Questions about upcoming firefox changes

[lmintnewb2]

^ Please let it fade. Habitual is a cool mellow fellow, seems to be a very nice guy as well, on top of being highly knowledgeable on the topic of tech. Anyone who spends a good deal of time in gnu/nix communities is going to have days where they don't feel like hugging teddy bears and farting rainbows.

I +1 him anyway too, Mozilla makes these decisions (as such kinda is an oh well situation) and it is consistent with how they've been operating for the last couple years, "sounds like Mozilla". They've made several decisions that weren't liked down stream. Extension signing etc. Though think Mozilla did that cause they felt they had to.

For security/stability reasons and an attempt to protect the userbase. X-person gets ahold of a crappy (or malware infested, unregulated) extension and FF becomes all buggy and weird, x-user is just as likely to blame Mozilla or say FF stinks, as they are to hang blame on themselves where it'd belong.

So yeah they wanted people to have access to extensions but with some oversight and vetting. Rather than the inevitable finger pointing and hey, Firefox is your thing, why didn't you do something ? So they did, introduced extension signing and ticked a lot of folks off.

Ot: Guessing many of the most popular extensions will be migrated. I kinda get where Mozilla is coming from, they're getting their butts kicked and they'll have to make changes if they hope to compete.

They're the upstream, meaning they have to take responsibility and make some hard choices. If that means compatibility with down stream gets disrupted in favor of making major upstream choices, then it does.

Think Mozilla is one of those open source projs that's at a disadvantage cause so much falls on them. Read the papers that said the open source development model can't be matched in a closed source lab. But believe that's if xyz open source has a vibrant contributor and userbase.

Seems folks are just as likely to rebrand or fork Firefox for their own fame/fortune as they are to contribute to Mozilla. Leaves them in a bad place, can't make xyz changes cause it'll break away from xyz down stream. So let's sit here, stagnate and keep having our butts handed to us.

I don't know exactly what they're planning, the dumbest dev at Mozilla has likely forgotten more about Firefox internals and web browser development than I'll know.

Hopefully real improvements and enhancements. Cannot make an omelet w/o breaking eggs. Time will tell.

[lmintnewb2]

One more pointless brainfart on this topic.

Sure if extension dev's spent years contributing extensions to FF (voluntarily, cause it pleased them or they were looking to make a few bucks or build up their rep etc) that's great but it still doesn't mean they get to take the project over or even that they're entitled a major say in which direction it goes.

That's Mozilla's job and the people they hired to deal with such.

Then there's the many users who may like x-extension and want it to hang around. This being the bulk of people griping about the situation, end-users who've never created an extension or donated a cent to Mozilla. Those types while understandable are just silly.

Just not the way it is (and totally right imo). Would be like end-user nixers saying hey dang, volunteers have contrib'ed to the Linux kernel for decades, so Linus Torvalds and all the full time pros at kernel.org this is how it's going to be dang it!

Yeah right, keep dreaming and goes w/o saying who has the knowledge, experience and skills, in such a ridiculous scenario.

Think Mozilla has no choice but to do something radical. Never thought I'd see a day when IE has a bigger browser share than FF. Looks like there's a danger of Google Inc, pulling a replay of those early Internet days when IE dominated everything.

Depending on which stats someone believes, Chrome's 60% or more browser share already and growing. So hope Mozilla does do something drastic. Remember back when I'd say IE blows, why don't you switch to Firefox and folks would reply "What's Firefox ?"

Doubt Mozilla or a bunch of others will ever officially close up shop but if something doesn't give, FF and all the rest will be delegated to novelty browsers with whatever down sides coming with that.

[groze]

In Windows 7 sp1 & Linux Mint 18.x I switched over to Palemoon. However, I didn't get rid of Firefox totally. What I did in both is installed the ESR version & removed the release version. I am using version 52.1.1 The only tricky part was installing Firefox ESR in Linux Mint XFCE 18.x its not that easy. Yes, I realize when Firefox has a new release it will show up in the Linux mint updater, which I will have to disable. I also changed the setting in Firefox not to autoupdater but to allow me to choose. (Note, if you have more that one profile, you will need to do that for each profile)

I am confused why Mozilla would switchover to webextensions after they just got done requiring signing for the add-ons?

I read some of those comments in the link that was posted here. Developers our not happy with these change.


I wonder what Clem thinks of the changes to Firefox.