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Originally Posted by BetterRed
And don't get me started on Mozilla's dropping of the XUL-extension support and introduction of their WEB-extension feature - afaik without any conversion aids. I know of two people who enjoyed a modest supplement to their income from donations related to their XUL-extensions. It plummeted to near zero soon after Moz announced that future versions of Firefox would not support existing extensions - i.e. they would not work and may (would) crash Firefox.
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Here, they simply don't work. I haven't seen trying to use one crash the browser.
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The effort to develop feature equivalent WEB-extensions was, by their estimation, either not doable or enormous. I noticed Moz added a boatload of developer enhancements in version Firefox 63 - that's about two years too late.
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XUL going away was expected here. It couldn't make the jump to mobile when Mozilla began focusing on mobile devices. XUL was deprecated for a while in any case. The preferred model was extensions in pure JavaScript. It was easy to see which those were, as the Mozilla Addons site labelled them as No Restart. Extensions using XUL required a browser restart after installation.
It's going away on Firefox on the desktop among other reasons because Mozilla is
very focused on security, and XUL executes on a higher privilege level than plain JavaScript. (And what JavaScript can do is increasingly locked down. Among other things, it runs in a sandbox in the browser and can't write to the local file system.)
Firefox Quantum had a goal of far greater speed. It does this via parallel processing. Instead of a single main browser process, it spawns sub-processes. There is a main process, four (by default, though changeable) content rendering processes, and an extension process.
Chrome already did that - in Chrome,
everything is a separate process - the browser, and open tabs, and any extensions you have installed. (Chrome is lighter weight than Firefox, but start adding extensions and watch what happens. The size advantage drops precipitously.)
Spawning and killing processes is expensive in computer terms, and Mozilla didn't care for Chrome's approach. Their Electrolysis project began by breaking the browser UI and the content rendering into two separate processes, and then further divided content rendering. Along the way, they began rewriting a chunk of the core C++ code in a Mozilla developed language called Rust.
I maintained a Firefox ESR installation so I could continue to run XUL based extensions while I waited for WebEx versions to fill in the blanks. I did not expect it to be quick or easy. Several things I ran simply couldn't be done as Web Extensions, because the WebEx API did not include basic functionality those extensions used.
At this point, enough of the holes have been filled in that I use Firefox Quantum as my production browser. The two big missing pieces are a password manager that will let me list stuff that uses passwords and see what they are, and a facility to dump a list of currently installed extensions. An API that might make a password manager possible was under security review by Mozilla the last time I looked. I don't know about an extension dumper. (There is a third-party program from Nirsoft that will dump a current Firefox password list in a human readable form, but there is no way to import the result into a new profile. I do a lot of playing with profiles here, and dumping a PW list using a password manager, and then installing the password manager in a new profile and importing the dumped list made life much easier.)
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I've used a particular duplicate image finder for decades, it was abandoned in 2010. I have looked for and failed to find an equivalent product. Given it has no internet connectivity, and that I've been using it trouble free for almost 15 years my continued use of it has zilch security implications - IMO. Would I recommend it to anyone - probably not - the UI is disconcertingly wonky these days But it it has features I've not found in other free or modestly priced products - I did find something that claimed to have similar features - for hundreds of usa-bucks.
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Which one? I've looked at an assortment, and still use an ancient one called Doublekiller. The main use is finding duplicate image files, and it can use file size and CRC32 checksums and ignore file names.
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Dennis