I can assure you that you only want this if you can guarantee that your add-ons only do what they claim, don't have security vulnerabilities, and are never acquired and maliciously updated. Otherwise, a permissionless add-on model means a bug in TreeStyleTabs could potentially be used to exfiltrate your entire password database, plant malicious binaries on your system, and destroy local data. If TST had limited permissions along the lines of only being able to manipulate tabs and their UI, that wouldn't be a problem.
> Have you seen "treestyletabs" implementation on chrome? It's a whole other window that has to be started an placed on the left of the screen by user because of the addon limitations.
Firefox will not have this limitation.
Is that a statement about future Firefox visions or Firefox 57? I assume you know the gritty details while I'm a rather confused Firefox power user / fan / advocate (using .. addons that are affected, vertical tabs/tree style tabs plus vimperator/pentadactyl mostly).
The outrage The Internet™ seems to feel is probably not about XUL being deprecated/killed. I'd say no user cares about the technology, the only people even caring are probably the addon developers.
From what I can tell, the outrage is mostly due to the impression (and I dearly hope that you will dismiss this as wrong, just like the 'addon limitation' reference above) that the web extension switch happens before popular, polarizing addons are even remotely possible given the new API.
"Will not have this limitation", as in "it won't support that use case in 57 at all" or as in "you can do better than this Chrome extension you describe"?
You're basically correct about the APIs, though. Developers of some popular add-ons don't know when or if the APIs they need will be implemented. Support for migrating gradually (embedded WebExtensions) was just released in 51 and will be gone in 57 -- not even a full ESR cycle.
Developer burnout is a problem, too. This comes right after many of them put in significant work making their now-deprecated code multiprocess-compatible, which came after mandatory extension signing, which came after a bunch of UI changes. It's not surprising some of them have quit.
Most of these changes and their timelines are motivated by fundamental architectural work happening deep down in Firefox. We're doing the best we can to get as many add-on APIs in place before 57, but for heavy add-on users, it has the potential to be a rough transition.
For deeper meddling in the browser, and for APIs that don't yet exist, WebExtension Experiments (https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/i...) should provide a reasonable option. Basically, you can keep using old-style "bootstrapped" add-ons in DevEdition and Nightly. Kind of an explicit way to opt-out of API stability guarantess so we can continue refactoring the browser core. Experiments are intended for prototyping new WebExtension APIs for eventual inclusion into mainline Firefox, but you could also use them for power-user APIs, so long as you don't mind the maintenance burden.
Can you clarify/elaborate? Last I heard, UI modification by web extensions was still unconfirmed at best.
Can I use this to replace the entire browser history system and omnibar autocomplete with a custom one?
Can I use this to replace the entire browser chrome?
Some of these changes I need (AutoHiDPI) to use a browser at all. Others I wish for. All of them I currently am using.
The alternative is me staying on an ancient browser, or forking Firefox and browsing with a horribly outdated and barely patched version. Or reading HN with a magnifying glass.
Generally, the way forward will be to use WebExtension Experiments (https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/i...), which let you run classic-style "bootstrapped" add-ons in Firefox Developer Edition or Nightly. The intended use is for prototyping new WebExtension APIs for eventual inclusion into mainline Firefox, but nothing limits you to that usage.
In fact, the per-screen HiDPI setting even has an environment variable on most Linux systems (Qt’s QT_SCALE_FACTORS), but Firefox completely ignores that.
I don’t have the time anymore to rewrite half the UI stack of every single application I use, and then take over maintenance of that. I’ve done that with a few open source projects, but my time is limited. And if I wanted to implement extending the UI properly, I’d definitely have to rewrite the entire stack, similar to what Browser.html does.
But neither of them is good enough. (Especially Palemoon’s UI is painful to look at, and hard to fix).
Owning the code that runs on your machine is your right as a user of open-source software, but there's no right that says that Mozilla must be the one to maintain that code. And nobody's asking you to maintain your own personal fork either: find all the other people who care about unlimited (if fragile) browser extensibility via unrestricted addons and form a community (or hell, a corporation) to collectively make the browser you want, starting from a fork of Firefox (or Chromium, or Midori).
If you believe that there are enough people in your position to make such a collaboration successful, then you're all set. And if you don't believe that there are enough people out there who care about unrestricted addons to make such a project viable, then--while I sympathize with your plight--maybe it makes business sense for Mozilla to drop support for unrestricted addons, especially due to the ways that this feature hinders all the other features that Firefox users are clamoring for: speed, reduced memory usage, speed, HTML5 adoption, speed, ES6+ adoption, speed, speed, security, and speed.
And there's no right that says I have to use FF. They are giving up one of their big advantages.
Source on me saying that? I think they are making a few dumb decisions, but that's putting a lot of words in my mouth.
FF has very few advantages. They aren't competing on speed, mind-share, ease-of-use and now they aren't competing on reliability of add-ons. I get that this can help them focus, but pushing away their limited user-base is like using an axe to help a sinking ship.
The set of clueless users who would install arbitrary malicious extensions and the set of clueless users who would download and run arbitrary executables is basically the same. Yet if they do the latter, any extention sandboxing is completely and utterly moot. It's the same issue as with mandatory extension signing; requiring signing for extensions while nothing stops someone from downloading an unsigned .exe (which could memory-patch Firefox if it so wished) is absurd.
When Firefox is no longer an attractive option for power users, the only thing it will have going for it is ideology. And that will not be enough to compete.
I do not consider myself a power user of Firefox, but the two extensions I use (DownThemAll and tab groups) are not going to be ported.
Servo has been in Dev for 5 years, so if google isn't working on something to compete with that, Firefox is going to completely dominate the web for years.
I would bet that 99%~ people don't need or even want that kind of absolute freedom. As a chrome user, the only plugin I have that I can't get on the play store is one for downloading youtube videos but I can still install it from the author website, just takes a few extra clicks.
The fact that one doesn't exist. "Developer edition" is really just their alpha build, they don't have release builds that allow unsigned extension installs.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
It seems that those very much exist.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
The one thing that is striking every time I try to use chrome/chromium is just how limited the addon functionality is and how much less freedom the user has. Have you seen "treestyletabs" implementation on chrome? It's a whole other window that has to be started and placed side-by-side with the browser window by user because of the addon limitations. There are also some keybindings which are fixed forever and not allowed to be changed (<C-W>, <C-N> etc).
Of course you can justify the restrictions by bringing up the case of the poor average user who will get abused by his browser having more functionality that he will ever need. But the thing is - I really don't care for the "average user" and its problems. Average user is a beast that is perfectly happy to be contained in the walled garden, but we already have Chrome and Android for that.