This is its biggest upside and I suspect that I'm not the only one who sticks to FF pretty much exclusively because of it. I am even willing to look past their shenanigans with Pocket, EME, Loop, featured tiles and all other "for the sake of our users" crap Mozilla keep on stuffing into the browser. One thing is pretty obvious though - Mozilla now don't really give a damn about "community". They do what they want to do and the only deterrent is a risk of lash back from said community, rather than their approval.
At the end of the last contract with Google, Mozilla chose to change their default search provider to Yahoo in the US, and to various other providers in the rest of the world.
While it is not longer true, Firefox still uses them for SafeBrowsing, download scanning, geolocation, Loop authentication and as a source of jQuery for DevTools. If you are concerned about Firefox leaking information to Google, the tie-ins are still there.
PS. Just go to about:config and type "google".
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an...
There's valid criticisms against WebExtensions, but the biggest misconception is that the capabilities of WebExtensions are set in stone and that X or Y addon "won't be possible". The entire point of announcing WebExtensions so early was to start getting feedback on what needs to be supported to make major and useful addons possible, and to start work on a way for experimentation outside of the officially supported spec to still happen.
Their current schedule only gives a year to build an api, mature the api, get a significant number of popular ported addons, and deprecate their old api. There will either be mature apis and many casualties, or half-conceived apis and lots of addons that will need to be changed with these apis.
With enough time and design, I'm sure this move would result in many positives at the cost of some negatives. But this time frame is just too short for such a huge undertaking.
On the other hand, Tree Style Tabs is far and away the biggest extension I care about, so that link does provide me with some level of hope. For which I genuinely thank you.
On the third hand, my cynical take is that apparently Mozilla really does take community feedback into consideration. When making a wish list of things that could potentially happen in the future to put on a wiki page. I've also heard that it's possible that Pocket could be moved to an extension.
From the FAQ, there's a proposal for a way to do things that require the same level of access that the browser chrome has here: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/proposal-native-js...
To me it seems like a decent way to say "Hey, here's an explicitly unstable way to do things that aren't possible with WebExtensions, and hopefully we can eventually get those things into WebExtensions, or you can just live your life as you do now with no hard promises about compatibility."
> On the other hand, Tree Style Tabs is far and away the biggest extension I care about, so that link does provide me with some level of hope. For which I genuinely thank you.
You're welcome! :D
> On the third hand, my cynical take is that apparently Mozilla really does take community feedback into consideration. When making a wish list of things that could potentially happen in the future to put on a wiki page.
I could talk about this _forever_, but the short version would be: That's not a false criticism of Mozilla in recent times, but it's also not entirely true. Hacker News, r/firefox, and others are very vocal minorities compared to our greater userbase. Sometimes we really need to listen more and change our plans and be more open than we have been, but sometimes the people doomsaying everything we do might have a different opinion if they had all the details and metrics and info (knowing how to navigate Mozilla to find info about something is a skill in itself).
> I've also heard that it's possible that Pocket could be moved to an extension.
I dunno if we've specifically made that decision yet, but it is certainly one of the primary candidates for Go Faster: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster
Like what? Genuinely curious.
Being able to just type in the random things you remember from a url / title (I think it combines them) and have FF narrow down the alternatives, -fast, is something I haven't found in any other mainstream browser.
Another aspect is it doesn't automatically send everything you type to google (I don't worry to much but it is a nice touch.) Maybe the average user is confused by having a separate search field in addition to the address bar but I like it. (And yes, you can search from awesomebar as well, although there is no suggest feature.)
Chrome has exactly the same feature. You can disable Google Instant, too, but it's actually a really useful feature.
Try to type
new com <part of title of something you read on hn today>
[0]: which might explain why not everyone is using the better browser :-P
you [tab] searches on youtube. news [tab] searches hn. I've never set it up and works with almost every site I've performed a search on.
I agree Chrome's site search thing is awesome, but how did you teach it to use the new HN one?
EDIT: Chrome settings -> manage search engines. Very impressed with the list of those it's stored automatically. Point stands that it doesn't seem to relearn though when one changes.
Safari will suggest also suggest things like Wikipedia articles and popular sites. Similarly, if I type "imdb michael mann", Safari will suggest "Search imdb.com for michael mann".
Firefox's location bar is arguably much worse than both Safari and Chrome — it won't really autocomplete anything except "search Google for this" and bookmarks/history. Safari also leaves the search standing in the location bar when you submit it, whereas Firefox replaces it with an obscure, unreadable google.com URL.
1. Tree Tabs: this extension lays out my tabs stacked vertically on the left of my window. I can fit upwards of 50 tabs in a window before I have to scroll the tab list. This is great for managing big research or documentation sessions without the squinting in Chrome. The APIs necessary for tree tabs are not yet in chrome, although there is some discussion now of a sidebar API.
2. Vimperator: this extension provides a very powerful vim-like interface, including a .vimperatorrc file. I don't use any more of the advanced features like that, but it is excellent for keeping my hands totally on the keyboard as I switch between Tmux splits, vim windows, and my browser. There are several vimperator-inspired plugins for chrome, some of which are passable. However, vimperator is a lot faster than Vimium, and the interface is more concise and vim-like. A big difference is the UI for opening links: in Vimperator, you press `f` to enter follow-link command mode. Each link is assigned a number by page order; you filter links by typing letters, and can follow the first link by pressing `enter`. So to submit this text form, I would press `esc` to return to normal mode from edit mode, then press `f`, and then type "rep<enter>" to filter links to reply, and then click it. It's rather natural, and easy to click the right link.
In Vimium, each link is assigned two letters (which are easier to type than numvers), but you can't filter links. There's a lot more squinting at the little labels to type the right thing. Plus, it's easy to fat finger the link text with no recourse.
Are you sure you can't change that in Vimperator? I use Pentadactyl (can't even remember why I chose it over Vimperator) and i can just do `set hintkeys=asdfghjkl`.
1. Tab Groups: This is a must have for organizing tabs and keep me sane with 30+ tabs open. 2. Lazy loading: I am not sure if Chrome has it or not but FF doesn't load a tab content until I switch to it. I can regularly have a lot of tabs open without all of them using resources.
This is usually transparent to me. Except when I am on a train and realize that all the tabs I have opened in the background have never been loaded. :(
For this and other reasons I have removed tabs from my workflow, now I use 90% maximized or half-screen windows. It is also easier to alt-tab between them.
I could do something similar with bookmarks but that would be way slower and not as comfortable.
Circumstantial: In most cases I prefer the way Firefox handles runaway scripts. Though when it fails, it fails hard.
There are many others, though like I said...I doubt they'll out weigh Chrome's advantages sans the existing extension ecosystem.
When Firefox loses the extensions which require XUL (whether fundamentally or merely to avoid rewrites) I doubt its upsides will outweigh its downsides for me anymore. They may surprise me, and even if they don't they still might increase usage with other people, but right now I am sad.