Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
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I've looked at Edge. It's actually usable, though a long way from what I'd like.
I have several versions of Firefox here. I have a release version as production browser, and Developer Edition and Nightly. I was running all three with the same profile, switching back and forth to see what might break in new versions.
The problem is extensions. The Gecko rendering engine Firefox uses understood and rendered HTML and CSS, and interpreted and executed JavaScript. Gecko also understood and rendered XUL, an XML language for creating user interfaces. The look and feel of Firefox was implemented in XUL, CSS, and widgets, with JavaScript doing the work when you clicked on a menu choice or an icon. The browser was simply an instance of something Gecko rendered. Because of this, you could dramatically change what Firefox looked like, and create extensions to modify and enhance how it worked.
XUL is deprecated, and Gecko itself is going away, with a new rendering engine called Quantum in the wings. To make it more fun, Mozilla has decreed that going forward, all extensions will use the Web Extensions API, making it theoretically possible to create extensions that that will work in Firefox, Chrome,
and Edge with minor changes. Such extensions will be entirely JavaScript.
The problem is, a good deal of what a lot of existing extensions do simply can't be
done with only Web Extensions, unless that API is considerably expanded.
I have about 40 extensions in Firefox that are part of my standard kit.
All of them will stop working as of v57.
To give myself head room, I switched the the Firefox ESR release. This is intended for organizations with many FF installations. It will get security updates, but major changes that will break things will happen a lot more slowly. Firefox ESR is at v52.04 level, and what I use will continue to work for a while.
I have a Firefox Developer Edition instance using a different profile that I use to track the progress of stuff using only Web Extensions, and if a sufficient subset of what I rely on now gets implemented, I
may switch.
But I've already gotten notices from developers of an assortment of extensions I rely on saying "Sorry, but development is hereby ended. What my extensions do can't be
done in only Web Extensions!"
There are some third party Firefox builds, like Pale Moon and Waterfox that are sticking with Gecko, but I foresee problems for them down the road. Web standards are constantly evolving. Gecko is a large and
very complex product. Will the developers of the third-party builds be
able to change Gecko to handle future web standards? I strongly suspect the answer is "no".
My big gripe is that the Mozilla devs seem to live in a echo chamber. At no point do I recall Mozilla trying to find out how the
users felt about proposed changes. Users have been voting with their feet, and FF browser market share has been steadily shrinking. Mozilla funding comes from ad deals, and the current funding base is through a deal with Yahoo, replacing Google as the default search engine. But Yahoo has been bought by Verizon (and the amount of the funding Yahoo had committed to give Mozilla was a sticky point in the acquisition.) Will Verizon continue to provide the funding when the current agreement expires, with traffic coming from FF shrinking as people drop Firefox? What will Mozilla do if it doesn't - make puppy eyes at Google? I don't see this ending well.
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Dennis