I think Vimperator was the same. I don't recall blank and loading pages, but it definitely didn't have the "page is not focused" issue all the current ones have (where you have to click on the page and then it starts responding to keys).

Yes, it was the same. Killing XUL killed effectively keyboard navigation. My only hope is Qutebrowser, but I'm not sure who wants to surf the web without access to any extensions these days.

Can and "wants to" are two different things. On iPhones and iPads, there's very limited access to extensions. So anybody on those platforms can't. (For now. The EU decision may change things.)

As far as keyboard browsing, doesn't vimperator cover that?

Vimperator was abandoned when XUL add-ons were abandoned, presumably because they couldn't pull it off with WebExtensions.

Partially, the reasoning they gave back then was it was too tightly integrated with Firefox's internals. Even if WebExtensions had all the APIs needed, it would have needed nearly a complete rewrite and they weren't up to it.

Ah yeah Vimium, for Chrome, not Vimperator, is the one was thinking of.

SeaMonkey browser is still maintained and is XUL based, it's the continuation of the original Mozilla browser

Latest release March 21, 2023!

It's XUL based but has lots of other Mozilla garbage, like the bits of Rust they jammed in there and which are now essentially unmaintained.

Why do you believe Rust to be "Mozilla garbage"?

Thanks! I'll likely use that until the XUL show is over for SeaMonkey. I'm currently on Waterfox, but I'm open to any alternative as it's owned by an adtech company...

keyboard support is already such a 3rd-class citizen everywhere, and then it gets further degraded by steps like this...

But hey someone could write a nice blog post about removing useful code! That person will soon land a nice 800k per year job in FAANG. Who cares about disabled people? Also who cares that firefox had a 40% market share when it allowed extensions? Extension model was hard to program so the code was depreciated and now Firefox has 2% share. But people responsible for this are not there any more.

From what I can see, Firefox deprecated the old add-on structure in August 2015, and the statistics then were ~15% usage for Firefox -- well into its decline from its heyday.

Yep. There's a meme that always pops up on these threads that changes made to Firefox to "be more like Chrome" were the catalyst for its decline, but that's clearly not true if you look at the data; if anything, that meme reverses cause and effect. It also doesn't make sense: people wouldn't switch to Chrome if they disliked the changes Firefox was making to become more like it.

> people wouldn't switch to Chrome if they disliked the changes Firefox was making to become more like it

Except they are and they do. Last I checked, Chrome was still gaining, not losing, on Firefox. Or more accurately: Firefox is losing whatever tiny userbase it still has, while Chrome already is the new IE (hell, even the new IE is Chrome).

For nearly a decade now, the only reasons to use Firefox instead of Chrome is, first and foremost, because Firefox is not made by Google, and secondly, because it had some extra technical flexibility that made the overall worse general-audience UX tolerable. The more Firefox loses on that technical flexibility, the less reason there is to use it.

The switch to be more like chrome definitely removed incentives that kept a portion of the user base on Firefox.

The ones who didn't care for such extensions might have jumped ship earlier, but advanced browser extensions were non trivial sticking point for a lot of the remaining user base

It makes sense if you think just a bit deeper: if Chrome was better in some regards (e.g. performance), and if Firefox removed things where it was better (e.g more customizations) to be more like Chrome, there is no reason not to use the better Chrome

I use both Firefox and Chrome (and Opera too) - and I can tell you that the current version of Firefox is not only a "Chrome clone". It is worse chrome-like browser than Chrome.

At the moment Firefox is a memory and processor hog (Chrome sometimes seems to have improved now). Only some ad-blockers keep Firefox alive.

When Chrome kills ad-block (something that Google seems to be working on), then probably more people will come back to Firefox. But at the moment Firefox (even with ad-blockers) is a worse product than chrome.

But think how many blog posts were written and how many people used Firefox as a stepping stone in their careers. Who cares that the product is just genuinely bad now.

Also Firefox was always "the" customizable browser that all the techie people used. It spread via word of mouth - "hey, your browser does not show those nasty ads all the time, how do you do that". Or the techies installing Firefox to their family. At the moment you barely have an incentive, since Firefox feels like mostly a re-skin of Chrome. And bad at it too.

It wasn't until 2018(?) that they removed the old system for real. And back then they promised to replace all lost functionality with proper designed APIs, to make all add-ons workable. Never happened beside some low hanging improvements.

But the problems with extensions started far earlier. It was a common joke how every bigger update broke many popular extensions, made some of them even impossible. In the early days of Firefox, extensions very growing wild and rich. But over time so many were dying a slow death. At the end of the early days (around Firefox 3 or 4), mostly nothing was left, and Firefox was already significant crippled in ability. The later removal of XUL only gave it the last hit.

Today it's basically a handful of popular extensions who keep this feature alive, and most of them are just Adblockers.

Have you tried the Palemoon browser - http://www.palemoon.org/ ? It is a hard fork of Firefox that still supports XUL and the old XUL based Firefox extensions.