That's unfortunate. I finally gave up on Firefox as my main browser when 57 came out, and one of the big reasons was that so many of the useful extensions that had set Firefox above other browsers for me were broken and didn't have good replacements. In some of those cases, my understanding is that you can't currently write a direct replacement because the new API doesn't support the required functionality. I was really hoping that by two releases later these kinds of issues would have been addressed and new Firefox would at least not be worse than old Firefox in this respect. :-(
> That's unfortunate. I finally gave up on Firefox as my main browser when 57 came out, and one of the big reasons was that so many of the useful extensions that had set Firefox above other browsers for me were broken and didn't have good replacements
I never really understood this argument, you gave up Firefox since you could no longer have your XUL/XPCOM extensions in favor of serious browsers who have less WebExt APIs than Firefox and don't have those same extensions?
Mozilla took away perfectly good functionality and gave existing fans a big middle finger while doing so. Although I am a fan of Mozilla, it is entirely understandable to me why someone wouldn't want to keep using their products.
And lets not ignore the fact that most sites are designed with Chrome as their intended target. FF simply doesn't work as well on many sites.
What's difficult to understand? I've been using Firefox as my main browser because of the extensions while choosing to miss out on features that other browsers had and Firefox didn't. Simply because the pros outweighed the cons.
I still use it as my main browser at home, but with the extensions that used to set Firefox apart gone and forced to reset my workflow and expectations to the minimum common functionality, I find myself using Safari more and more at work simply because the battery usage is better and has out of the box support for SPNEGO. As an added bonus, I can watch HD videos smoothly without killing my processor and draining my battery.
Not really. I gave up Firefox (as my main browser; I'm a web dev so use all of the major ones regularly anyway) because the main thing keeping me there was its extensibility, and that advantage went away. Firefox was and remains slower, less reliable, and less capable than Chrome, and IME has actually become worse in those respects as well since Quantum.
No, but somehow I get the feeling we're talking about entirely different levels of "slower" here.
You're talking about GPU-accelerating complicated page renders.
I'm talking about things like regularly seeing flashes of unstyled content on page load, which I thought we'd left behind somewhere in the last millennium.
I had a look around for other people with this problem, and all the examples I found were caused by extentions. Ghostery just fixed theirs a few days ago, for example. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404468#c36
Old extensions won't ever really work again, but part of me is still kind of holding out hope for WebExtensions API features for things like "allow extension on 'system' pages (new tab, settings, etc)", "focus addressbar", "hide/replace address/tab bars", etc.
Some of those are coming or pretty much ready (tab hiding, addressbar focus), and others I've almost given up on, given how Mozilla seems to have changed their philosophy.
We're waiting for the webextensions API to be extended with a bunch of missing functionality so that extension authors can reimplement things that were made impossible when the older APIs were deprecated. This is something that ideally should have been done before or shortly after the quantum release but was not seen as a priority.