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by chippy 3131 days ago
Firefox 57 was directed at people who moved away from it, to Chrome users, I'm glad it has made an impact - however, it has upset many people who were using it as their main browser and who depended on a number of extensions which used APIs which were disabled.

There's talk that some API's will be built back, and hopefully with the increase in new users it should be worth it.

For example, on Xubuntu, a low resource friendly Linux distribution run by many on devices with small screens, Firefox 57 now is unable to hide the title window bar and unable to customise the size of tabs, reducing available screen estate by about an inch. In development versions of Firefox, they are enabling CSD for Firefox windows, so in a few months this might be better for the title bar, and in the article it seems as if theming tabs are being addressed.

A particular bug for me is the second time they removed being able to change to the next tab by mouse wheeling over the tab bar. They removed it in Firefox 34 or so (it was default, in built function) and pointed to using Extensions as the workaround. Now they have removed these very extensions that enabled that.

If only an extension could change userChrome.css! That would solve many people's problems.

3 comments

Users who wish to continue using legacy Firefox extensions can use Firefox ESR 52. It will receive security updates through April 2018 at which point it will move to a later version of Firefox which no longer supports legacy extensions. Over the next 5 months, the WebExtensions API will continue to be expanded enabling more of the older extensions' features to work with the modern extensions framework.
Though if NoScript is any indication, they will not work as well and the user interfaces will be inferior.
> If only an extension could change userChrome.css! That would solve many people's problems.

This! Even if extensions were very restricted to only toggle pre-defined css rules or something, this could go a long way.

> If only an extension could change userChrome.css! That would solve many people's problems.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re-style/