Lots of developers abandoning their Firefox extensions..

[Frank Lion]

The stuff is all on record and I can go into more detail, if required.

Please do in your free time...

Sure, it won't take long.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 5#p6909435 - it was pretty obvious to me, back in 2006, where Google were going to go. Now, I'm not in the software business, but Mozilla are, so it should have been damn obvious to them as well.

So why, within 4 months of me writing that, are 4 or 5 Google guys working directly alongside Firefox devs, learning how to make a ******* browser! -

http://forums.mozillazine.org/memberlis ... e&u=223261
http://forums.mozillazine.org/search.ph ... &start=120

Naivety, stupidity, conspiracy or malice on the part of Mozilla? No idea, but back in 2006 many of us believed, myself included, that Firefox was going in the right direction, with the right motivations. Meantime, I had noticed Google twitching to diversify and knew that no good would come of any involvement with them.

With that in mind, you can imagine how me and the Google guys got on here? Damn, those guys took one helluva beating

[therube]

This next one is an official internal Mozilla video

Frank, you're on a roll .
(Strange how I could laugh at such a man.)

[Virtual_ManPL]

@ Frank Lion - Thank you very much!
Good reading, especially when I was just lurker without account here these times.

[Drumbrake]

Interesting reading, looks like the roots of this "transformation" (or maybe "normalization" would better describe it) go way back to the Firefox 3.0 era - clearly it was happening too much behind the scenes for (almost) all of us to understand what was going on - and what would be coming out of it.

[max2]

There will still be Firefox ESR!

I know it will soon have the same faith but not until 2018 instead.

[GHM113]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1320872#c1
W.Palant about AdBlock Plus 2.8.0 memory usage compared to 2.7.3:

This change addresses a number of consistency issues but it is also expected to increase the memory footprint to some degree - should not be very noticeable for realistic use cases, and by far not as bad as the upcoming WebExtensions move.

R.Hill about uBlock Origin WE:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/commen ... s/d9dz9ms/

Apparently in its current state, webext causes even more overhead to be added by uBO

[Virtual_ManPL]

Thanks Mozilla...

[PadaV4]

Wait.. So bigger memory usage AND slower loads?

[Frank Lion]

R.Hill about uBlock Origin WE:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/commen ... s/d9dz9ms/

Apparently in its current state, webext causes even more overhead to be added by uBO

Nope. How about we don't 'do' selective quoting here? He then goes on to write this -

[2] In general, webext extensions quite probably perform better than their non-webext counterpart because except for a very few exceptions, everything in the webext API is asynchronous, by design.

Now, that's just one guy's view and things may well change in the future. But, either way, just remember that opinions follow facts, complete facts, not the other way around.

Well, they do here anyway.

This next one is an official internal Mozilla video

Frank, you're on a roll .
(Strange how I could laugh at such a man.)

He's the same man who played an ex-Stasi spy in Unknown with Liam Neeson.

[GHM113]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280368

Over time the needs changed and we should consider implementing an asynchronous API for content blocking which could replace nsIContentPolicy. Let's gather some thoughts and ideas within this bug as a first measure.

For reference, this is currently causing performance issues in Adblock Plus with e10s. Our content process code needs to query the parent for content policy decisions because that's where the state is. Currently it has to happen synchronously because nsIContentPolicy requires a synchronous decision - so rather than delaying a single network request slightly we block the entire content process every time. IMHO, that's what is causing the issue described in bug 1192585 comment 17.

Does anyone know if WebExtensions support this asynchronous API? I sent W.Palant an email but didn't receive any answer. According to R.Hill, "webext extensions quite probably perform better than their non-webext counterpart because except for a very few exceptions, everything in the webext API is asynchronous, by design" but I am afraid this particular API is an exception because the bug related to it on bugzilla hasn't been Resolved Fixed.

Frank Lion
Thanks!

[ibewlu]

Firefox 50 is the last that I will be using... end of story.

[AtotehZ]

As it is now, it's not fast. Anything interactive completely breaks Firefox. Freezes that either last up to a minute or completely crashes the browser.
I just tried the other options I had besides Firefox. They're all faster, and they use NPAPI.

I've sworn by Firefox for something like 15 years, around the time I stopped using Netscape, but I think this is the end of the line.
Firefox is taking themselves out of the game, they're no longer a competitor on the mainstream market for browsers.
Being innovative is fine.. Stripping something of functionality because you want speed at the cost of stability and not giving a proper alternative, is dumb.

The perfect analogy to what Mozilla has done with Firefox is this:
Correspondence between Scientist and a Mozilla representative.
Scientist "We have a problem, combustion of oil is causing global warming."
Mozilla representative "I know what to do! Ban the use of oil!"
Scientist "But what about transportation and production of electricity and heat?"
Mozilla representative "Never mind that, we'll figure something out"
... communication stops... no electricity left, world dies.

[Kevin McFarlane]

Stripping something of functionality because you want speed at the cost of stability and not giving a proper alternative, is dumb.

Unfortunately, lots of vendors do this kind of thing - specifically, removing features without providing an alternative, or providing an inferior one. Then maybe (if you're lucky), over time, they restore the missing features - or some of them.

[impar]

Just realized that even if a current addon can be... "ported" to webextension, old addons might not be ported.
From the 14 addons I currently use, five have "last updated" of more than 2 years. Oldest is from February 2009.
The developer could just not be around anymore.