[jerheinze]

> 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?

[CaptSpify]

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.

[esarbe]

This is - in my opinion - one of the best reasons to use Firefox.

I don't want to go back to one browser dominating the web.

[loopbit]

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.

[Silhouette]

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.

[jerheinze]

> Firefox was and remains slower

Did you try out the Firefox Nightly with WebRender enabled?

[Silhouette]

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.

[sp332]

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

[Silhouette]

Based on the differences among different machines I use with Firefox installed, it is certainly possible that extensions are causing a lot of the degradation since Quantum, but I'm not sure assigning blame is interesting or useful here. The fact is that my experience as a Firefox user is now much worse than it was before. The new extension model was supposed to make things faster, more secure, more reliable, but sadly the result seems to have been very much the opposite.

[sp332]

The new extension model makes better extensions possible, but it isn't going to make good extensions appear out of thin air. It's not going to stop a buggy extension from causing FOUCs or slowing down the rendering of a page.

I don't want to make excuses if you're having a bad experience though. But I'm hopeful about the future of Firefox.

[jerheinze]

> I'm talking about things like regularly seeing flashes of unstyled content on page load

Never seen on my end for quiet some time, maybe worth a bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org