[mixedCase]

Are they? The old system is holding improvements back. If they move to a superset of Chrome's they can still get Chrome add-ons and then some.

If people value the old extension system that much, then it will live on in one of the FF forks. Regardless Firefox will finally get faster, more responsive, more secure, AND still have a better extension API than Blink/WebKit.

[Grue3]

The only reason to use Firefox is because many of its extensions are not possible in any other browser. Watch the market share drop after the extensions are dumbed down to Chrome level.

[ohthehugemanate]

Only reason?

I use Firefox because it's way faster, more stable, and from an organization that I trust. I run Nightly, which means that I made the shift to Webextensions last week. My only extension that didn't have a WE version or alternative was LastPass. No surprise, since they seem to take such poor care of their extensions anyway. That's a Deal Breaker for me, so I switched to pass.

[aorth]

I'm not sure if it's faster yet, but Firefox 57+ is getting very good due to all the radical changes they have been making in the last year. If you haven't checked out Firefox in a while I think you should try Firefox Nightly...

[nindalf]

Fwiw I haven't had an issue with Lastpass, before or after the change to the extension API. They appear to be using the exact same code base as in the Chrome extension and that's fine by me.

[tw21]

Same here... Firefox remains my default browser for its indepence. And it is great to see it improve. Once they catch up with the Webapi I hope they keep expanding it beyond a Chrome copy.

[sweep3r]

Firefox is way faster than what? IE6?

[sgift]

Firefox nightly, which will end up as FF57, uses less memory than Chrome and is faster. (Windows, x64). One of the reasons this was possible was disabling the old extension system. Does it hurt? Sure. Was it needed? Yes.

[quazeekotl]

Do you have any evidence this is actually true? XUL is still there, the firefox UI is still written in it and it will be for quite some time to come. I find it hard to beleive disallowing XUL extensions have significantly sped anything up.

[seba_dos1]

Disallowing XUL extensions made it possible to make many underlying changes that otherwise would break a lot of them. There are plenty of long-lasting tickets on Bugzilla being finally tackled in Firefox 57.

[jsudhams]

I don't use extension any extension but i use Firefox on Desktop and Mobile. From end user wait time etc i dont see any difference between firefox and chrome. For some reason firefox is seem to be faster than chrome on mobile. I use firefox focus mostly on mobile. It would be really sad to see firefox go away as that is only one which is not tied to OS or tied to provider of webmail etc. I see firefox as a product from browser company.

[sethhochberg]

I dunno - I'm a very technical user and I use a pretty vanilla Firefox mostly just because I like/trust Mozilla and don't want to support the web becoming a Webkit / Chrome monoculture.

The only addon I use is LastPass. They support the new extension format just fine. I'm looking forward to the architectural changes coming in Servo, etc, which WebExtensions help make possible. I can't be the only user like me.

[nindalf]

Ditto here. I use Firefox exclusively and all of my extensions are supported - OneTab, ublock origin, Lastpass. I fail to understand the narrative of "the only thing keeping FF alive is the handful of extensions that can't be ported to Chrome". I don't think the extension API is where this battle will be fought anyway. Performance and reliability are what users care about - is the browser fast to open, are pages fast to load, is it making other apps slow (memory and CPU consumption), how many tabs can I keep open, does it hang, does it crash, does any website fail to load/misbehave?

I'm confident Firefox will outstrip Chrome in these areas in the next year or so. But if it doesn't... it will die a slow death and the people on HN will assure us it was because NoScript didn't work anymore.

[seba_dos1]

Thankfully, NoScript will still work just fine - it's already a WebExtension/XUL hybrid and Firefox 57 will bring last changes needed to make it fully WebExtensionified :)

[sweep3r]

>If people value the old extension system that much, then it will live on in one of the FF forks.

Using a fork is also bonkers. I don't trust the security of my web browsing on a fork. Most people won't, either. So Firefox will just get this nice metric saying "most people have not moved to a fork" and will be able to pat themselves in the back. But it's bogus.

[walterbell]

Forks (or old versions of Firefox + extensions) can be run in isolated VMs on platforms like Qubes.

[4c2383f5c88e911]

That's kind of a moot point when your browser handles most of your online interactions (and therefore a good chunk of your online identity, which is quite valuable to most people). Even if you isolate it as much as you can, which is a good thing to do in any case, it can still do a lot of damage without escaping the sandbox.

[walterbell]

Yes, usage of isolated browser instances should be restricted to information within a single context or risk profile. E.g. a stateless, frequently rebooted VM for occasional use of a particular extension. Or a Bromium micro-VM for each tab, redirect, etc.

[testestx]

This is totally impractical, or people would be already doing this when using other browsers as a defense in depth thing.

[walterbell]

Bromium claims to be seamless to end-users, but it's not available to consumers, except on some HP devices, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/13/hp_bromium_virtuali...

As for practicality, if your daily workflow involves a browser extension that has no replacement, the options are:

  - stop doing the task
  - all browsing with insecure browser, no isolation
  - single task with insecure browser, no isolation
  - single task with insecure browser, some isolation

Most people will do #2 or #3. Those who care about security will do #4, with quality of isolation dependent on their threat model.