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Comment by lkramer | Hacker News Reader

I love the new Firefox, but the fact that it killed my favourite tabtree plugin, and the alternative is less nice + plus you have to do weird css hacks to make it look seemless and hide the top tab bar is very disappointing. I'm guessing the new extension system is a lot less flexible than the old one?

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It's been covered to death, but it's a vastly different approach that is closer to what other browsers provide, allowing many extensions to share the vast majority of their code across Edge, Firefox and Chrome (and descendants.) It also is highly asynchronous, which has become more important as Firefox has become multi-process and multi-threaded, and more secure, both from a usability standpoint (users have more control over add-ons) and from a low level standpoint (extensions are more 'sandboxed' than before.) There's more advantages but needless to say there's no turning back, so hopefully the missing features needed to implement what people want will arrive with time.

As for me, I'm just happy to be running Firefox as a daily driver again.

I think part of the problem is that Firefox doesn't have flexible, high quality tabs. Vertical tabs, tab trees etc were really popular extensions.

Personally I'd be happy to see Firefox have tab feature chrome natively has:

- Scroll wheel to move between tabs (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285812)

- Ctrl+1 (2, 3, ...) to jump to a tab. Ctrl+0 to jump to the last tab. [Edit: This works with Alt, nvm!]

- Multi-select tab management (Ctrl+Click, Shift+Click to select, drag, snap and move multiple tabs)

Back when Firefox initially got a lot of market share, its killer feature was tabs. It almost feels like they forgot that :(

Alt+1, Alt+2, etc. jump to a tab in Firefox. Alt+9 is the last tab.

Thanks!

Chrome parity would be good, but I think that with little effort Mozilla could make a tremendous improvement:

- Multiple-row tab bar.

Such an obvious improvement over tabs scrolling off the screen sides or squashing them like Chrome does, I don't know why it's not being considered.

It's already been done by Tab Mix Plus (or was it Classic Theme Restorer?). They only need to copy it and polish it a little.

It's not been considered because Tree Style Tab just is just the best solution to all these problems.

People keep mentioning tree-style tab but I don't see how that's an alternative to TMP's multiple tab rows.

Personally I don't find tree-style tabs appealing at all because (1) I usually have few pages open on the same domain, but I have many pages open on different domains. And (2) I don't want a vertical column of content width lost to a sidebar.

Limiting tabs to a single row per window is awful for usability.

You should try tree style tabs for a few days

> And (2) I don't want a vertical column of content width lost to a sidebar.

You have to understand that this is a pretty unusual concern. Most of the world struggles with screens with aspect ratios optimized for watching TV, making vertical space very precious but leaving plenty of excess horizontal space that cannot be effectively used by the majority of web pages that only use a single column of text.

> Most of the world struggles with screens with aspect ratios optimized for watching TV ...

You are right about that. I use two external monitors, one of which is rotated 90°. Guess which one I keep my browser window on? :)

Tab Mix Plus.

On a Mac: Cmd + 1, Cmd+2, etc + Cmd+9 for last tab

Chrome tabs sort of suck, they shrink down to no text if you have too many, firefox has a minumim size of tab and lets you scroll the ones that are visible at a time.

Ctrl+1 (2, 3, ...) to jump to a tab.

works for me, Ctrl+0 doesn't

It's Ctrl+9 (on Windows, Alt+9 on Linux at least), rather than Ctrl+0.

> Multi-select tab management (Ctrl+Click, Shift+Click to select, drag, snap and move multiple tabs)

You could try the Multiple Tab Handler[1] extension. It seems a bit clunky and limited if you use it alone, but it integrates well with Tree Style Tabs [2]. Note that you could open the vertical tabs sidebar when you need to manage tabs and close it right after. You can also disable the "tree" feature of tree style tabs.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-han...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

Reading these recurring discussions, there is a bunch of Firefox users that used FF's extensions to change everything about the browser. You could change Firefox to be a different user experience entirely. But this has become way more limited.

For users that are okay with the common way browsers work, all this new stuff is great though. Firefox Quantum is so fast and it still delivers all of the mainstream add-on functionality.

I'm firmly in the second camp. Give me any browser that I can install uBlock in (and hide most buttons except back and forward), and I'm good to go. With Quantum, I switched over all my browsing to Firefox. Including on Android, which hasn't even had most the Quantum improvements yet (its UI has just gotten a much needed update).

There's at least a third camp. Those who used extensions and have a degraded performance now too - I'm wondering if all the speed increases people are talking about are only available on the most modern hardware?

It takes 12s after launch for my newtab to populate with icons -- which incidentally I dislike compared to the previous page thumbnails -- there's regular stalling when it fails to respond.

I'm prepared to give some space to get acclimated to new versions, there were font problems on lots of pages (including newtab) for me which I've worked through. But I'm failing to see any benefit yet - even then turning the icon super bright has annoyed me ...

> only available on the most modern hardware?

Obviously there's something slowing down your Firefox, but it's definitely not to do with how modern your hardware is because 57 is noticeably faster than the previous version on my 2011 MacBook.

There is something slowing it down, but it wasn't under 56. Might be a localised issue, that's always possible.

You can also restore the New Tab behavior you liked pre-Quantum by clicking on the gear in the top right-hand corner.

Actually you can't, you can cut down most things but you can't get previews in preference to icons and you can't get more than two rows (from that menu, you have to go to about:config and browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesCount [for some reason the browser.newtabpage.rows and ..columns settings are still present but appear to be unused]).

if you turn off the new activity stream you can get the old behavior back.

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled = false

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories = false

browser.newtabpage.enhanced = false

browser.newtabpage.enabled = true

seems to respect my 5 columns and 3 rows with large preview icons.

I have all those already; it respects my setting 24 icons (4 rows of 6) rather than giving my prior 3 rows x 5 of page previews.

well I must have some other setting going on because i have 3 rows of 5 and the other setting is at 24 which both can't be true... 15 vs. 24 total.

What does your about:support say about accessibility?

I'm in a middle ground -- I did have 'Classic Theme Restorer' installed, but I can live without it. But I have a few extensions which haven't updated yet (most notably 'rikaichan' which provides dictionary-lookup on hover for Japanese text), and some like Greasemonkey seem to have only managed to get an update at the last second. So I can live with the situation but the transition seems to have been poorly handled -- why did the FF which marked extensions needing update as "legacy" only arrive a week before the one which killed them off? Marking legacy extensions a year or so before the deadline might have helped in increasing user pressure on extension authors to convert earlier... There will always be a long tail of "extension author vanished years ago but it's still used by 10 people", but if widely used things like Greasemonkey are only just sliding in under the deadline then something seems to have gone wrong with the transition plan.

And on the "improvements" side -- I have to say I've never felt the browser was too slow. Sometimes the network is lousy, sometimes stupid websites are terrible, but the browser itself has been just fine for me for years. So I'd rather have had a less painful and abrupt transition, which maybe took a bit longer.

The problem is that Firefox was the last well supported browser that allowed for power user features.

With this change, Firefox targets the lowest common denominator just like every other major browser (tracing the footsteps of Chrome). In the progress, it too, is becoming just like Chrome.

This whole saga begun back when Opera dropped support for their 12.x browser, and became just another Blink-based browser. At that point, the only way to get a usable browser (with vertical tabs, MRU tab switching, gestures) was Firefox with a number of addons (Tree Style Tab, Tab Mix Plus, Firegestures).

One may argue that users like this should just use a fringe browser with such features built-in, but that's not viable because they're either unstable or lack timely security updates.

You may also argue that you can get all those features, even in Firefox 57, but that's only true with caveats:

Tree Style Tab still exists, but if you use either the history or bookmark sidebars, you better get ready to switch back and forth all the time (since only one sidebar can be active at a time).

The about:config setting browser.ctrlTab.previews (now also exposed in preferences as "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order") is mostly useless, since it is limited to the 6 most recent tabs (probably even fewer on lower resolution screens).

There are several mouse gesture addons for Firefox 57, but none of them currently work on Linux/Mac. Even on Windows (and the others when they're fixed), gestures will work neither on internal pages nor on addons.mozilla.org.

Well, true. You can be a power user without all of those things though.

It's a shame tradeoffs are necessary, but I think it's worth highlighting that it's a tradeoff that also brings substantial advantages. For all users, including the power users.

On Linux I use the EasyGestures application which I've configured to send XF86Back and XF86Forward keys for the respective gestures. The added benefit is that the back and forward gestures work in the other apps too, not just in Firefox.

For anyone else looking, the parent probably meant 'easystroke': https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke

It's likely available from your package manager.

Indeed, I did. Thank you for linking to it, I was in a hurry when I posted.

Firefox keeps getting less and less usable for me. I'm considering switching to chrome for the first time in a while.

Things that bother me on desktop developer edition:

    * no usable mouse gestures extension
    * constantly changing UI
    * hid really useful things like file/edit/history/bookmarks/tools menu behind
      holding alt button on Ubuntu. 
      Pretty sure that whole menu will be gone soon.
    * it's impossible to clear for example last week, last month  etc of browsing data (not sure if you could do it before).  
      In fact, I'm not sure if I can clear cookies but not site history anymore after spending 5 minutes in the settings.
   
    * tree-style tabs turned into something unusable
    * getting rid of all the rare extensions that worked previously and are no longer supported by the original author
    * tons of greasemonkey userscripts broken
    * greasemonkey a lot less usable now (still can't figure out how to write a custom script from scratch)

Android (Mobile) Quantum takes forever to load pages. As in 5x-10x longer than Android Chrome. Some things like videos from twitter simply don't load at all. Some websites no longer load. Cannot enter data into some text boxes. But don't take my word for it: https://www.androidauthority.com/mozilla-firefox-quantum-and...

Unfortunately, on desktop I'm stuck between this new FFX and Vivaldi. On mobile, I already switched to Brave even though it's terrible because you can't easily google for selected text or select a part of a paragraph easily.

I also begrudge the loss of many useful extensions in my workflow. It is a sad loss.

But couple of your annoyances can be fixed rather easily:

1. Get back the toolbar back: View (or Alt-V) - Toolbars - Menu Bar

2. To clean recent history: Ctrl-Shift-Del will give you the clean recent history dialog box. It can be accessed from toolbar too: History - Clear recent history.

These are good. Thanks.

Weird that the only way to get to that menu is through a toolbar that's not visible by default.

I don't think they will remove the menu bar any time soon. I always put it back to always visible, just click view->toolbars->menu bar.

What's unusable about the new tree style tabs? I use it constantly.

If you want old greasemonkey scripts to work without changes, use violentmonkey.

There must be a bug with the new greasemonkey that I can't find the editor either. Use violentmonkey for that too for now.

What's unusable about the new tree style tabs?

I'll grant that the new responsiveness of FF makes TST feel much better. But there's one thing that's constantly giving me headaches. I don't feel like the highlighting given to the currently-selected tab is in-your-face enough, so that I'm always scanning up and down the tree trying to see which one it is. The other formatting options it used have were nice, but being able to at least make the selected tab's title bold was a big deal for me.

I realize that this is technically possible in the new regime via userChrome.css. However, the element classes are completely undocumented so I have no idea how to accomplish it.

Adjust the gamma of your screen. I see a distinct shade of grey-ish blue that I can see even when looking at the other side of the window. If that's not the problem, ask TST author since that should be fixable in the addon.

My screen is calibrated, it's not that anything is displayed wrong. I just want it to be more obvious.

Before FF57, I was able to set the font and background color for tabs depending on their status (current, inactive, unread, etc.), and that's what I want now. IIRC, this was actually a feature of Tab Mix Plus.

It's clear that this is still possible even without TMP, but requires putting code in userChrome.css. That would be fine with me, if I could just find any documentation on what element classes (or whatever would be the most appropriate selectors) I need to reference.

I did some digging for you in the browser console. userChrome.css can't touch TST's content. TST is in a separate document (sidebar.html). I'm sure the tabs in TST aren't the actual browser tabs, but they're made to look exactly the same as before. Talk to TST's author, or modify the addon yourself, it must have a CSS file, the tabs are "li.tab" (<li> elements, tab class). The active one is "li.tab.active".

    document.querySelector('#sidebar')._contentWindow[0].document.querySelectorAll('.tab.active')

Thanks. Actually, it turns out that the latest version contains a mini-editor for the appropriate file (whichever it is). And it includes a link [1] to further documentation about what to do with it.

[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

Toolbar thing is my fault. And violent monkey seems like a good alternative.

With tree style tabs I didn't realize there is a CSS hack to remove the top tabs.

Have you tried pale moon?

On Windows [Alt] shows menu bar still, [F10] too. Try [F10] on your system.

> I'm guessing the new extension system is a lot less flexible than the old one?

For security reasons, yes.

For people who don't want to say bye to old extensions which are not (or cannot) be ported to 57+ there is the option to stick with 52 ESR version (Extended Support Release). According to Mozilla FAQ [1] this version gets obselete in march 8 by Firefox 59 ESR.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

Do you know how to install Tree Style Tabs for that version though? It looks like the plugin page only offer the last version.

There's a 'Version History - See all versions' link further down the page that points at the previous releases.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... and look through teh list til you find something that supports FF52+

I'm a little concerned that any bugs/holes in extensions will be left open though, since it's very unlikely the extension devs are going to be backporting features/fixes.

Waterfox[0] is another option. It's based on Firefox, integrates patches from upstream and will continue to support the old extension system.

[0]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

52 ESR will still be supported until mid-June. It is supported for two release cycles after the release of 59 ESR.

TreeStyleTab? The new (2.*) version works quite ok though?

Ditto re: weird css hacks to hide the top bar.

I had previously gone back to Firefox for Panorama (Tab Groups.) But, the feature has seemed to live in a state of such flux that I eventually found myself falling back on my habit of using Chrome.

Iirc, they decided to move it out of the browser and in to an add-on, which is frustrating in light of the recent changes. Don't get me wrong, I'm for the migration to WebExtensions, but it's annoying that there wasn't a better path for a feature that used to be a part of the browser.

Here's hoping most of this will be resolved in the upcoming months.

The css hack is probably temporary, and for me it was easy to add works very well (it looks exactly the same as before to me). Other than that, what else is "less nice"?

> you have to do weird css hacks to make it look seemless and hide the top tab bar is very disappointing

Firefox plans to add an API for dynamically hiding the tabbar. You can follow progress here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447

Tree Style Tab has been awfuly slow for me :(

Why doesn't it get prime support?

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