the real stuff, what good is a scrollback buffer in the first place?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @01:44AM
Why 9is this only voted +2?
This is pretty literally the kind of stuff that sysdevs do because thing X is blocking normal method Y.
I've done split pipes to term and remote file where the remote link was unreliable and the term was the critical backup. I'd have been pissed to find it truncated.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Bot on Monday August 14 2017, @10:16AM
> Or simply don't configure xterm to save an unreasonable number of lines.
wow, the systemd devs deflection maneuver!
If only you put a reinforcing ad hominem it would have been perfect :)
To be fair, the amount of stuff dumped to stdout/err by a browser is not much relevant imho
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday August 14 2017, @05:44AM
Like the AC said, Chrome has its share of issues as well. If your connection isn't goddamn perfect its processes tend to crash. No, seriously, if I've got a lot of packet loss for some reason and I'm loading certain sites, the load indicator will just sit there spinning for 10+ minutes and then finally every tab I have open pops up that "Your shit just crashed, lol" page. Happens especially often with Wikia sites but I've seen it elsewhere too.
Modern browsers are a shitshow. All of them. That's what happens when you try turning a layout engine into an operating system.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @03:28PM
The plugins might be your problem. I've got around 30 tabs open in my Firefox that never get closed. Even when I reboot it keeps the same session open, but they can stay open for months between reboots too and I've never had a problem. That's on a system with 4 cores and 10 gigs of RAM. But I don't really use plugins. I also don't visit many "web 2.0" crap sites like Facebook anymore...and I do recall Facebook in particular having a pretty bad impact on damn near any browser.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RedIsNotGreen on Monday August 14 2017, @05:05AM
NoScript will solve most of your problems, along with many others.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Monday August 14 2017, @06:13AM (1 child)
I'm in same boat, but with different extensions. I'm currently on 52 ESR to give things time, but whether I stay on Firefox or not long-term depends on what happens with the addons I rely on most:
The Tab Groups developer already abandoned ship over the change, so unless someone else picks it up that one's dead. OneTab might still work, I don't think it does anything that's outside of what's allowed, so that will be okay. I know uBlock Origin's already been ported, and I use it on Chromium as well, so that one should be fine.
Tree Style Tab is probably dead. It relies on XUL to replace the existing tab bar so there isn't muc hope unless Mozilla adds functionality specifically to keep it working. I know there are attempts to do the same thing on Chrome within the constraints of this New World Order of addon design, but they're all shit because of its restrictions. If it can't 1) remove the default tab bar and 2) add a new vertical one that 3) can group the tabs, it's shit. None of the Chrome ones can do all three, most can't even do two, and the ones that can are either embedding a fake tab bar into page HTML, or require you to use a second window, in the multi-window-interface style of Gimp. And we all know how much everyone loves that feature in Gimp.
Ubiquity is likely dead too. It's an old Mozilla project that they abandoned and the community kept alive, but so far nothing's happened with converting it, and it might never happen.
It's All Text could go either way. There's nothing comparable in Chrome due to Chrome limitations, but it probably has a better chance at survival than Ubiquity and TreeStyle Tab.
If I lose these, especially TST, Tab Groups, and Ubiquity, I have no reason to use Firefox any longer. They're the only reason I still use it now, and when they go, I go with them. Where, I don't know; Pale Moon possibly, if I can get those three working in it. If not I may as well just start using an emacs browser. :P
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday August 14 2017, @04:05PM
TST currently works on Pale Moon. They have workaround versions for a lot of stuff, too.
https://addons.palemoon.org/incompatible/ [palemoon.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"