Re:Firefox 57.0 Released
by venatiodecorus on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @03:59PM
(#15699048)
you are a tiny minority and a specialized browser fork is a great solution for your use case in this situation.
I think that's a great point: it's difficult, near impossible, to make any particular piece of software contain 100% of the features that 100% of people want. Especially in the case of a tiny-minority feature, a specialized version that caters to your needs sometimes makes the most sense.
I just worry that people using some of these alternative browsers are opening themselves up to security issues since those code bases are less well-tested for security problems, and often they don't have the developer resources to implement things like process isolation and sandboxing.
> I just worry that people using some of these alternative browsers are opening themselves up to security issues since those code bases are less well-tested for security problems
Absolutely. The web browser is one of the most notorious attack vectors on computers these days. I find it hilarious that a vocal minority of power users is protesting this _massively impressive_ Firefox release just because they lost Tree Style Tabs or some extensions for downloading videos. Switching to a legacy fork like Waterfox or Firefox 52 ESR is not an enlightened move!
We lost NoScript!
"it's hard to justify holding an entire browser back just to maintain compatibility with an extension that has been abandoned by its own maintainers"
Pentadactyl was far from the only extension that Firefox decided to break. Many other extensions were affected.
As far as Pentadactyl itself went, the reason its maintainers abandoned it was because Firefox kept breaking compatibility with it over, and over, and over, and over. They understandably got frustrated by that and moved on to other things.
Then, when Firefox put their foot down and announced that they'd be changing the browser so that Pentadactyl will never again be able to work on it, no matter what its developers did, a lot of people didn't see the point of putting more effort in to. It survived only because of the dedication and help of the remaining community. Now there's nothing even they can do. Not with Firefox anyway. So we're moving on to something else.