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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:12PM
Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
Ralph: That about sums it up for me.
(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?"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:23PM (15 children)
I've played with a lot of extensions, some cooler than others. Nowadays, all I really insist on is Noscript, uBlock, and a dark theme. Palemoon has that. I'm cool with abandoning Firefox. Firefox is still installed, but I haven't used it in - weeks, at least.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:37PM (7 children)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday August 13 2017, @08:47PM (3 children)
Which is by no means unique. Just about all leading browsers have these same extensions and plugins. So no points scored there.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:44PM
No, the other browsers have no ability to support the same range of extensions as Firefox. For example, read about why Zotero stops providing its Firefox plugin and requires you to use its standalone application in the future (in connection with a much less able plugin to connect to the standalone application).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday August 13 2017, @10:48PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by Zal42 on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:41PM
I am unaware of any browser that has the functionality of NoScript (either built-in or available as an extension). I'd love to know which ones do!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:40PM (2 children)
Wow, are you ever out of the loop.
There are multiple mentions of ESR in this (meta)thread.
Do a text search.
(That's Extended Support Release.) [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday August 13 2017, @10:40PM (1 child)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:32AM
This may interest you:
.
...and when you change topics in a comment, standard practice is to start a new paragraph.
It is more difficult to pick up on thoughts when those are all mushed together in text blobs (such as yours).
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:39PM (1 child)
Right there with you. I still have FF installed but only because it's got a lot of saved passwords and I wanted to start with a clean profile in PaleMoon aside from transferring my bookmarks. That's literally the only thing I use it for anymore.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @08:48PM
Great minds do think alike. I ditched FF for PM (and DDG for Google search) months ago. Neither is 100% super-duper, but the best available at the moment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:09PM
This. I moved all my Firefox profiles over to Pale Moon, replaced a few addons, left some behind. I still have Firefox installed, but won't update it past version 56 and probably remove it soon.
There's just no point in Firefox anymore.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:21PM
At home, i have firefox running to connect to plex on my raspberrypi. Other than that, it's palemoon (Opera sometimes for quick searches when i don't want to wait for a bunch of tabs to open.
I could switch to something else if i needed to.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @02:03PM
I stopped using firefox when they dropped support for cpus without SSE support.
(Score: 1) by Hyper on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:22PM
Same. The only plugin I missis Decentraleyes. .
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @03:59PM
Yeah, I don't have any extensions that are really *essential*. There have been times when I've gone to the addons browser and went through dozens of pages of popular extensions and couldn't find anything I considered useful (except on mobile...there's some nice ones on mobile). Main thing I care about is privacy/security, but I don't see the point of half-assed blocking -- if I don't trust you, I blacklist you at the firewall. No point in blocking on one browser and giving full access to the rest of my network for whatever sneaky crap they might try to pull.
I do have Lightbeam, which builds a database/graph of connections over time, so you can for example see all the third-party connections and figure out if anything needs to be added to the firewall blocklist. But that one is created and maintained by Mozilla, so I don't expect it to go anywhere in the near future.
I have PrivacyBadger, although I'm not sure that it's actually doing anything at this point -- the stuff it's "blocking" would be blocked by the firewall anyway. But it's nice to have a second line of defense, and it's maintained by the EFF so I expect they'll keep it going.
Most recently I installed Decentraleyes, due to some problems I was having browsing the Steam forums that I thought might have been caused by blocked libraries. It wasn't. I don't think I really need that one at all, but again, it's a decent second defense.
So I've got two plugins that I probably don't need, and one plugin that makes life marginally more convenient occasionally. I'd give those up in a second if I had to in order to keep using Firefox. I'm sure as shit not going to use a Google browser, and the same goes for Apple/Microsoft. I could perhaps use Pale Moon, but that's just a degraded Firefox as far as I'm concerned (I kinda *like* the new UI, and AFAIK reverting that is still their main "feature"). Last time I needed an alternate browser I ended up on Midori, because that was the most ethically acceptable and least "just a rebadged Firefox" alternative. And Midori freakin' SUCKS unless you're browsing from some underpowered ARM device...
I also think there's a strong moral/strategic cause for supporting Mozilla. It's our browser of last resort. Every alternative is Google or Microsoft or Apple. Or based on Mozilla's code. (Or niche applications, like Midori.) It's the last stand of Free browsers and a Free web. And Mozilla is taking that role seriously, they're becoming much more of a rights organization like the EFF rather than just another software company. A lot of people don't like that, and a lot of people seem to assume that every single project they start is somehow just another bloated or threatening addition to the browser (see some comments on the story about the "Information Trust Initiative" a few days ago.) But I think that while Mozilla does make some mistakes, and they could definitely do things better, at the moment they're the best alternative we have. I'm certainly not ready to just throw that out without a viable replacement. The best replacement I know is Pale Moon, and I'm not yet convinced that they could survive independently if Mozilla went away.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:27PM (8 children)
If you're only now considering to drop that PoS you're late to the party.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:00PM (3 children)
I don't see a troll post there. I don't guess it matters a lot to AC, but it's not a troll post. Firefox has forgotten it's mission. Any number of us can argue who, what, when, where, and why for days and days, and still not agree on a specific point in time. But, the fact is, Firefox has forgotten it's mission. Way back when, Firefox was going to be the leanest, meanest, fastest, bestest, and most securest web browser in existence. And, it was that, for awhile. Then, they got distracted with screwing a pooch, then another pooch, and eventually, Firefox is just as bad a fleabag as any of the pooches.
Specifically, TFS and TFA question whether this last bitch is the straw that broke the cameltoe. (I heard that one on the radio, LOL)
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:14PM
It hasn't been lean since it was called Phoenix. It got renamed and bloaty, then renamed again to Firefox.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Sunday August 13 2017, @05:20PM
I agree that Firefox has been doing a lot of silly things over the last few years but:
1) that post has no arguments what so ever.
2) It voices an opinion using..lets call it not very sophisticated language.
To me, it is just plain dumb. It maybe not a troll but it sure as hell is not very interesting not insightful (which is what it is modding now that I am reading this).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @02:35AM
This is how Mozilla has been since the START. The only reason they had the success they did was because of the guy who developed phoenix, which eventually became firefox, and the luck of firefox becoming popular right about the time they finally got JIT support so they could enhance/ruin firefox by adding XUL support to it. When that happened it both inevitably was on the path to its modern shittiness, as well as having the plugin support that ended up making it so great for so many people.
The original phoenix was gtk2 without plugin support. The plugin support and xul in general was AFAIR one of the reasons that original dev left after being ousted from his lead position when he let phoenix/firefox become an official mozilla project.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @02:02PM (1 child)
Yeah, I switched to Chrome and then Vivaldi some time back. I don't even have Firefox installed.
Not even the whole Brendan Eich thing, even if I'm supposed to support Mozilla's decision to fire him because of my demographic, could convinced me to keep Firefox with all the problem it has (slow and leaks memory as others have noted), especially now with the shit going on with Google.
“Then the third one hit Google. And then the fourth. And then we learned this was not gonna stop. This was just the beginning.” Eh, probably need something a bit different from a giant mech, not that I'd mind having a giant mech.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:01PM
Sigh, not this again. He was fired because he couldn't effectively lead. The only reason anybody questions this is because he's a homophobe. Had he been donating to racist groups there would have been no question about it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Sunday August 13 2017, @02:41PM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:32PM
To be fair, changing their versioning system and copying Chrome UI elements are clearly more important than creating a good browser.
(Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:28PM (4 children)
Learning that Firefox planned to break extension compatibility + seeing extension developers say [mozilla.org] that their extensions are "dependent on XUL overlay" was enough to impel me to switch.
I ended up on Pale Moon, which is free software, cross platform, very firefoxy and works nicely with extensions.
Worst side effect of using Pale Moon: Some sites (banks, but other random sites too) are designed and/or run by brain dead morons (or zombies, in past their depth?) that check for a shortlist of user agents before artificially declaring that their site won't work on your "unsupported browser." Extension "User Agent Switcher" is required to get around this.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by J_Darnley on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:59PM
> past tense of "yes"
Ha. Me too. I abandoned Firefox when I got a new computer. I had been using Firefox v3.6 for years on the old one after it was "unsupported". I didn't want to deal with Australis (the new UI introduced in Firefox v28 or v29) on the new one so I did move to Pale Moon too.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 14 2017, @02:58AM (2 children)
Tip on user agent switcher and user agent strings?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday August 14 2017, @01:39PM (1 child)
I use the one simply called "User Agent Switcher" with Pale Moon.
The extremely imperfect system goes as follows:
I suppose it would be nicer to have a user agent switcher that remembered user agents on a per-site basis, but in looking at what I have set up, I am apparently not that organized.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday August 14 2017, @02:15PM
Update: UA Control 0.1.3.1.1 provides per-site user agent spoofing in Pale Moon.
User Agent Switcher has a nice list of user agents to choose from; UA Control just lets you paste what you want, meaning you have to find the user agent of the browser(s) you want to spoof. Still and all, tested and working here; I logged into online banking successfully with Pale Moon.
For what it's worth, here's the user agent that unlocked access to my online banking:
(Score: 4, Informative) by moondrake on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:29PM (4 children)
I use just 4-5 exensions regularly. For all of those, new versions already exist or are in development. For one of those, I will lose some functionality that I value (but, chrome-based browser also do not have that functionality), but there is a 3rd party applicaition to solve this.
I expect the vastly reduced tab memory use with the new version will make it worthwhile for me to update sooner rather than later...
Note that WebExtentions/FF is already allowing you to do a bit more than what you get in Chrome (see e.g. posts of the ublock author here [mozilla.org].
Change is always a bit painful, but without it, we cannot progress.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday August 13 2017, @06:48PM (2 children)
Out of curiosity, what extensions are those, what functionality, and what third party app? That information would probably help others that use (those) extensions.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:11PM (1 child)
Mostly noscript, ublock, flashblock (can live without this one i since noscript covers most of it), ghostery and zotero. See here [zotero.org] for how zotero plan to continue forward. On some machine I have tree-style tab installed, but feel i can live without it (have not checked its status).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:52PM
Tree Style Tab works on Pale Moon.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday August 13 2017, @10:19PM
I use the Keybinder extension [mozilla.org] to keep accidental presses of Ctrl+Q instead of Ctrl+W from closing the whole browser. But it's legacy, and the WebExtensions replacement [mozilla.org] isn't compatible with Firefox for Linux.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ealbers on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:32PM
Switched to Palemoon awhile ago from firefox, its firefox without all the options removed.
Same reason I love Vivaldi as a chrome replacement, Chrome, no options, no privacy.
Firefox/Chrome -> fixing problems you don't have.
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:37PM
Yes, I'm considering using another branch of Firefox at least. If need be, I'll stay with the version 56...
My problem is that I use A LOT of addons & I've already many extensions problems, right now. I mostly use the DEV edition (version 56), and it's already starting to create issues. ALL my addons are marked as LEGACY already, and several -niche ones- only work because I disabled some checks. I'm quite pessimistic.
I know that some of my addons (including my owns) will not (or cannot) be updated (the authors said so), so I'm going to be stuck.
I suppose that I'll have to do what I already do: using various browsers and profiles according to the needs of the sites. For instance, some sites are painful with Firefox, so I use Chromium (it's rare). Then I have several profiles with various levels of security. For instance, I use a separate one for Youtube, with less protections (they make it impossible to use YT), but only used for Youtube. I also use them to segregate my different types of activities (programming, casual browsing, mail, etc.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:42PM (1 child)
It turns out I only use four extensions. If alternatives for them exist, I will go to them. If not, I'll certainly look at other browsers.
That being said, if other browsers don't have alternatives for those extensions I don't get much benefit from switching, do I?
My extensions:
Go Parent Folder
Adblock +
XMarks
User Agent Switcher (Frankly, I totally forgot I'm using this one!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @02:10PM
The one thing I miss from Firefox is a good extension to add Vim-like keybindings and : to get a command line such as vimperator or pentadactyl. I don't miss it enough to deal with everything broken about Firefox.
(Score: 4, Informative) by moondrake on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:47PM (3 children)
For anyone wondering what is the status of their favorite extension, here's the list:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gA_Nj8SJ6ykhrqJNJqIoge2H-_CGHQc8uK5K3LYr5As/edit#gid=1070962981 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Sunday August 13 2017, @02:35PM (2 children)
Damn only 2 of the extensions I use often are on that list, Adblock Plus and NoScript. Both are listed as "likely." No Firebug, Dummy Lipsum, or Web Developer? That sucks.
Ever had a belch so satisfying you have to blow your nose afterward?
(Score: 3, Informative) by moondrake on Sunday August 13 2017, @05:15PM
It only lists what they think are popular ones. The others you mention might, or might not, be supported.
For noscript I am pretty sure it will be supported (there's a test version already).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:59PM
uBlock Origin has been mentioned in the (meta)thread.
Some folks find that that replaces both of those.
After the brouhaha about Adblock Plus and advertising, that extension lost a lot of its luster.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DarkMorph on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:52PM (13 children)
If I have to dump FF due to no forks preserving working ALSA, and I'd be surprised if no fork does keep it alive, then maybe this extension break will be the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm not sure what alternative there is that is acceptable. I want to like Midori but without proper privacy control, no browser is suitable to let loose on the wild wild web. Noscript is a significant reason why I stick to FF, and actually the web dev tools built into the browser have been quite nice to work with. Chromium, with patches to strip out the dozen or so Google references baked into it, would be the best to switch to since it has an extension that serves Noscript's purpose, and uBlock Origin and Ghostery have already been available for that browser for quite some time.
The problem isn't Firefox, it's Mozilla and what they're doing to it. I would like to see the Iceweasel fork keep ALSA alive ideally, because I doubt Seamonkey is going to try to keep that fight alive and they'll just cave in and take upstream's dropping of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:10PM (7 children)
There was a sound server called ESD. It was so bad Alan Cox had to call it out, everyone hated it. It had 500-2000ms latency at the best of times. Eventually it gained renown as the worst idea anyone ever had for audio, and died. Just kidding! It was renamed to Pulse Audio and nearly every major vendor who ships on Linux supports it and nothing else. Microsoft, Mozilla, commercial VOIP software, etc.
I have no love for systemd, but it was the very best idea that shitstain ever had.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by coolgopher on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:55PM (6 children)
Ah, I think you're slightly off the mark here. ESD was the Enlightenment Sound Daemon, and part of the Enlightenment desktop. Probably the neatest, coolest, flashiest-yet-still-highly-usable desktop of its time. Except the hardware to run it properly wasn't to be invented for another 5-10 years - everything had high latency :( I really tried to like it...
PulseAudio on the other hand, well, it also had (has?) the same crap latency. And, in true Lennart style, it sits on top of everything like a fat frog and slurps everything through it. So if you're unlucky to have a program which outputs via ESD, that would end up getting both the ESD latency *and* the Pulse latency.
PulseAudio is however not derived from ESD, to the best of my knowledge. Wikipedia seems to back me up on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_Sound_Daemon [wikipedia.org]
And just to make it clear, I'm neither an ESD nor Pulse expert - neither of those daemons have been allowed on my systems for a very (very) long time. ALSA, possibly with the OSS compat layer, is generally sufficient for my needs. For heavier stuff, there's JACK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:02PM (5 children)
Wikipedia doesn't say anything about the relationship, other than ESD being outmoded by it in gnome. It's hard to find links on that ancient POS though. The point is they do share lineage, ESD was a piece of shit in its day, everyone knew it, and it would be just about as bad today—seriously, you don't need much to mix audio, the amount of latency it had was not because the cpu was slow—I've been doing it since the 286. Besides, aRts had similar features (and then some) and good latency under normal usage... and it's not exactly well-loved either. Pulse is bad for the exact same reasons as ESD: dipshit basically put every feature into the main code path. That's why he wanted to start fucking with the Linux kernel, separation of concerns is not in his vocabulary.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:01PM (3 children)
Linux deserves a lot of the blame. The Linux OSS implementation allowed multiple channels, but only with hardware that did sound mixing. This completely missed the point of a kernel: to provide abstractions for userspace. Only one application could open /dev/dsp and so you needed something in userspace to do the mixing. Unfortunately, GNOME and KDE, in their typical fashion, implemented incompatible ones.
The next version of OSS, OSS 4, did support in-kernel sound mixing, but was proprietary. The reaction of the Linux kernel developers was to replace it with ALSA, which had a lot of extra complexity, was harder to program for, and didn't provide useful OSS compatibility (still no sound mixing).
In contrast, FreeBSD took the last BSD-licensed version of OSS and update it to support the newer interfaces. They added in-kernel sound mixing, so multiple apps could open /dev/dsp and get their own independent channel. No need for any userspace mixing, no need to rewrite existing applications.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:28PM (2 children)
I don't think BSD's approach made the difference. If BSD was as popular on the desktop as Linux it would attracted the same shitstains and end up with the same sound server problems. You've still gotta have PulseAudio if you want Skype, etc.
It's hardly fair to blame Linux when half the time the sound server isn't serving the client or the hardware, it's just sitting there in the middle, taking up space. People want to write these deep stacks. Look at Android, with ~120ms latency typical not that long ago, on what is essentially a proprietary stack, the devs just don't care. When they realized this was a problem for musicians, they started targeting 50ms. (Musicians want about 9ms.) As far as latency in sound stacks go, developers by and large don't care, or even when they do, are so out of touch they miss the point.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 14 2017, @03:09AM
Skype is a spy tool for En-Ez-Ay that delivers a copy of your face every 5 minutes to their storage. So not much reason to keep it around.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @11:35AM
Most places say 20ms is the limit before it becomes audible, but that's end to end. E.g. if you are using a soft synth app, that's 20 ms from the keyboard, through the midi router, through the USB driver into the midi stack, into the app, generating the sound, back out through the sound stack to the line out.
So yeah, 9ms for just the audio stack is probably on the high side.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday August 14 2017, @03:05AM
Oh I sure aren't disagreeing on the idiocy of the fat-toad-monolith approach here! Pulse did replicate it all on its own though, with a dedicated plugin/interface to allow it be an ESD client. Because, you know, peeps all love latency, so let's have some latency with that latency, yo.
Man what a trip down memory lane here - I'd completely forgotten about artsd!
(Score: 3, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday August 13 2017, @02:24PM (1 child)
I was finally convinced to remove PulseAudio from my “# Lennart” section in /etc/portage/package.mask after the roommate demoed modern PulseAudio to me. I'd heard that Lennart hasn't been involved in its maintenance for some time. Sure enough, it worked out of the box just fine—totally different from my previous experience with it back when we had to use ESD or aRts before ALSA seamlessly allowed multiple processes to play sound at the same time with dmix.
I had been maintaining a .asoundrc to manage swapping between my headset and speakers, but PulseAudio takes care of that very well. It's able to flip audio streams between multiple devices seamlessly during playback. The 1s lag I'd been used to back in the bad old days is completely gone. pavucontrol, a GTK mixer XFCE likes to use, is very easy to use, way easier than Windows 7/8.1's mixer.
To each their own, though. It is somewhat disturbing to see applications no longer supporting native ALSA.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Monday August 14 2017, @10:54AM
Pulse stopped sucking once Lennart was no longer involved (though unlike systemd, I don't think the design was fatally flawed from the getgo); I do find the either Linux sound situation to be rather pitful but I can't blame devs for targetting pulse vs ALSA.
Dealing with ALSA directly is a nightmare, and poorly documented at best; libasound is a staggering good example of how NOT to design a library; to do basic PCM audio requires a staggering amount of code and more knowledge of sound hardware than most people have.
For many many years, the situation was you picked a sound library (openAL) which got rid of the pain of libasound at the cost of requiring new dependencies/latencies/etc. Pulse on the otherhand is trivial to code against, so there's a lot to be said with cutting out the middle man. I don't *like* it, but ALSA is pretty much my goto example of how the Linux kernel isn't designed, it's just one bad kludge after another.
Notably, sound on the *BSDs as the parent-parent post stated was pretty much sane right from the get go, and ESD/aRTs wasn't necessary.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday August 14 2017, @05:02AM
SeaMonkey just doesn't have enough developers or funds to keep any fights alive and is probably going to die when XUL etc are dropped from Mozilla. As a long time SeaMonkey user and fork maintainer, it's sad but that's Mozilla, don't give a shit about users, just "the architecture"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @09:56AM (1 child)
I'm trying to get ALSA support working for one of my projects, but PULSE keeps getting in the way, hogging ALSA.
And after I get ALSA working only one process can access the audio hardware at a time, and my projects has multiple processes that I'd like to generate audio with, so that means making a mixer (going to have to anyway to support ALSA, even though MS, Apple and Pulse all have APIs that have mixing made) AND I have to do some funky event driven audio server -- basically I'm building a low latency sound server.... HEY WAIT A MINUTE!
Fuck you and your ALSA. Pulse sucks but the wheel has been invented. Put your money where your mouth is and fund a new API -- and the battle it will take to get it adopted.
Sorry, it's just not worth supporting ALSA -- Maybe next time, when I'm doing something "simple" like making a Linux port of a game's audio engine... Seriously, the only audio API worse than the cluster fuck on Linux is HTML5.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @11:41AM
ALSA has had a built in mixer for years. Originally it introduced a lot of lag, but even that has been fixed years ago.
However, I would not be surprised if pulseaudio goes around the mixer and directly to the "hw" device, in a typical Poettering fashion of "I am the only king in town", and prevents dmix from getting access.
If that's the case, it's yet another reason for me to never allow that crap onto my machine.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:56PM (2 children)
I wonder how much the chrome guys paid for this decision.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:44PM (1 child)
Honestly, I doubt they paid anything. This is just one small self-destructive bad decision in a long line of self-destructive bad decisions we've seen from the Firefox devs.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday August 13 2017, @10:16PM
Yeah, I have to wonder if Firefox has long been hiring the Yahoo people as they have been getting laid off. They seem to have the same "vision" of where they want to go.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:57PM (3 children)
I use Firefox for two reasons:
1. you can turn off most of the "phone home" stuff, since it's all in support of user features instead of ad network features
2. pentadactyl ( http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/index [5digits.org] ) - which is hard enough to find working builds of these days anyway
#1 means I won't be on Chrome or Edge anytime ever. I'll be losing #2 come the new version. If Pale Moon or something supports it I might switch, but I'm concerned about security issues in the less popular browsers. FF has pretty good security, and Debian took it so much farther by issuing patches faster than FF could mainline them. (This is why FF was called "iceweasel" on Debian before they changed their trademark policy.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:10PM (2 children)
That's actually based on a real story, but with the details changed, presumably as the result of fuzzy memory.
It wasn't the speed with which Debian was patching, it was that Mozilla did not want these patches produced at all, and tried to use their trademark to prevent it. Patches in question being back-ported security fixes for older Firefox versions. Mozilla wanted them to simply accept the new version whole, and that was back when Debian was worth something so they took the time to strip out the copyrighted images and maintained old versions with backported security patches.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)
That isn't borne out in the exchanges I've read between Mozilla and Debian, so I'm pretty sure you're making it up. The gist of those exchanges were:
M: you can't use our trademark on builds we don't provide
D: we need security patches tho
M: upstream them plz
D: we tried, yo' ass slo. ain't nobody got time fo' dat
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @08:15PM
Actually I believe that Mozilla was fine with Debian producing patched versions, and was perfectly willing to grant Debian a special dispensation to use the Mozilla trademarks for the patched versions.
BUT it's against the Debian rules to accept a special dispensation that can't be passed along downstream.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:05PM
In every sense of the word it is.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:06PM (2 children)
I've been using luakit. Vimish controls, works well with tiling (the renderer used to crash when the window resized but is working very well now), very customizable and extensible using lua, just a joy to use. Before luakit, I used seamonkey (still do sometimes because I have so many bookmarks/logins saved in it that I can't be bothered to transfer), which I would recommend to anyone who doesn't like editing config files or is uncomfortable with keyboard-driven browsing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @09:45PM (1 child)
[I still use SeaMonkey] because I have so many bookmarks/logins saved in it that I can't be bothered to transfer
Your browser's bookmark manager doesn't have an Import tool?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Monday August 14 2017, @04:11AM
I'm pretty sure there's a relatively pain-free way to transfer bookmarks (copying a file, maybe changing the formatting IIRC), I've just never bothered with it. I jusr don't use them often enough to make it a big enough deal to take care of, and for the stuff that I do use often luakit's quickmarks are much more convenient (basically assigning a hotkey to a page, all you do is type the quickmark-leader 'go'+$hotkey).
(Score: 2) by driven on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:25PM (1 child)
Much as people hate on FF for breaking extension compatibility, I think their userbase will get past it.
Looking at this interesting blog post on Firefox marketshare [andreasgal.com], two things stand out:
- Google pushes Chrome heavily through its web searches, which the majority of people use.
- Mozilla lost a lot of users by deprecating old platforms.
Not earth shattering news, but somehow hard to grasp for a lot of people.
The quickest thing Mozilla could do to win users back is reinstate support for old platforms that they've abandoned. The open web should be available to everyone, not just people with shiny phones and computer operating systems.
Mozilla also needs to cut its tether to advertising-driven companies. Then they can do some real work on privacy preserving features.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 14 2017, @02:44AM
Look who is in executive positions at Mozilla and wonder no longer.
The people involved with Mozilla are mostly cronies of existing mozilla members, and the majority aren't devs, or only worked on the 'web design' side of things, not the browser engineering side of things. Short of a major shakeup in management at Mozilla, the only that that can be done is to fork and forget (Well, forget the good parts, because the bad parts need to be remembered so as to not repeat their 20 years of mistakes.)
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:25PM (2 children)
It EOLed a few days ago but I haven't bothered updating yet. Will probably wait using ESR\Palemoon until the following are available:
PassFF
NoScript
uBlock Origin
NoSquint Plus
Better Reader
Open in Reader View
compiling...
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:08PM
uBlock Origin is availible in PaleMoon. Dunno about the rest, don't use them. Here's the official status list though: https://addons.palemoon.org/incompatible/ [palemoon.org]
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by number11 on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:48PM
Both uBlock Origin and NoScript work with Pale Moon. As do FlashBlock and Secret Agent. Dunno about the others you mention.
(Score: 2) by Ken_g6 on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:41PM (1 child)
When they killed Firebug I started looking at Chromium again. I finally found a user-friendly script blocker in ScriptSafe, and that was enough for me to switch. Plus Chromium is just faster. I still miss the FireFinder extension, though - typing in $$('[path]') at the console isn't quite the same.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:46PM
I didn't know people still used Firebug. Seems like the built-in Firefox developer tools do all the same functions, don't they? Or has Firebug advanced significantly since I last used it? What do you need from Firebug that Firefox itself doesn't do?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thesis on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:52PM
In the early days, I loved it. It was fresh, new, supported extensions, and it wasn't like other browsers. I liked it better than chrome, for the settings were easily tweakable, with nothing hidden. Chrome kept taking away options, and burying options making it difficult for users like me (not so tech savvy) to set it up the way I like it, with the extensions I wanted. Then there is the privacy issue, for we all know Chrome, being a Google product, will usurp all the data it can about you and send it to the mother ship.
Then suddenly, Firefox mimicked Chrome... Excuse me Mozilla, I used your product because it was not like Chrome... I dropped it like a bad habit then, as did many thousands of others. It is a dead project in my mind, and Mozilla does not give a shit about righting the ship, in many ways. It will never recover the user base it had, IMHO. They should rename it Titanic, for it is sunk.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pkrasimirov on Sunday August 13 2017, @03:54PM
> Will You Stop Using Firefox
Firefox will stop using me.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:49PM (3 children)
It's just a crippled Seamonkey browser, with less features and just as fat. You may as well use Chrome with its built in flash player and pdf reader. What purpose did Firefox ever serve?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday August 13 2017, @06:45PM (2 children)
For me, it served the purpose of a web browser, for many years. It's been sad to see it go, but it's pretty much gone. Without extensions (noscript in particular) it's not really a web browser anymore. It's become a malware delivery system basically like all the others... chrome, ie, edge.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:32PM (1 child)
Yeah, I still don't know why people bothered. Maybe because download speeds made a difference back then. Netscape/Seamonkey has remained the most consistent for 20 years (or more). And now it's not much bigger than browsers with one quarter the features. Firefox and Thunderbird are completely unnecessary now and should be depreciated.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday August 14 2017, @05:15AM
Sadly SeaMonkey may not survive the stripping of stuff out of Gecko. It's all they can do to keep up with the build bustages and now that Mozilla is really ripping the good stuff out...