Posted on 10/23/2017 3:03:26 PM PDT by CedarDave
On November 14 Mozilla will take the biggest gamble in its long history when the organization will ship Firefox 57, the first version of its browser that will stop supporting legacy Firefox add-ons.
This means that starting with Firefox 57 the browser will support only new add-ons written on top of the newer WebExtensions SDK.
All legacy Firefox add-ons written on the old XUL-based Add-Ons SDK will stop working.
In a blog post last week, Mozilla said it will continue to allow developers to upload and list legacy Firefox add-ons on its add-ons portal (AMO), but they'll only show up for users with older browsers and buried in search results under newer WebExtensions-compatible add-ons.
Changes are already being rolled out to AMO and Firefox 57 (currently Firefox's Nightly edition).
The release of Firefox 57 is the end of a two-year-long project that started in August 2015 when Mozilla announced the new WebExtensions API that would eventually replace the older Add-Ons SDK.
The new WebExtensions SDK is also compatible with the universal WebExtensions SDK implemented in Chromium and related browsers such as Brave, Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi.
Firefox's large collection of legacy add-ons has always been one of Firefox's strongest points and one of the primary reasons the browser has been popular so many years.
When Mozilla announced the new WebExtensions SDK and the death of the old legacy add-ons system, many feared most add-on developers wouldn't bother to migrate their add-ons for the newer WebExtensions API and Firefox would lose most of its add-ons, and its strongest attraction point.
In April 2017, the Mozilla Add-ons Portal listed 18,814 add-ons, but only 2,273 add-ons were WebExtensions-compatible. Currently, this number is at 3,633, which is about 19.3% of all Firefox add-ons.
Bkmrk.
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Same here. Now I can't get to my logins and passwords without going to Safe Mode and a couple of my popular add-ons are not working either. While investigating the latter problem, I came across these articles on how Firefox was going to bomb its own browser in a couple of weeks.
I must have a strange way of looking at things:
Good enough is good enough
I use 10-12 add-ons. About half have already said their product will die, as they no longer intend to update them.
Some of the ‘new’ ones are quirky and take getting used to.
Okay but what is it? Like FF?
I have plenty of other issues with Brave.
I tried Brave. It was okay, but few options to customize.
Then, they upgraded and changed the GUI to crap. I deleted it.
My gosh, all these browser problems, lol.
So, which browser do my fellow FReepers recommend for privacy, speed, results, etc?? :-)
It's based off the same open source as FF but superior in every way. It loads and runs much more quickly, the memory bloat is much less, and it still supports all your favorite add-ons. (For me, NoScript and Fluff Busting Purity are essential.) Menus and functionality are almost exactly the same as FF, so there is no dramatic learning curve.
Use Waterfox (see my other posts on this thread). So far, it has installed and allows me to use my favorite add-ons. Give it a try.
However, it acts in coordination with a system of DNS servers all over the world which misidentify your IP address, making it impossible to know who/where you are.
The problem is, the "onion routing" scheme is hackable by man-in-the-middle impersonations. If as few as about a half dozen of the volunteers providing service are compromised (and they probably have been) your location and history will be known to the man-in-the-middle, so it's likely that the TOR network is thoroughly infiltrated by state actors. No one knows for sure.
Its origins are also murky; it's possible (likely?) that the routing system was created by US national intelligence; the concept behind it certainly was.
Firefox is becoming a dog. I have Linux Mint and see Firefox memory footprint routinely exceed 1.5 gigabits. It also has problems grocking javascript.
Thanks for the links.
I have noticed that on some pages, I get a “this page needs you to download Adobe Flash Player...” I already have it but it seems FF does not support it.
tech ping
Remember the browser wars of the mid 1990s that involved Microsoft Explore and Netscape Navigator? Those were trying times for all of us. This was when Cascading Style Sheets exploded upon the scene and wreaked havoc on all.
Well the browser wars of 2018 promise to be positively deadly and barbaric. May the best browser win and have mercy upon the vanquished.
So something to stay away from I guess. I’ve been using FF for quite some time and I don’t like IE, I’ve tried to use it and I don’t like it.
IMNdi commented Sep 28, 2017:
@watchpocket If I may chime in, Waterfox is a one man project that proposes to maintain pace with Mozilla (it did) and (now) keep addon compatibility. That is a monumental task and doesn't solve other Mozilla issues, like the control they took away from the user or future decisions to kill the UI and user privacy. Mozilla announced a new-new UI.
It is not in the scope of Waterfox nor is it feasible for a person to maintain a "freeze" of features. Waterfox is essentially a stripdown of Firefox that proposes to (now) maintain XUL after Firefox drops it. This would be the first major workload spike on the maintainer.
By contrast, PM is a standalone browser and while new features are uncertain, stability is not. PM never gained the new Australis so there is nothing to maintain.
This is what kept me from going Waterfox and put the effort into PM.
Also, PM is faster, since it never got the later bloat. Whether you think that is good is what your definition of bloat is. I happen to think Firefox has been gaining weight recently.
~~snip~~
mgol commented Sep 28, 2017:
@IMNdi I share your concerns about Waterfox. I've been watching recent changes to Firefox and there's been a massive number of commits stripping out code needed only for the XUL add-ons infrastructure to work, legacy code not yet removed due to compatibility concerns with add-ons etc. It's going to be very hard to revert all those changes and at the same time keep the code up to date with Mozilla latest changes. It's not as simple as it was with restoring NPAPI compatibility.
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