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by Juan_Largearm 2987 days ago
I never left FF. It's been a great browser for me and I've never been tempted to leave. Recently though since the big update that rendered half the add-ons I came to rely on useless - I'm in limbo with no alternatives to them or half-hearted promises that the dev will get round to porting them "sometime".

Chrome has a lot of them as well as alternatives available and for me this is where I do consider jumping ship.

I completely understand FF wanting to change things up in the name of performance and modernising but I do feel they didn't really appreciate how important add-ons are to keeping people using it.

A lot of those add-ons are many years old but still had 1000s of users who suddenly were in the same situation as me.

3 comments

Can you list some of the addons? I too have been using Firefox since it was called Firebird and had a whole host of addons. Interestingly I just continued using Firefox and now don't miss them much. Addons I used to use include FireFTP, FireSSH and the SQLite addon. I now just use other applications. I am guessing the Vim addon is one the ones you need?
Personally, I have 5-6 'must-have addons' that keep me on Firefox, but they've all now been updated for the new API. The only perhaps outstanding breakage is add-ons that implement alternative tab bars (I use a couple to put the tab bar on the side) -- they still are somewhat limited in how they can customize the sidebar, and the add-on now has no interface to disable the default tab bar, so you need to do that yourself with userChrome.css. As I understand, add-on devs are working with FF to address this soon.
Yes. It broke many add-ons that were important to me. I'm hanging in there doing my usuals with the 52 ESR version, although it has broken a half-dozen of them. Many of the Quantum 'replacements' have been severely restricted in functionality.

Unless the situation improves, when the ESR expires, I'll be switching to FF forks permanently. E.g. Pale Moon. And there are others in the works, like Waterfox.