What you'll do when Firefox drops support for XUL addons?

[Dngrsone]

Hrm... I think I will take it for a spin... I have an older OS that I never boot; I could sandbox it there for a little while.


**Edit: It does do profiles, and Morning Coffee works as advertised.

[Houchou]

lol, i just understood what you meant by profiles....

[Dngrsone]

I have a half-dozen different Firefox profiles I use, each with different settings, plugins and themes. For instance, I have one for my regular email stuff, another for shopping, a third for when I'm away from home and using a hotel or other unsecure wifi...

[lmintnewb2]

Personally plan on continuing to support Firefox and Mozilla. Though whether it's used as primary web-browser at all times as it has been formerly will depend on how things develop. They're supposedly planning some real enhancements and upgrades to FF and hope that bares fruit. Been using FF since a couple versions before it went v 1.0 and would really like to see the project rebound and remain a real competitor in the browser wars.

More than a few remember the dark days, when IE dominated the interwebz and that brought on all the expected detrimental impacts someone can expect from a browser monopoly. IE only features and websites, reduced efforts to develop set web standards etc etc. Would be a shame to see Chrome bring about a repeat of that. Have to say though, kinda goes w/o saying web developers and others are bound to be paying especial attention to support for Chrome with it's massive market share. They'd be fools to ignore it.

[cecilieaux]

Hrm... I think I will take it for a spin... I have an older OS that I never boot; I could sandbox it there for a little while.

I am finding that even with Palemoon (the alternative version of Firefox), the performance of many extensions is degrading. To me there are several extensions, such as NoSquint, LastPass and Stylish without which surfing the web is simply painful.

I'd be interested in the sandbox option. Is there a way to download an older Firefox and older extensions and absolutely forbid all updating?

Meanwhile, I'm trying out Chrome and Opera.

[xenopeek]

I'd be interested in the sandbox option. Is there a way to download an older Firefox and older extensions and absolutely forbid all updating?

Just go to iwantmalware.com and sign up to infect your browser with malware Sandboxing doesn't protect your browser.

But seriously, using an outdated web browser version—with known security issues—is a recipe for trouble. Please use a supported version so that you get fixes for security issues. The web browser is the most vulnerable part of the operating system for most home users...

You mention trouble with certain extensions. For LastPass I don't think this has to do with Firefox changes but with LastPass changes. See the overwhelming number of 1-star reviews since version 4 of LastPass was released early this year: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... r/reviews/. The good news may be a new version of the extension should arrive in 3 weeks when Firefox 57 is released. Hopefully the new version of the extension does more than just compatibility with Firefox 57, and fixes the huge list of outstanding bugs in LastPass version 4 that make it unusable.

You might consider an alternative like BitWarden: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... d-manager/. For some other extensions you might also want to look at alternative extensions.

[xfrank]

I'm quite concerned about FF57 because: 1 - UI changes and 2 - "legacy" addons.
UI: for browsing I prefer a really minimalistic environment, not distracting and very lean. I mean, slim bars (just two bars) to gain the maximum space to see the web pages. Normally I install a very useful addon, Hide Caption Titlebar Plus, that allow me to reduce the thickness of the bars to a bare minimum. This addon, unfortunately, will not work in FF57.
"Legacy addons". I use a few of them but I need them to improve my browsing experience. Normally I install and use:
Lastpass (very convenient to manage my passwords)
Ublock Origin (an absolute necessity)
Decentraleyes
Disconnect
Hide Caption Titlebar Plus (magnificent customization tool)
DownThemAll! (a very efficient downloader)
Video Download Helper
Better reader (extends the functionality of Reader, a powerful and very useful feature of FF)
Zoom Page We (I changed to this, after Nosquint was classified as "legacy")
Hoxx VPN (a free VPN)

I don't know what to do with FF57. I'll see what will happen and then I'll decide. Maybe Vivaldi or Waterfox. Maybe waiting when the most useful addons will be ported to the next version of FF.

[aes2011]

I'd like to share three links that deal with using userChrome.css to customize Firefox 57 to some extent:
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/releases/
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... &t=3034022
https://github.com/IsaacSchemm/photon-n ... Chrome.css

The first is by Aris who is the maker of CTR.

The other two may also be useful.

[xenopeek]

Maybe waiting when the most useful addons will be ported to the next version of FF.

These are confirmed compatible with FF57:

• Lastpass
• Ublock Origin
• Decentraleyes
• Disconnect
• Zoom Page We

These are not yet, if ever, compatible with FF57:

• Hide Caption Titlebar Plus (but tabs in titlebar is coming to Firefox on Linux https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283299)
• DownThemAll! (but see http://www.downthemall.net/progress/)
• Video Download Helper (FF57 ready alternatives: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... =firefox57)
• Better reader
• Hoxx VPN (FF57 ready alternatives: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... =firefox57)

[xfrank]

Maybe waiting when the most useful addons will be ported to the next version of FF.

These are confirmed compatible with FF57:

• Lastpass
• Ublock Origin
• Decentraleyes
• Disconnect
• Zoom Page We

These are not yet, if ever, compatible with FF57:

• Hide Caption Titlebar Plus (but tabs in titlebar is coming to Firefox on Linux https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283299)
• DownThemAll! (but see http://www.downthemall.net/progress/)
• Video Download Helper (FF57 ready alternatives: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... =firefox57)
• Better reader
• Hoxx VPN (FF57 ready alternatives: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... =firefox57)

Thanks Xenopeek!
I can live (for some time) without the much loved DownThemAll! and Video Dowload Helper, maybe the alternatives are not too bad.
About the size of the bars, a quick way to get rid of the title bar is to enter in "about:config" and modify the parameter "browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar" setting it to "false".

[aes2011]

...
About the size of the bars, a quick way to get rid of the title bar is to enter in "about:config" and modify the parameter "browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar" setting it to "false".

"False" is the default setting for me on Fx57 b14.

[Houchou]

The day has arrived..... All legacy addons are dead...
And the new UI in my opinion is horrendous and no, you can't fix it with CTR....

I'm currently on waterfox. I hope it will survive long term....
Only wrinkle right now, is that it's 64bit only, i'll need to find something else for my old 32bit laptop.... I'll use ESR on that for now....

[BG405]

The day has arrived..... All legacy addons are dead...
And the new UI in my opinion is horrendous and no, you can't fix it with CTR....

Thanks for the heads-up. I've been keeping an eye on FF version numbers and as yet it isn't showing but I now know to lock the current version.

I'm currently on waterfox. I hope it will survive long term....
Only wrinkle right now, is that it's 64bit only, i'll need to find something else for my old 32bit laptop.... I'll use ESR on that for now....

I'm going to have to go ESR on all mine, for that reason. I need sync capabilities between all my machines for my current workflow and can not convert all of them to 64-bit without first getting my printer to work on a 64-bit OS, so I need this intermediate stop-gap.

[xenopeek]

I've upgraded to Firefox 57.0. All but one of my extensions work; only the Advanced Locationbar extension stopped working and has no alternative. It's a "nice to have" for me.

I did reset Firefox so as to start with clean settings. I've been tinkering with it to get everything in a place where I like it. Works fine so far.

Only one nitpick from spending a few hours with it: no way to reload favicons except to visit all websites. My bookmarks all have the grey globe icon now; makes the bookmarks harder to browse until I've reloaded all bookmarks manually.

And I still have to figure out how to rip out Firefox Sync from the menu (I have Pocket, Reader and Screenshots all removed already) and how to disable making website thumbnail screenshots for the new tab page. You can set the new tab page to not show them, but it looks like it is creating the thumbnail screenshots anyway. Waste of disk space.

[aes2011]

... You can set the new tab page to not show them, but it looks like it is creating the thumbnail screenshots anyway. Waste of disk space.

Are you referring to thumbnails in ~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/thumbnails?

If so, please try to create a new boolean about:config entry

Code: Select all

browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled

and set it to true.

[xenopeek]

Thanks! That did it, after also deleting that directory and cleaning history completely once.

On a happy note, the problem I noted with it being less clear for some websites when their pages were completely loaded was due to a problem in one of my extensions' data set. After clearing that up, I'm now very happy with Firefox 57! Fast and sleek

[Lucap]

Video test @ 29.97 fps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xkNy9gfKOg

Video test @ 60 fps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvIbVmCOxg

I love the new Firefox , my only complaint is that i now have webpage video glitching that i never had before ( even with Nvidia pipeline enabled ) so hopefully they will add some type of sync in the future.

[xenopeek]

Could be hardware acceleration is disabled. I think it is less stable and thus not enabled by default. You could try it. Check in about:config if layers.acceleration.force-enabled is set to true.

[Lucap]

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pe ... e-settings

There is a new performance section for that plus the amount of CPU cores you can now use but it made no difference.I just done a update on my computer that i'm testing Debian Sid and FF 57 is now showing the same where as 56.0.2 was solid.

Don't get me wrong video is not Unwatchable but if you look at those Video tests i posted at full 1080p the previous versions of Firefox the lines moved smoothly without any breaks , now the line edges occasionally judder and i've had a couple of tears that have never happened before.

[Lucap]

Could be hardware acceleration is disabled. I think it is less stable and thus not enabled by default. You could try it. Check in about:config if layers.acceleration.force-enabled is set to true.

looks like you're right.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... L-No-Plans

There's been a seven year old bug report about enabling OpenGL accelerated layers by default on Firefox for Linux on at least some supported hardware, but Mozilla still doesn't have any plans to do so.

Still odd that previous versions have been ok as long as Nvidia pipeline was enabled.