Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

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KingMachiavelli

The big issue I see with Firefox is that they lost a lot of power user's when the removed XUL extensions and the underlying engine doesn't have good third party wrappers like QtWebEngine (that I know of) so creating reskined browser's is pain.

I don't pick a browser for the Firefox or Chromium engine (unless a site needs it), I pick a browser based on the UI and configuration management. So I use Qutebrowser that is keyboard based and a declarative configuration. It happens to use QtWebEngine but that is not why I picked that browser.

Since I don't use Firefox... I don't really recommend it to anyone. Firefox's early success was driven by educated user's telling other people to drop IE for the better product. It also means a lot fewer developer's are using the Firefox engine when developing websites... especially the developer's that would put in the effort to submit bug reports & patches.

(At least last I checked, recreating a Qutebrowser like experience in Firefox was at best just really annoying and would still lack features).

The end of XUL was necessary to make Firefox faster. Doenload an old XUL Firefox version and surf the web. If you don't notice a difference in page load speed, startup time, and overall responsiveness, you might have a very, very fast computer, which most people around the world don't have.

The 3 or 4 thousand power users that needed native interop were (and still are) of no interest compared to the then bad performance of Firefox in relation to Chrome. Even HN was full of people who complained about Firefox' performance. Now it's full of people who recommend to give Firefox another shot because it's fast again.

Firefox is also currently the only browser where uBlock Origin can use all of its features, Chrome is intentionally limiting APIs. Are people using Firefox because of it? No. So XUL add-ons would not have helped Firefox.

If you still want XUL, there are many forks out there that claim to support it.

My number one reason to use Firefox is uBlock Origin. It does an exceptional job and web is way more annoying without it.

uBlock Origin is available for Chrome and Chrome-based browsers.

No, there is only a subset of features available for Chrome. You don't get quite few important privacy features.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

but only as long as google leaves api "blocks" open for it. They are slowly removing those

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