[newscracker]

The enterprise part is great to see (though it was something that seemed long overdue). I recently noticed on a Firefox mailing list that Mike Kaply (of Kaply Consulting, a company that helped with enterprise deployment and configuration of Firefox) had officially joined the Firefox team. Mike's presence is going to make Firefox in the enterprise much better.

On Firefox 60, I'm still not on board with the newest versions after the support for legacy extensions was removed. SessionManager, an awesome (legacy, XUL) extension, still doesn't have a perfect equivalent in the Web Extension world. Tab Session Manager, which has similar functionality, seems to be lagging behind and struggling with issues in Firefox that prevent it from becoming a good session manager.

If there's one thing I could ask the Firefox team, it would be to focus on enabling web extensions to do almost everything that legacy extensions were able to. Without the power of feature rich and stable extensions, Firefox is currently inadequate for me (though I still use it as my primary browser).

[Vinnl]

I'm not sure whether it fulfils what you're looking for, but Mozilla just ran an extensions challenge, and one of the winners was Session Sync.

[0] https://extensionschallenge.com/ [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/

[newscracker]

Thanks, I did see the Session Sync extension before (and again now after the challenge winners were announced). Unfortunately, it seems to be quite thin on features, with the man advantage being syncing the sessions easily since they're stored as bookmarks. I also found the UI unintuitive (for example, I have to click on the extension icon, then go to the history tab, and then click on the current session to see the Save button).

Tab Session Manager is comparatively a lot richer in features, and also allows importing from the (legacy) SessionManager sessions.

[catach]

On the one hand, the FF webextension API is under continual development [0]. On the other hand, "almost everything" previously possible does not seem not a realistic expectation since it'd mean the ability to change almost every single atom of browser behavior.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/04/02/extensions-firefo...

[newscracker]

Considering that Firefox pioneered the extensions concept among the masses and had a wide variety of terrific extensions (and still has) as a key differentiator, and since many users have appreciated Firefox for this reason (even if they didn't care much about FOSS), Firefox must continue to push heavily on this front.

Of course, everything that was possible before wouldn't make sense in the web extensions platform (for security and other reasons), which is why I said "almost everything". But things like tab management (even Tab Mix Plus on web extensions is only in beta now), session management, etc., are highly important to the browser UX for a lot of Firefox users. They're highly sticky factors as well that prevent users from switching to another browser.

I've also seen some people who deploy and use Firefox in enterprise state that they're going to be on ESR 52 for quite sometime, with one of the reasons being some extensions not being available (or ported) on web extensions.

I'm not going to blame Mozilla or the Firefox team for the current state of affairs. But knowing what we know (with the advance notice on web extensions), the main advantage of Firefox on the extensions front shouldn't be lost. If anything, this piece needs to be accelerated further and also have the Mozilla Firefox team drive new features and abilities in web extensions that make other browsers look outdated.

I'm a die hard Firefox fan, and would always be cheering it on to thrive and grow.

[m-p-3]

It will definitely improve enterprise adoption. We're a G Suite shop, but I wouldn't mind giving our users another web browser to use if they want to.

[ChickeNES]

Yup, I'm stuck on an old version until proper Session Manager support is a thing.