this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Firefox's decision to move to WebExtensions is starting to look even more questionable, IMO.
Questionable in what way?
It was originally questionable because it completely hobbled extensions, and now Chrome is seeking to hobble the standard even more
Yeah, perhaps not their greatest move ever. I miss how customizable Firefox used to be. For a long time I used Waterfox Classic to postpone the switch, but it got harder and harder. Now you have to use stuff like paxmod to get back some of the old features.
I don't know the internal technical issues too well, though, and they have made a lot of headway in the speed department since switching. I do recall discussion around when they dropped them about being held back by the addon architecture.
It definitely was their gratest move ever. So many improvements was blocked by supporting the old extensions. Firefox would be completely useless and dead by now if they was still supporting them. Their loss in market share to chrome is largely due to not killing them 5 years earlier.
OK, but even if I accept that there was a technical necessity, the new architecture needlessly blocked ui modification to offer a less flexible experience. They could have provided a solution that worked better for their most loyal users and long time advocates. Instead they caused the outflux of these highly technical users, many of whom instead championed chrome, and more or less got us into this mess in the first place.
A lot of the Firefox users you mention have probably moved to Vivaldi, given that it has implemented features that Firefox had via extensions before they went all in on WebExtensions.
Yeah and it'll be very interesting as to what the Firefox fanboys will think then when that continues gaining traction.
I'll go back to what I said - all browsers are generally shit in one way or another. And they influence one and another. Very few browsers keep up the fight but browser hopping will be entirely meaningless when these people are out to redesign the web in their visage.
You can consider me a Firefox fanboy if you like - I certainly prefer it to the alternatives. Firefox made a bad decision to follow Chrome, and then Chrome made it event worse, so I don't think the fanboys will be moved from their support when the alternatives are worse.