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Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

>>Mozilla will be hoping to attract power users

They already had the power users, which they have now told to get screwed when they killed the extensions to chase the performance benchmark

Trading Usability and the ability to customize the browser for something that is "fast" but you cant do anything with it...

Useless is what it is IMO

This is the difference between a sports car and a truck. Me I drive a truck, it might be slow and cumbersome but it is versatile and customizable, I haul people and things, I can add a camper, I can do all kinds of things with my truck. If I had a sports car it might be fast but I would be limited in the places I could go and the things I could do

They are taking the FF Pickup and turning it into a FF Sports car... I have no interest in a sports car

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The new system is more secure. There'll be some initial pain as new APIs are stabilized and new extensions are created, but I'm willing to give Mozilla the chance, they're the only major browser that's not making a browser with a secondary, ulterior motive.

The problem is that the new API are not and can not be as powerful as the XUL based system. It is impossible.

The new Chrome Replica Web Extensions can never be as powerful as the old system.

What power, specifically, are you missing in extensions?

How about the power to customize every goddamn aspect of the UI? The power to make my browser behave the way I want it to behave? This is what made Firefox worth the while for thirteen, fourteen years or however long it's been. I really have no idea where to go from here.

Vimperator is not possible in the new Web Extensions, it requires customizing the UI in a way that Web Extensions doesn't allow. I am supremely salty about this still.

The APIs don't exist for this now but they could be added.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681

As far as I know TreeStyleTab will still not be compatiable and it getting resistance on enabling the API needed to make it work like it does today.

It will end up being a far cry from what we have today and more like the Ridiclous and unusable "SideTree" menus that are available in chrome.

No TreeStyle Tabs, no FF for me. that is non-optional. I will switch full time to vivalidi that has a less feature complete vertical tabs built in.

There are also many other Addons I use today that look like their are going to be discontinued post FF 57 for API or other reasons.

WebExtension Experiments (https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) allow you to create your own APIs that are equivalently powerful. You're just restricted to Nightly and Developer Edition builds, since we can't simultaneously support that degree of customization and guarantee the safety, performance, and API stability that we need for the mainstream Firefox browser.

I am well aware of the excuse used to sell the Chrome Clone version of Firefox.

I have used Firefox since Version 1, I was beta testing Firefox back when mozilla suite was still the focus

I never adopted chrome, and I do not like the User Experience or the limitation of Chrome.

From EME/DRM, to Web Extensions, to who knows what else, Mozilla is killing the identiy of FF all in the name of chasing market share it will never get back.

FF should be focusing on privacy, stability, and the ability to customize the browser for you. Instead they are focusing on Mainstream placation, performance, DRM, etc

Mozilla has made it clear they no longer want people like me as users, that is fine after over a decade of support I will see myself out...

So I could replace the history search backend, add tab thumbnails and colorized tabs, and add finally working HiDPI support for Firefox on Linux/X11 by parsing QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS with that?

As long as I can still do that, it should be acceptable. Ideally this would be in the main version, though.

Not to mention the only browser outside of Microsoft's that's not a fork of chromium. None of the other browsers out there can ever hope to be faster than chrome when they are just chrome with different paint job

That's not to talk down the chromium forks out there. Opera and Vivaldi are great projects. I just think they can't change the core engine much

> Not to mention the only browser outside of Microsoft's that's not a fork of chromium.

Safari is still a thing, if only on Apple's OSs.

I remember eagerly testing out the beta of safari for windows. It couldn't render bold text. Like it was literally invisible

The new system is less capable and everyone will be force-upgraded to that less capable version before the capabilities are restored. If that's even possible. Firefox will not turn into pumpkin.exe some time in November if they let it bake for a bit longer.

If they're going to make me throw away all my addons, I have no reason not to use Chrome. Literally every non-enterprise Firefox user will have this dilemma in the near future.

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