I've been using Firefox since way back in the day when I stopped using Opera 12 (and I had been using it even before that, I just had really crap hardware for a long time so I had to use Opera).
The devs obviously care about the product and its users and sometimes have to make tough decisions.
I think Firefox 57 is a good thing for Firefox's future. It's basically what the Mozilla rewrite or Firefox's being spun off from Mozilla did, but this time with less of a big-bang. And 1 year from now 99% of the current extensions will work.
And no, for the obvious question, they couldn't have done it the other way. I've been part of several migrations of this kind and people don't really move voluntarily 100% during migrations. Yes, the nice folks do it in time (say, 40%) but the rest have to be dragged along kicking and screaming.
I agree that they had to force turn off old-style extensions at some point to force adoption, but I feel like the same release where most of the APIs needed to port the old extensions over (and still missing a bunch of things) was way too soon. Even quite a few of the actively maintained, high profile extensions are not ready. Same reason why a disturbingly large number of Jetpack extensions has to use require("chrome")… they never got around to flushing out the implemented API set.
My guess is that they had a long and hard discussion (or several) about this exact subject we're talking about. Due to budget constraints (development budgets aren't infinite, even for Open Source projects), they probably decided they had to switch. Otherwise the banner of Firefox would be flown by 0.5% of the world's browsers. Chrome is currently crushing everything and I don't see anyone else stepping up.
Firefox has given developers 3 years and over 10 FF releases to work on migrating extensions [0]. Would you have preferred 5 years? a decade?
Every change breaks someones workflow [1]. It sucks, but it happens because we need to acknowledge a point when the current system holds back progress more than the headaches introduced by a new system.
> Firefox has given developers 3 years and over 10 FF releases to work on migrating extensions.
No it hasn't: Firefox still doesn't ship an API capable of supporting many existing extensions. The developers of those extensions haven't had three years to port; they still can't port.
I really like how fast the new Firefox is, but I won't use it until Keysnail works.
Same here. Tab mix plus (for multiple tab rows) is the reason I kept using FF all these years. WebExtensions does not provide the capability to manipulate tabs the way TMP did.
Like you, I care not how much of a speed improvement may be had as without certain add-ons, my end value is 0. I have been with Mozilla since, IIRC, netscape 0.96. I only use Chrome if absolutely necessary for site functionality.
NoScript, Session manager and Self destructing cookies are the hurdles to clear for me - the rest I'll miss but can probably get by without. Note that both the session and cookie manager are in fact features that should already be part of Firefox and are not. And when I say 'clear', I mean functionally equivalent in all regards to pre 57 (NoScript fails that test).
> Firefox still doesn't ship an API capable of supporting many existing extensions.
And I doubt they're ever going to.
It's the Design Disease: Once a company has it in its head that it Knows Better, anyone who ditches their way for a different one is Wrong, just... Wrong in some way the company thinks is objective, based on whatever Design it has in its head, and must be brought back into the fold.
How tabs work is Design. Design must not be questioned. If you want your tabs to open such that you get a new tab right beside your current tab, instead of over a dozen tabs away at the end of the tab bar, you're Wrong, and having more than three or four tabs is Wrong, too.
They can say that Firefox is faster. I say it's easy to be faster when you're not solving the whole problem.
I've been using Mozilla based Web browsers since before the ice age - I paid for a copy of Netscape in a box from an actual shop.
Many people are unhappy with the extension situation. Mozilla have to take that into account and provide equivalent functionality fairly sharpish or face just being a chrome-clone.
Downvoting this is preposterous when it's a legit point. I've been using Firefox since the Phoenix days and now many of my old extensions that I've been using for years are non-functional; it's very much telling old users to pound sand for the sake of new users.
It's really not though. Try to put yourself in Mozilla's shoes for a moment:
You run arguably the most "free" and "open" internet browser in the business. You are constantly pushing for standardization in the face of competing browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Edge; all of which are trying to establish a walled garden powered by browser specific features. Your browser is consistently losing market share to Chrome because you don't have the cash to spend on marketing partnerships and pre-installs like Google does. Your browser is a means to an end, not the end itself. Your browser exists purely to push forward the tenets of the open internet and open source software. You need market share to push further standardization and improvements to the web experience. To get this market share you need to ensure that your browser offers at least the same performance and security as other browsers. In order to do this, you need to make some backwards incompatible changes or risk falling into obscurity. It's a sacrific you have no choice but to make.
There's no question that breaking backwards compatibility is eventually necessary. That doesn't mean Mozilla did a good job of handling this transition. They absolutely screwed a lot of their existing users, and without good reason. They have had no overlap between support for WebExtensions and XUL extensions. They've been marking XUL extensions as "Legacy" for months but prohibiting you from installing a WebExtension on anything prior to FF 57, forcing everyone to deal with jarring changes to all of their extensions at the same time.
Backwards compatibility was not an option for Mozilla to move their architecture forward for a modern multi-core computer. A rational person would understand this and move on, or find a way to support a fork of FF 56.
I have been a user of extensions since the earliest days of Mozilla Firefox (and earlier) and I love the new browser.
The migration to a multiprocess architecture was handled relatively painlessly early this year. It had nothing to do with the migration to WebExtensions. Many extensions were incompatible with the multiprocess Firefox architecture, but when the user had one of those extensions enabled Firefox simply fell back to using a single process. Many popular and well-maintained extensions were modified to be multiprocess compatible without widespread user-visible breakage or loss of functionality.
Starting to think that they should have forked and rebranded, and let XUL Firefox live on within Mozilla much like the Suite/Seamoney did after Firefox and Thunderbird.
But then Mozilla management has been "weird" ever since they decided to chase Google's tail with rapid fire releases.
And frankly i fear that it, like some other big name FOSS projects, have attracted managerial types that are there more to pad their resume with "social" projects than actually caring for what they are dealing with.
And those in turn have introduced a "push to prod" culture of development...
The fork is Firefox 52 ESR. It's probably enough to wait for some extensions that weren't ready when 57 was released, but 52 ESR isn't going to stick around indefinitely.
SeaMonkey isn't a good role model here. Even before 57, the SeaMonkey release interval had lenghtened to multiple months. That is, evidently it hasn't been tracking Gecko security updates at Firefox's pace.
I started with Netscape Navigator and used FF until 2016. As of FF 55 I started to like Firefox again. As of 56, I was mostly sold on it. As of 57, it is the only browser I consider worth using.
I understand getting salty about losing extensions, but sometimes a company has to make decisions that will get them back on track and recording some growth again. Sometimes a company has to overhaul their product to make it work for _more_ people and not their "minority but vocal core."
My first browser was Mosaic, and I was on Firefox while it was called Phoenix. v57 brought me back to Firefox (from Safari), so I think it's great to see they're not just laser-focusing on what was a rapidly shrinking userbase.
It's not a zero-sum either: those of you who always used Firefox will surely benefit from it not dwindling into obscurity.
I've been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.1, and a Mozilla Suite/Netscape user before that. I used Chrome for a couple of years, but went back around when FF56 was released.
FF57 is absolutely the greatest version of Firefox to date. I have yet to hear a single legitimate complaint against it that actually holds up to scrutiny.
I have yet to hear a single legitimate complaint against it that actually holds up to scrutiny.
It breaks about 2/3 of the extensions I was using, and many of them don't currently have similar replacements available. That's a big loss in some of the functionality that made Firefox attractive as my default browser.
I understand the desire to fix fundamental architectural limitations. In the medium term some of those extensions will probably be updated or replaced. In the long term, the improvements may well pay off in terms of better security and better performance and easier development allowing faster progress. As a software developer I can see that the move was rational even if it is also somewhat controversial.
But in the short term, the loss is still significant for some users. That's a perfectly legitimate concern, and it's apparently sufficient that some people are not upgrading this time.
I'm very much on the pro-webextension side, but really, people's workflow being broken is not a legitimate complaint? What exactly would constitute a legitimate complaint then?
It broke web experience for me. I write userscripts / extensions for most websites I frequent, and almost none work anymore. Granted, it's because Greasemonkey decided to break backward compatibility, but that was triggered by this move to a new extension model.
I tried to think forward, and proactively convert my greasemonkey scripts to new style FF extensions a few months back, to avoid dependency on GM. But abandoned that after it became clear that I'm not allowed to install my own extensions on regular Firefox, because of forced thir-party signing requirement. I have no need for signing. I could create an extension by zipping a directory. Now the workflow is 1000x more complex with all the crap loaded from npm required to sign it.
My web experience is s*it, ATM.
Firefox is great anyway. But it is power user hostile in some aspects too. Personal extensions/userscripts are central to my use of the web. So this is all quite annoying, since signing was enforced. And now even my userscripts broke with 57, as expected.
This point is irksome. How hard would it be to provide a switch to disable mandatory signing? Something similar to the unknown sources option in Android.
To all those claiming that Mozilla doesn't owe this to their users, you are technically correct. But why piss off users when you can easily satisfy them with a simple option. I shouldn't have to use a patched browser for something so basic.
Last I knew, there were "unbranded" editions of Firefox - editions without the Firefox logo and name - which allowed users to disable the signing requirement. The ESR (extended service release) edition might also allow it.
Pretty easy, I think; there was a switch in the UI for a while, then hidden in about:config, then hard-coded into the browser.
I think that the issue was that they were worried about people who don't understand the security implications turning verification off and getting themselves into trouble.
Then you'll be overjoyed to hear about the unbranded builds! The exact same code, except it's yours, so it allows all extensions and doesn't say "Firefox" on it.
Without this it’s significantly easier to install bad extensions posing as a “good” extension. It’s happened many times and is a huge win in terms of security.
> It broke web experience for me. I write userscripts / extensions for most websites I frequent
Sorry to hear this; but I think it's arguably more important for Mozilla to improve the web experience for a hundred million users who may never "write userscripts / extensions" for any website than to hamstring their development in order to avoid inconvenience to a single user who feels the need to customize every point of their web experience.
Also mandatory signing doesn't improve web experience for anyone. It's a security feature. Security is always inconvenient, almost by definition. So your point is invalid.
I don't mind change, I like new Firefox features, what I dislike is imposition of stupid lockdowns, and pointless control. One valid point, I might concede, is that there are innocent third parties affected if someone clueless confirms installation of some malevolent extension. So restricting it is somewhat justified.
Anyway, it's all still a sham. Anyone can still disable mandatory signing with a simple 10 line script patching omni.ja in any Firefox. So it's still no security against people who can be persuaded to enbale something in about:config, or run firefox with a command switch, or add some file to /etc/firefox/, or run a simple 10 line script "to make firfox compatible with our great extension".
I've been using FF57 on OS X since its release, and it's been great. Two issues have proven particularly difficult to get used to, however, and I'm surprised they aren't talked about more:
1. Video performance. Even something as simple as opening a video in reddit spikes my CPU to 100%, and before reluctantly installing Adblock Plus I ran into multiple kernel panics from opening articles on mainstream news sites and blogs.
2. Pinch-to-zoom isn't supported (closest alternative I could find is some about:config settings to make the pinch gesture equivalent to cmd++/-, which isn't useful).
I'm still using Firefox, and there's a lot that I like about it more than Chrome, but I'm seriously considering switching back because of those and some other minor issues.
I thought I was the only one with an issue with Firefox57. Got a Macbook Pro 16 GB, 3.1 Ghz Core i7, MacOSX Sierra (10.12.6). The CPU goes wild during a search on Google Maps and also on certain pages of forbes.com. On forbes I've disabled the Ublock origin coz they politely asked me to.
At one point the whole browser crashed. So right now got Chrome and FF open and am switching depending on the site. Might just end up back in Chrome if this isn't resolved.
Yep, apparently. (Technically not macOS, but OS X, since I haven't upgraded from El Capitan just yet.) I'd never had an issue with frequent kernel panics before, so I'm not sure what could be up with videos in Firefox.
You can't inspect websocket frames. It is a tiny quibble in the face of big amazing improvements. But it is a thing (and is why I still use chrome primarily for development), and the extension used to patch this in to the devtools broke in the big extensions change.
I don't believe that's the case. Evolution is important. Sometimes you have to get rid of old stuff to get ahead.
By doing so, Mozilla shows that it cares about his user. Letting use old stuff that are not maintained anymore (if they are, a compatible version will shows up) lead you to situations like win32
By doing so, Mozilla shows that it cares about his user.
By completely trashing a tool I'd spent years customizing without anything resembling feature parity ready by release? It's not really on the devs to port something when the new system is missing APIs. The "They had 5 years!" argument directed at the addon devs could just as easily be directed back at Mozilla...
Or perhaps by ignoring the loud negative feedback when I and many others said we didn't want paternalistic "thou shalt not install unless we say okay" controls on add-ons like Chrome has?
Or was it instead by ignoring my repeated questions on how to fix a ten-year-old SSL handling bug that causes a great deal of pain for sysadmins? (Vendors have a poor habit of reusing SSL certs - Firefox will flat out tell you to pound sand and not allow you to visit a site with a dupe cert. Chrome, IE, Opera, and I believe Edge will warn you that this is abnormal, but otherwise continue)
If this is how Mozilla cares for its users, I'd hate to see what they consider neglect.
I have been a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix.
This is the best Firefox , but I have lost a ton of extensions including my Vim extensions. So right now I use Qutebrowser and know that the new plugins will get added.
Vimium is _good_ but I really wish it would use the browser's native search widget when searching via `/`. I've been meaning to look into the documentation, but my assumption is that this is a limitation of the WebExtensions API.
The problem with all vim-style extensions is that they have been limited in potential functionality. For instance they won't work in any builtin pages such as about: pages or the new tab page or https://add-ons.mozilla.com. This forces the user to think about whether their command will work or not and induces an uncertainty in their flow.
The other issues regarding limited control over the browsing experience may be resolved with future API expansion, but the previously mentioned hobbling is something with which we are most likely permanently stuck.
I understand that in principle the new model of extensions is the way to go... but then Firefox without Session Manager, FireFTP and no way to read MAFF files just doesn't have the distinct functionality that kept me using it in the desktop. Perfect is the enemy of good I guess.
I've been using Firefox since way back in the day when I stopped using Opera 12 (and I had been using it even before that, I just had really crap hardware for a long time so I had to use Opera).
The devs obviously care about the product and its users and sometimes have to make tough decisions.
I think Firefox 57 is a good thing for Firefox's future. It's basically what the Mozilla rewrite or Firefox's being spun off from Mozilla did, but this time with less of a big-bang. And 1 year from now 99% of the current extensions will work.
And no, for the obvious question, they couldn't have done it the other way. I've been part of several migrations of this kind and people don't really move voluntarily 100% during migrations. Yes, the nice folks do it in time (say, 40%) but the rest have to be dragged along kicking and screaming.