I agree that they had to force turn off old-style extensions at some point to force adoption, but I feel like the same release where most of the APIs needed to port the old extensions over (and still missing a bunch of things) was way too soon. Even quite a few of the actively maintained, high profile extensions are not ready. Same reason why a disturbingly large number of Jetpack extensions has to use require("chrome")… they never got around to flushing out the implemented API set.
My guess is that they had a long and hard discussion (or several) about this exact subject we're talking about. Due to budget constraints (development budgets aren't infinite, even for Open Source projects), they probably decided they had to switch. Otherwise the banner of Firefox would be flown by 0.5% of the world's browsers. Chrome is currently crushing everything and I don't see anyone else stepping up.
Firefox has given developers 3 years and over 10 FF releases to work on migrating extensions [0]. Would you have preferred 5 years? a decade?
Every change breaks someones workflow [1]. It sucks, but it happens because we need to acknowledge a point when the current system holds back progress more than the headaches introduced by a new system.
> Firefox has given developers 3 years and over 10 FF releases to work on migrating extensions.
No it hasn't: Firefox still doesn't ship an API capable of supporting many existing extensions. The developers of those extensions haven't had three years to port; they still can't port.
I really like how fast the new Firefox is, but I won't use it until Keysnail works.
Same here. Tab mix plus (for multiple tab rows) is the reason I kept using FF all these years. WebExtensions does not provide the capability to manipulate tabs the way TMP did.
JS-based (crippled IMHO) vertical tabs are also in Chrome. Why would someone switch from Chrome to Firefox to use a crippled extension?
I hope I am wrong but I don't think Firefox will be able to increase their market share. They may be able to stop losing their market share, which is not really a huge achievement.
Crippled? Sorry, I don’t get what you’re trying to say. Tree style tabs work fine in FF57. Only annoyance is that the top tab line cannot be removed. That’s supposedly coming soon though.
Like you, I care not how much of a speed improvement may be had as without certain add-ons, my end value is 0. I have been with Mozilla since, IIRC, netscape 0.96. I only use Chrome if absolutely necessary for site functionality.
NoScript, Session manager and Self destructing cookies are the hurdles to clear for me - the rest I'll miss but can probably get by without. Note that both the session and cookie manager are in fact features that should already be part of Firefox and are not. And when I say 'clear', I mean functionally equivalent in all regards to pre 57 (NoScript fails that test).
> Firefox still doesn't ship an API capable of supporting many existing extensions.
And I doubt they're ever going to.
It's the Design Disease: Once a company has it in its head that it Knows Better, anyone who ditches their way for a different one is Wrong, just... Wrong in some way the company thinks is objective, based on whatever Design it has in its head, and must be brought back into the fold.
How tabs work is Design. Design must not be questioned. If you want your tabs to open such that you get a new tab right beside your current tab, instead of over a dozen tabs away at the end of the tab bar, you're Wrong, and having more than three or four tabs is Wrong, too.
They can say that Firefox is faster. I say it's easy to be faster when you're not solving the whole problem.
