WebExtensions in Firefox 48

Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by rpgmaker on Friday April 29, 2016 @11:02PM (#11600139)

They also "updated" the search box, beside extensions the main reason why I still prefer it over Chrome. Firefox is slowly but surely becoming unbearable. It's a real tragedy that its market share has suffered as much as it has but Chrome users aren't coming back. If they keep this Chrome-ization their remaining users just won't see any reason to choose Firefox over Chrome and they will leave.

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Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by giovannibajo1 on Saturday April 30, 2016 @12:17AM (#11600325)

Yeah I agree. Firefox is slowly becoming a Chrome clone. It took them a long while to migrate everything to follow the Chrome lead (release strategy, update strategy, multiprocess architecture, sandboxing, extension API, HTML UI, etc.) but I wonder what's the benefit of having two identical browsers. Yes the HTML engine is different but then so what, I don't think end users are ever going to switch because of HTML engines.

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Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by scrollaway on Saturday April 30, 2016 @07:01AM (#11601242)

I'm sick of both Chrome and Firefox, honestly.

I like Chrome's UI a lot so I don't mind Firefox becoming that. However, god damn it I just want a good browser. One I don't have to restart on a regular basis. One that doesn't become sluggish after a day of usage, or 20 tabs open.

Firefox right now is an overall sub-par experience. Of the two, it's the only one that I've seen actually crash (Chrome has individual tab crashes). The scrollbars aren't stylable and it is a lot slower.

And then Chrome has its own issues as well. Its "Restore tabs" dialog is too easy to click away (firefox's is a lot better) and it just loses the tabs. Not to mention when there's a lot of tabs to restore, it loads everything at once instead of doing lazy loading like Firefox. And Chrome still doesn't have autoscroll... I use an extension for it, but it can't touch the chrome:// pages...

These are all extremely long standing issues, it's incredible they haven't been fixed. Fat good that competition between Mozilla and Google is doing.

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Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by derefr on Saturday April 30, 2016 @04:32AM (#11600927)

Does there need to be a difference? Having two independent "rival" implementations of every feature is useful for the health of the web development ecosystem. The two apps could just be completely interchangeable from a user's perspective—a single site giving users one or the other for download at random—and that would still be true.

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Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by malka on Saturday April 30, 2016 @05:51AM (#11601095)

This. If tomorrow Google goes truly crazy with the tracking in chrome, this lower the cost of switching for the end user

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Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by nathancahill on Saturday April 30, 2016 @12:32AM (#11600373)

Privacy is a big reason I'm still using Firefox over Chrome.

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Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by nol13 on Friday April 29, 2016 @11:34PM (#11600217)

Still, an extension for a popular message board that was being developed was about to get me to switch to Chrome, but turns out that with almost no modifications it works great in Firefox nightly too! If not for that there's no way anyone was going to bother to port it.

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Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by bad_user on Saturday April 30, 2016 @04:15AM (#11600882)

Not sure what you mean. I'm a Chrome user that came back.

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Re:WebExtensions in Firefox 48 by cheiVia0 on Saturday April 30, 2016 @08:46AM (#11601467)

Thankfully, there's the Old Search addon for that brings it back

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-search1/

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