Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image.
It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment.
There are still tons of less-then-smartª people using Chrome. I blame Mozilla for not doing any smart marketing at all.
____
ª Its fair to call it that way. You use a browser more than a car. Yet people do research before buying a car and carefully weigh the downsides versus the upsides. But not for their most important software application in their lifes.
I agree generally with your points, but this doesn't really address the issues being criticised in comments here. I want to use Firefox (I do currently use Firefox, despite a lot of limitations), but there comes a tipping point where the balance of privacy (and apparent "user-interest") and actual usability and power leads to a not-so-good proposition.
Someone has commented above that it seems like Mozilla management may have been bought off by competitors and may be deliberately trying to run Firefox into the ground. I don't believe this, but given the recent decision-making it's not entirely implausible.
Opera went a similar path ~5 years ago. Most Mozillans don't consider this comparable as Opera was closed-source (and there's this one-track tunnel vision people have around that term), but the similarities are stark. A company with a history of listening to its users and a massive level of contribution to open standards and interoperability, making a product that served a niche userbase extremely well, decided that aping it's mainstream competitor (Chrome) directly would somehow be a good move. Now there's no discernible difference between Opera and Chrome, and no reason whatsoever to choose the former over the latter.
> Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative.
Humans are loss-sensitive.
When Coca-Cola did blind taste tests for New Coke, it was overwhelmingly preferred. When they told people which was which, the preference for New Coke increased. Instead, when they removed Coca-Cola Classic from the shelves, people clamored for it back. People want the thing they cannot have. Scarcity creates desire.
To some, this is a simple engineering trade-off. You can't have sandboxing, tab isolation, and responsiveness improvements with XUL add-ons in any kind of feasible or sustainable way. You can estimate how many people use add-ons that can't (or won't) be ported to Web Extensions, how many people would benefit from the proposed improvements, what the relative changes in user adoption are likely to be for each, and make a call that gives the best result for the whole Firefox population.
But that won't stop the people who are feeling the loss from being vocal about it, nor others who don't even use those add-ons attaching value to the thing they can no longer have, and resent that it's being taken away.
To reverse course now would fail the other way: if you tell people you're going to hold off on full e10s deployment and the security and responsiveness improvements that will come with it to allow XUL add-ons to remain a while longer, they'll be upset that you've taken away the improvements you promised.
Both times the conversation will only be about one side of the equation. No amount of marketing will fix that. Just ask Coca-Cola.
Google Chrome is kind of like a sedan, something convenient for most people.
Firefox is kind of like a pickup truck, less convenient for a lot of people but more powerful and useful for the people who need them.
This move is kind of like a pickup truck manufacturer realizing that sedans are more common than pickup trucks, then thinking sedans don't have beds in the back, and removing the bed from their pickup truck. Then afterwards, they're confused why people don't like this change.
Your comment is insulting, people are not "less than smart" because have different priorities or different view than you. I am using mostly Chrome because I had a lot of performance/memory usage issues with Firefox and because of security.
You forget how someone got access to internal not disclosed list of vulnerabilities in Firefox?
It's innovator's dilemma. The same thing that made Mozilla popular ("advanced" add-ons) is what kept it from moving to the "dumb" Chrome extension model that Google's browser adopted a long time ago. The older add-on model is what kept it from having better security and having less memory problems for so long.
I last used Firefox in December 2017, and there was something else weird that made me stop using it.
I'm waiting for Mozilla servo to be released as a standalone browser that doesn't use more memory than chrome, and doesn't have trash font support. Right now it's worse than chrome for battery life and RAM usage on Windows.
There are still tons of technical people (myself included) who use Chrome because Firefox became bad. The only reason I even have Firefox installed at this point is for extensions like DownThemAll - which will disappear after this move.
The years of firefox memory leaks completely turned me off the product.
IMO Firefox has just 2 things to beat Chrome: better add-ons (like treestyle tabs) and politics (made by Mozilla instead of an ads company). They are burning the first one.
Rikaichan allows translation of Japanese words simply by hovering your mouse over. It works much better than entering words into an online dictionary, since nearly every free JE-EJ dictionary uses the same source, and if a conjugation isn't translatable it will cut the word off giving the meaning and then letting you easily highlight the conjugation to figure out the meaning of the two together. Its just much faster than using something like jisho.org if theres a lot of words in a text you don't know. Rikaisama makes Rikaichan even more powerful with a lot of extra features
Everytime I've ever tried the similar plug-ins on Chrome they've all been terrible, missing words, missing conjugation, or just being slow in general. Its the first check I do every time I think about switching browsers.
However with the new Electrolysis on Firefox its completely broken and it seems like the dev might not want to do a rewrite since the plugin works exactly how you would want it and has for a few years now, but especially not if the sandbox changes make the plugin impossible to work.
Only about 250,000 users use the tab modification extensions that people keep claiming is Firefox's only advantage out of 10s of millions of Firefox users. Addons that greatly alter Firefox's behavior are the main reason for crashes. And maintaining XUL is hampering Firefox future development.
Firefox also seems slightly faster for me than Chrome (and Safari feels _a lot_ faster), but that's not enough to switch, since I'm so used to Chrome's sane UX and sync (and with a passphrase I'm pretty comfortable having that on Google's servers).
Still waiting for a lightweight browser that works on Windows (Linux has bad battery life even after very very aggressive power optimization) and doesn't use 4gb RAM and 89% of my battery. If anyone can do that then I'll switch.
Okay, I read through the entire comment tree and I didn't see a single top-level comment explaining why they're doing this. So I'm going to give it a shot.
If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up.
This is because Firefox's UI uses the same single-threaded JavaScript engine that web pages do. Ads tend not to be good web citizens, so they cause that single-threaded engine to run poorly, which causes the whole browser, even UI elements like scrolling, to run poorly.
To fix this, Firefox has moved to a multi-process model. I believe it's called Electrolysis (e10s). The UI uses a different JavaScript process than web pages.
Electrolysis is enabled today.
And yet, if you read the comments in this thread, you'll see a lot of people complaining about Firefox being slow and janky. What's up with that? Electrolysis was supposed to fix it!
Well, legacy extensions dig into the internals of Firefox. If you've built multi-process code, you know that it's very sensitive to race conditions. Third-party extensions running arbitrary code make it impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult, for Firefox to run e10s.
So e10s is disabled if you have a legacy extension. This causes Firefox to be slow and janky.
To fix this problem, Firefox is removing support for legacy extensions.
To be clear, the engineering tradeoff being made here is this:
A) Allow legacy extensions to run arbitrary code. See performance get steadily worse in comparison to other browsers.
B) Have a fast, smooth, multi-process browser. Hope that the new extension mechanism is "good enough" and that important extensions are migrated.
You can't have both. Mozilla has chosen B). You may disagree with this choice. Personally, I think it was the right one.
(You might say that the correct answer is C) run single-threaded when legacy extensions exist, and e10s otherwise. This is the situation that exists today. Look at all the people complaining about Firefox's performance. I don't think this is a viable solution, as people blame Firefox even when it's their extensions that are to blame. Also, option B) gives extension developers a reason to migrate and help Mozilla identify needed APIs.)
Apologies if I got some of these details wrong. I've been following Firefox's migration to a multiprocess model with interest, but I'm hardly an expert.
WebExtensions are multiprocess-compatible by design, but so are Jetpack SDK extensions unless they use certain APIs. The main rationale for WebExtensions was to make it easier for extensions to support multiple browsers -- implicitly, because new extensions were increasingly Chrome-first or Chrome-only.[1]
The problem is less the end goal and more how Mozilla is handling the transition. Developers have identified missing APIs, but they don't know when or if they'll be implemented.
Option D: Define "good enough" in terms of specific features. Tell developers they'll have six months after that to migrate. Put out an ESR that fully supports both old and new APIs to give users a smooth transition. If you don't have the resources to do that, explain the tradeoffs in detail and apologize profusely.
Thanks for the lengthy explanation, but my impression is that most people's assessments in here are of the form "Firefox is slow, but it has better addons". The choice you present therefore actually boils down to
A) Continue being slow and have better addons;
B) Become fast at the expense of worse addons (probably worse than Chrome rather than merely the same, as more users generally means more developers).
Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage with the stable minority of users who care about addons enough that they would weigh FF's addon advantage higher than its speed deficit and try to beat Chrome on its home field? Certainly, other FOSS projects that tried to do similar things (Gnome 3) have only managed to garner vitriol in exchange for no meaningful increase in adoption.
It's also worth keeping in mind if you hope for FF to compete with Chrome over users with the same value function that especially in the US, there are now many websites that actually only have been tested with Chrome and perhaps Safari and IE, and hence are broken in Firefox.
> This is because Firefox's UI uses the same single-threaded JavaScript engine that web pages do.
JavaScript contexts are single threaded, but even in a single process you can (and do) give separate web pages their own JavaScript contexts and run them in separate threads.
Vimperator has an issue in it's github referring to e10s and webextensions from 2015. It was commented upon a few times through 2015, more in 2016, and obviously more now. Nobody ever started moving forward. Only 10 days ago, a different issue was opened with regards to porting to an entirely new codebase for vimperator that uses WebExtension. They just now are talking about getting in touch with Mozilla for API requests.
Mind you, a year plus ago, multiple mozilla developers were holding office hours blocked out in the day to explicitly talk to e10s and webextension developers. It got scaled back because nobody ever talked to them and paid developers cannot be paid to do nothing for hours at a time when nobody calls in/emails/etc.
Meanwhile OTHER plugins HAVE taken this seriously, but not a lot of them. Certainly not enough. And yes, that means that you are going to have those plugins lose compatibility. But that's not firefox's fault. Mozilla has done everything they can do to help this transition, including paying people to help, pushing it back multiple times, giving numerous conferences, opening up api requests, and communicating on most every forum available on the internet.
It's on the plugin developers now. That's where your anger should be. Not on the company that is doing, finally, what it said it'd do numerous years ago.
About 2) : the multi-process model is not "1 process per tab", but "M tabs sharing N processes". So you won't end up with 40 processes in your case. I've been running nightly with 5 processes for months and found that to be a good setup.
Is there a quick way to check whether or not specific add-ons are supported in the new version? I'm addicted to tree based tabs (100's of them open at the same time) and Scrapbook. Without those two I would have a very hard time to get through my workday.
An hypothesis about much of the criticism for this change, and similar movements of outrage on the Internet. It's amateur social theory and goodness knows we don't need more of that, but I haven't seen it said like this:
People naturally feel anger in their lives (about home, work, politics, health, etc.) that is not socially acceptable to act on; to varying degrees, they need an outlet. It's not a new phenomenon; some go to the gym or play video games (where some act out on audio channels); some people drink heavily; some abuse people close to them, or the waitress, or get in a fight at the bar, or join an angry mob and lynch someone in the streets. When there is a socially acceptable target, indicated by lots of other people acting out, they act out too.
Changes like Firefox's attract outrage not because they are wrong but because they create a social attack surface: People can see that the change isn't socially secure (e.g., messages about inclusiveness are relatively secure right now[0]) and thus know that it will be a target for attacks; again, it's socially acceptable. They attack because it's a vulnerable target; there is chum in the social waters.
Consider how much of such outrage completely disregards the facts and betrays a lack of interest in learning the facts. They make no effort to learn about the facts - I see almost no discussion of the merits or facts on this page - and you can put the information in front of their eyes and they will ignore it and attack you: by not joining them you expose your own social vulnerability.
It's very dangerous socially; mass bullying campaigns have serious, real effects on their victims. Whole nations embrace bad policies, from discrimination against their own to war, that can kill in the hundreds of thousands or more and ruin generations. Evil leaders manipulate this phenomenon.
But also consider the affect it has on innovation, something we should be very concerned about at HN. It stops innovators from getting too far ahead of what's already accepted; they will be judged by their social security not its merits. It kills innovations from those who are socially acceptable; for example, the Blackberry Passport was the most innovative phone in years, but it was trashed, including on HN, because Blackberry Inc. was socially vulnerable, an outcast.
If you read this far, thanks for listening!
[0] To be clear, I'm not disparaging them - I strongly support them.
I don't think so, I think its that Firefox used to be awesome. Now people who advocated for them feel betrayed when the search is "updated" to yahoo, the homepage is "improved" to have ads, the menus are "modernized" so you can't find the settings you used to, the add-on system is "secured" so you have to modify your workflow, etc.
Well, you may be right about the outrage. I don't have any outrage, and I want to see competition in the browser space, and I actually use firefox. I am, however, as a "power-user", mostly annoyed by the direction Firefox has gone in. It often feels like they're apeing Chrome, especially since Australis took a very similar feel to the Chrome UI. If I wanted to use Chrome, it's over there.
No outrage, and for all I know, they've made the best moves to maintain their marketshare, but once the extensions get comparatively neutered, the only things keeping me on Firefox are inertia, the awesomebar (I haven't played with chrome a lot, but Firefox's awesomebar works really well, and I use '*' to narrow it down to bookmarks all of the tmie), the real dialog boxes for managing history and bookmarks (vs Chrome's pseudo webpage thing), and inertia.
So I can understand the frustration of 'power-users' with their changes, which seem aimed to make it a more mass-appeal product.
November 14th. I really hope they get the promised additional APIs in order until then, but it seems like a really short time (given how they are not 1:1 Chrome yet last I checked). I personally don't mind the switch to much (since I really want better performance, and the beginning of e10s has helped, and I don't care much about non-trivial add-ons), but it's clear the promise of "We'll make new APIs for add-ons that need them" was important.
KeySnail[1] extension, which brings customizable Emacs and vi keys to Firefox, is the "killer app" I use Firefox for and it doesn't have a Chrome counterpart. Without this particular extension I wouldn't have a reason to keep using Firefox.
+1 Firefox user for the better add-ons. The ones in Chrome/Chromium just haven't seemed as effective for me. Reading people's comments here, I'm actually learning about some add-ons I might add to Firefox! (tree style tabs, Vimperator)
And thanks to Debian, I appear to be using Firefox 45, so I guess the changes people are talking about won't hit me for awhile?
I am honestly starting to believe that Mozilla is trying to run Firefox into the ground. I am not sure if it's just bad decision making or if the decision makers themselves had been bought off by competition, but it sure does feel like this. Why do we need one more Chrome like browser out there? I specifically use Firefox because it's a) not chrome, b) has better addons. If you hamstring the addons and make everything chrome/chromium like, what's the reasons to use FF then?
I use Vimperator. I have not upgraded Firefox since 43.0.4 in order to continue to use Vimperator. I will not upgrade Firefox past the point where it does not support Vimperator.
XUL has always been pretty terrible, IMO. But it has advantages over Chrome-style addons. Should Firefox support WebExtensions? I'd say absolutely yes. Should Mozilla remove XUL support? I'd say probably not. Or at least it should be optional, as there are clearly some people who want full control of their browser. I'm not one of those people, but I understand where they're coming from, and it would be like a food company deciding that they're getting rid of their other flavors and are just going to sell the one flavor that the competitor is selling out. Unless Firefox has an edge over Chrome, or even Chromium, there's very little reason for me to use it. This is coming from someone who was a Firefox evangelist for years since 2005.
Also, the Electrolysis project taking forever is one reason I ditched Firefox for Chrome, and I suspect I'm not the only one. It was only late last year that it finally got released(I think?), and that was a project being talked about at least since 2010. Chrome had process-per-tab a few years before that, and there was even word that Chrome was being developed in that direction long before its release. Firefox took nearly a decade to compete.
My first reaction was to disable automatic updates of Firefox. I'm not against change, but the whole controversy around this issue makes me a bit wary of blindly trusting Mozilla.
I want to make sure my browser experience doesn't get ruined because of this shift. I don't have the time or patience to clean up a messy first release with webextensions only, breaking my trusted browser add-ons. First seeing, then believing.
According to NetMarketShare stats [0], Firefox is now at under 12% of desktop marketshare... and falling. I've switched over to Chromium (and Safari on OSX) because I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore. I've also noticed it used a lot more CPU than alternative browsers... which is an issue if you're using a laptop. Once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons [1], there won't be any real reasons left to use Firefox. Lots of Firefox die-hard users I know have already moved to Palemoon which will support XPCOM/XUL addons for the foreseeable future [2].
It's amazing to me how badly managed Mozilla is these days. They've been on a downward slope for the last two years and they still haven't done much to improve their position. Last week I checked Mozilla's homepage and couldn't even figure out what their guiding purpose is anymore. They seem to care more about social issues than about browsers and technology [3]. Unfortunately, they don't have much future.
I get that there are a lot of people here who are really concerned that, without XUL and XPCOM, there will no longer be a reason to choose Firefox over Chrome.
What I think they overlook is that, right now, it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome that no one will take such a recommendation seriously.
I've been using Firefox since back when it was still called Phoenix. I intend to go on using Firefox for as long as it still exists. But it's been a struggle, these last few years. Having to kick over a primary application platform, losing effectively all state save what programs are running, and reboot it every day or two, because otherwise it gets so slow that it's entirely unusable, gets real old real fast. People like to make jokes about Emacs, but even it doesn't do this! My Emacs sessions last months, and die only when the machine loses power or I hose up the environment so badly while experimenting that it becomes unrecoverable without a reboot. And Emacs is thirty years old.
I don't want to switch to Chrome. Its UI sucks and I'm no fan of Google. But if Firefox keeps getting worse, I'll have to. So I am absolutely delighted to see Mozilla making real and tangible progress toward solving that problem. If doing so means deprecating an ancient plugin API that's in any case dangerous and hard to use, I'm fine with that, especially since there is no reason in the world to believe that its replacement will not eventually gain back most of the relatively few capabilities we're losing in the deprecation. Maybe I won't be able to customize context menus for a while. That's fine, if the browser regains the usability it's lost over the last ten or so years.
I understand not everyone agrees with this point of view. That's not a problem. But I should not like this point of view entirely overlooked by those currently proclaiming the imminent death of Firefox.
One of Firefox great features are the add-ons that change the _browser_ experience itself.
I NEED TileTabs, ColorTabs, and a few others that would stop working after this change.
Yes, I understand the ideology of browsers being invisible to the content, but what about our users? I don't think people understand that these add-ons are really productivity tools that aren't otherwise available.
• Mozilla Sponsored Add-On Migrator/Converter that transpiles to equivalent WebExtension code
• Separate lightweight container hosts with DTrace for Core and Extensions (not sure if that makes sense, can you help?)
In fact a friend of mine pursues his Dr. degree on Model-Driven "API-Transpilation" (that's how I call it, albeit limited to CMSs), such that API-breaks caused by CMS upgrades don't result in high integration costs for add-on migrations. Having a complete model for the CMS allows him to support convert add-ons to other CMS too.
Why all the anger? Because API-Breaks cause friction, are avoidable and are commonly known as the biggest "cost-centers & risk-factors" in the software industry.
Software-Architects should instead try to find a composable architecture that supports the transition, instead of moving migration costs to the developers. That would allow everyone else to move over more easily.
The anger caused by the limitations of WebExtentions, are they in fact unavoidable? HN, you've a collection of the most clever engineers of the World! Can we find a solution to this?
My question to HN: Do you know an example or show-case of any complex software that reached similar goals in a way that is transferable or at least advisable to Mozilla? I am really interested, if there is a way to migrate from old to new platforms without "API hiccups". Moving (avoidable?) architecture-debts to a huge fellowship of developers doesn't sound like the way to go. I hope you know about guidelines that removes such frictions for us HN devs that we can just follow suit.
PS: I'm a n00b, but incrementally recreating kernel-level APIs on user-land, then writing an abstraction layer ontop, then exposing a limited set of it via Java-Script doesn't sound elegant and counter-productive. Why not reuse an existing kernel and create drivers and bridges or DSLs ontop of that?
At least Firefox supports older computers like the old Pentium, I submitted this comment with. Chrome doesn't ; its my back-up ; win 10 has gone down on me twice this month.
[+] [-] exceptione|9 years ago|reply
It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment.
There are still tons of less-then-smartª people using Chrome. I blame Mozilla for not doing any smart marketing at all.
____
ª Its fair to call it that way. You use a browser more than a car. Yet people do research before buying a car and carefully weigh the downsides versus the upsides. But not for their most important software application in their lifes.
[+] [-] lucideer|9 years ago|reply
Someone has commented above that it seems like Mozilla management may have been bought off by competitors and may be deliberately trying to run Firefox into the ground. I don't believe this, but given the recent decision-making it's not entirely implausible.
Opera went a similar path ~5 years ago. Most Mozillans don't consider this comparable as Opera was closed-source (and there's this one-track tunnel vision people have around that term), but the similarities are stark. A company with a history of listening to its users and a massive level of contribution to open standards and interoperability, making a product that served a niche userbase extremely well, decided that aping it's mainstream competitor (Chrome) directly would somehow be a good move. Now there's no discernible difference between Opera and Chrome, and no reason whatsoever to choose the former over the latter.
[+] [-] derf_|9 years ago|reply
Humans are loss-sensitive.
When Coca-Cola did blind taste tests for New Coke, it was overwhelmingly preferred. When they told people which was which, the preference for New Coke increased. Instead, when they removed Coca-Cola Classic from the shelves, people clamored for it back. People want the thing they cannot have. Scarcity creates desire.
To some, this is a simple engineering trade-off. You can't have sandboxing, tab isolation, and responsiveness improvements with XUL add-ons in any kind of feasible or sustainable way. You can estimate how many people use add-ons that can't (or won't) be ported to Web Extensions, how many people would benefit from the proposed improvements, what the relative changes in user adoption are likely to be for each, and make a call that gives the best result for the whole Firefox population.
But that won't stop the people who are feeling the loss from being vocal about it, nor others who don't even use those add-ons attaching value to the thing they can no longer have, and resent that it's being taken away.
To reverse course now would fail the other way: if you tell people you're going to hold off on full e10s deployment and the security and responsiveness improvements that will come with it to allow XUL add-ons to remain a while longer, they'll be upset that you've taken away the improvements you promised.
Both times the conversation will only be about one side of the equation. No amount of marketing will fix that. Just ask Coca-Cola.
[+] [-] MiddleEndian|9 years ago|reply
Google Chrome is kind of like a sedan, something convenient for most people.
Firefox is kind of like a pickup truck, less convenient for a lot of people but more powerful and useful for the people who need them.
This move is kind of like a pickup truck manufacturer realizing that sedans are more common than pickup trucks, then thinking sedans don't have beds in the back, and removing the bed from their pickup truck. Then afterwards, they're confused why people don't like this change.
[+] [-] lossolo|9 years ago|reply
Compare amount of code execution CVEs[0][1]
Chrome = 80
Firefox = 700!
And I don't call Firefox users stupid.
[0]http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...
[1]http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?...
[+] [-] hasenj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlhaufe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReverseCold|9 years ago|reply
I'm waiting for Mozilla servo to be released as a standalone browser that doesn't use more memory than chrome, and doesn't have trash font support. Right now it's worse than chrome for battery life and RAM usage on Windows.
[+] [-] tw04|9 years ago|reply
The years of firefox memory leaks completely turned me off the product.
[+] [-] angry-hacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosarara97|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Larrikin|9 years ago|reply
Rikaichan allows translation of Japanese words simply by hovering your mouse over. It works much better than entering words into an online dictionary, since nearly every free JE-EJ dictionary uses the same source, and if a conjugation isn't translatable it will cut the word off giving the meaning and then letting you easily highlight the conjugation to figure out the meaning of the two together. Its just much faster than using something like jisho.org if theres a lot of words in a text you don't know. Rikaisama makes Rikaichan even more powerful with a lot of extra features
Everytime I've ever tried the similar plug-ins on Chrome they've all been terrible, missing words, missing conjugation, or just being slow in general. Its the first check I do every time I think about switching browsers.
However with the new Electrolysis on Firefox its completely broken and it seems like the dev might not want to do a rewrite since the plugin works exactly how you would want it and has for a few years now, but especially not if the sandbox changes make the plugin impossible to work.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkengine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veeti|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smnscu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acjohnson55|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReverseCold|9 years ago|reply
We need "Safari" for Windows, but not edge.
[+] [-] moron4hire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdlshore|9 years ago|reply
If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up.
This is because Firefox's UI uses the same single-threaded JavaScript engine that web pages do. Ads tend not to be good web citizens, so they cause that single-threaded engine to run poorly, which causes the whole browser, even UI elements like scrolling, to run poorly.
To fix this, Firefox has moved to a multi-process model. I believe it's called Electrolysis (e10s). The UI uses a different JavaScript process than web pages.
Electrolysis is enabled today.
And yet, if you read the comments in this thread, you'll see a lot of people complaining about Firefox being slow and janky. What's up with that? Electrolysis was supposed to fix it!
Well, legacy extensions dig into the internals of Firefox. If you've built multi-process code, you know that it's very sensitive to race conditions. Third-party extensions running arbitrary code make it impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult, for Firefox to run e10s.
So e10s is disabled if you have a legacy extension. This causes Firefox to be slow and janky.
To fix this problem, Firefox is removing support for legacy extensions.
To be clear, the engineering tradeoff being made here is this:
A) Allow legacy extensions to run arbitrary code. See performance get steadily worse in comparison to other browsers.
B) Have a fast, smooth, multi-process browser. Hope that the new extension mechanism is "good enough" and that important extensions are migrated.
You can't have both. Mozilla has chosen B). You may disagree with this choice. Personally, I think it was the right one.
(You might say that the correct answer is C) run single-threaded when legacy extensions exist, and e10s otherwise. This is the situation that exists today. Look at all the people complaining about Firefox's performance. I don't think this is a viable solution, as people blame Firefox even when it's their extensions that are to blame. Also, option B) gives extension developers a reason to migrate and help Mozilla identify needed APIs.)
Apologies if I got some of these details wrong. I've been following Firefox's migration to a multiprocess model with interest, but I'm hardly an expert.
[+] [-] pseudalopex|9 years ago|reply
The problem is less the end goal and more how Mozilla is handling the transition. Developers have identified missing APIs, but they don't know when or if they'll be implemented.
Option D: Define "good enough" in terms of specific features. Tell developers they'll have six months after that to migrate. Put out an ESR that fully supports both old and new APIs to give users a smooth transition. If you don't have the resources to do that, explain the tradeoffs in detail and apologize profusely.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
[+] [-] 4bpp|9 years ago|reply
A) Continue being slow and have better addons;
B) Become fast at the expense of worse addons (probably worse than Chrome rather than merely the same, as more users generally means more developers).
Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage with the stable minority of users who care about addons enough that they would weigh FF's addon advantage higher than its speed deficit and try to beat Chrome on its home field? Certainly, other FOSS projects that tried to do similar things (Gnome 3) have only managed to garner vitriol in exchange for no meaningful increase in adoption.
It's also worth keeping in mind if you hope for FF to compete with Chrome over users with the same value function that especially in the US, there are now many websites that actually only have been tested with Chrome and perhaps Safari and IE, and hence are broken in Firefox.
[+] [-] Royalaid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saurik|9 years ago|reply
JavaScript contexts are single threaded, but even in a single process you can (and do) give separate web pages their own JavaScript contexts and run them in separate threads.
[+] [-] imron|9 years ago|reply
1) vimperator 2) single process handling multiple tabs (I typically have upwards of 40 tabs open at a time)
Firefox is in the process of removing plugins like 1) so that it makes it possible to remove 2).
Wonderful.
[+] [-] GraemeLion|9 years ago|reply
Vimperator has an issue in it's github referring to e10s and webextensions from 2015. It was commented upon a few times through 2015, more in 2016, and obviously more now. Nobody ever started moving forward. Only 10 days ago, a different issue was opened with regards to porting to an entirely new codebase for vimperator that uses WebExtension. They just now are talking about getting in touch with Mozilla for API requests.
Mind you, a year plus ago, multiple mozilla developers were holding office hours blocked out in the day to explicitly talk to e10s and webextension developers. It got scaled back because nobody ever talked to them and paid developers cannot be paid to do nothing for hours at a time when nobody calls in/emails/etc.
Meanwhile OTHER plugins HAVE taken this seriously, but not a lot of them. Certainly not enough. And yes, that means that you are going to have those plugins lose compatibility. But that's not firefox's fault. Mozilla has done everything they can do to help this transition, including paying people to help, pushing it back multiple times, giving numerous conferences, opening up api requests, and communicating on most every forum available on the internet.
It's on the plugin developers now. That's where your anger should be. Not on the company that is doing, finally, what it said it'd do numerous years ago.
[+] [-] fabrice_d|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buovjaga|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tree1993|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beerbaron23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] et1337|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
People naturally feel anger in their lives (about home, work, politics, health, etc.) that is not socially acceptable to act on; to varying degrees, they need an outlet. It's not a new phenomenon; some go to the gym or play video games (where some act out on audio channels); some people drink heavily; some abuse people close to them, or the waitress, or get in a fight at the bar, or join an angry mob and lynch someone in the streets. When there is a socially acceptable target, indicated by lots of other people acting out, they act out too.
Changes like Firefox's attract outrage not because they are wrong but because they create a social attack surface: People can see that the change isn't socially secure (e.g., messages about inclusiveness are relatively secure right now[0]) and thus know that it will be a target for attacks; again, it's socially acceptable. They attack because it's a vulnerable target; there is chum in the social waters.
Consider how much of such outrage completely disregards the facts and betrays a lack of interest in learning the facts. They make no effort to learn about the facts - I see almost no discussion of the merits or facts on this page - and you can put the information in front of their eyes and they will ignore it and attack you: by not joining them you expose your own social vulnerability.
It's very dangerous socially; mass bullying campaigns have serious, real effects on their victims. Whole nations embrace bad policies, from discrimination against their own to war, that can kill in the hundreds of thousands or more and ruin generations. Evil leaders manipulate this phenomenon.
But also consider the affect it has on innovation, something we should be very concerned about at HN. It stops innovators from getting too far ahead of what's already accepted; they will be judged by their social security not its merits. It kills innovations from those who are socially acceptable; for example, the Blackberry Passport was the most innovative phone in years, but it was trashed, including on HN, because Blackberry Inc. was socially vulnerable, an outcast.
If you read this far, thanks for listening!
[0] To be clear, I'm not disparaging them - I strongly support them.
[+] [-] nonbel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theonemind|9 years ago|reply
No outrage, and for all I know, they've made the best moves to maintain their marketshare, but once the extensions get comparatively neutered, the only things keeping me on Firefox are inertia, the awesomebar (I haven't played with chrome a lot, but Firefox's awesomebar works really well, and I use '*' to narrow it down to bookmarks all of the tmie), the real dialog boxes for managing history and bookmarks (vs Chrome's pseudo webpage thing), and inertia.
So I can understand the frustration of 'power-users' with their changes, which seem aimed to make it a more mass-appeal product.
[+] [-] detaro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aharju|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki
[+] [-] tomkat0789|9 years ago|reply
And thanks to Debian, I appear to be using Firefox 45, so I guess the changes people are talking about won't hit me for awhile?
[+] [-] dagenleg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sychophant|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|9 years ago|reply
Also, the Electrolysis project taking forever is one reason I ditched Firefox for Chrome, and I suspect I'm not the only one. It was only late last year that it finally got released(I think?), and that was a project being talked about at least since 2010. Chrome had process-per-tab a few years before that, and there was even word that Chrome was being developed in that direction long before its release. Firefox took nearly a decade to compete.
[+] [-] yabatopia|9 years ago|reply
I want to make sure my browser experience doesn't get ruined because of this shift. I don't have the time or patience to clean up a messy first release with webextensions only, breaking my trusted browser add-ons. First seeing, then believing.
[+] [-] Jerry2|9 years ago|reply
It's amazing to me how badly managed Mozilla is these days. They've been on a downward slope for the last two years and they still haven't done much to improve their position. Last week I checked Mozilla's homepage and couldn't even figure out what their guiding purpose is anymore. They seem to care more about social issues than about browsers and technology [3]. Unfortunately, they don't have much future.
[0] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
[2] https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml
[3] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/
[+] [-] throwanem|9 years ago|reply
What I think they overlook is that, right now, it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome that no one will take such a recommendation seriously.
I've been using Firefox since back when it was still called Phoenix. I intend to go on using Firefox for as long as it still exists. But it's been a struggle, these last few years. Having to kick over a primary application platform, losing effectively all state save what programs are running, and reboot it every day or two, because otherwise it gets so slow that it's entirely unusable, gets real old real fast. People like to make jokes about Emacs, but even it doesn't do this! My Emacs sessions last months, and die only when the machine loses power or I hose up the environment so badly while experimenting that it becomes unrecoverable without a reboot. And Emacs is thirty years old.
I don't want to switch to Chrome. Its UI sucks and I'm no fan of Google. But if Firefox keeps getting worse, I'll have to. So I am absolutely delighted to see Mozilla making real and tangible progress toward solving that problem. If doing so means deprecating an ancient plugin API that's in any case dangerous and hard to use, I'm fine with that, especially since there is no reason in the world to believe that its replacement will not eventually gain back most of the relatively few capabilities we're losing in the deprecation. Maybe I won't be able to customize context menus for a while. That's fine, if the browser regains the usability it's lost over the last ten or so years.
I understand not everyone agrees with this point of view. That's not a problem. But I should not like this point of view entirely overlooked by those currently proclaiming the imminent death of Firefox.
[+] [-] baby|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tormeh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] replete|9 years ago|reply
One of Firefox great features are the add-ons that change the _browser_ experience itself.
I NEED TileTabs, ColorTabs, and a few others that would stop working after this change.
Yes, I understand the ideology of browsers being invisible to the content, but what about our users? I don't think people understand that these add-ons are really productivity tools that aren't otherwise available.
[+] [-] FractalNerve|9 years ago|reply
• Mozilla Sponsored Add-On Migrator/Converter that transpiles to equivalent WebExtension code
• Separate lightweight container hosts with DTrace for Core and Extensions (not sure if that makes sense, can you help?)
In fact a friend of mine pursues his Dr. degree on Model-Driven "API-Transpilation" (that's how I call it, albeit limited to CMSs), such that API-breaks caused by CMS upgrades don't result in high integration costs for add-on migrations. Having a complete model for the CMS allows him to support convert add-ons to other CMS too.
Why all the anger? Because API-Breaks cause friction, are avoidable and are commonly known as the biggest "cost-centers & risk-factors" in the software industry. Software-Architects should instead try to find a composable architecture that supports the transition, instead of moving migration costs to the developers. That would allow everyone else to move over more easily.
The anger caused by the limitations of WebExtentions, are they in fact unavoidable? HN, you've a collection of the most clever engineers of the World! Can we find a solution to this?
My question to HN: Do you know an example or show-case of any complex software that reached similar goals in a way that is transferable or at least advisable to Mozilla? I am really interested, if there is a way to migrate from old to new platforms without "API hiccups". Moving (avoidable?) architecture-debts to a huge fellowship of developers doesn't sound like the way to go. I hope you know about guidelines that removes such frictions for us HN devs that we can just follow suit.
PS: I'm a n00b, but incrementally recreating kernel-level APIs on user-land, then writing an abstraction layer ontop, then exposing a limited set of it via Java-Script doesn't sound elegant and counter-productive. Why not reuse an existing kernel and create drivers and bridges or DSLs ontop of that?
Happy Monday and thanks for your time! :)
[+] [-] taivare|9 years ago|reply