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A lot of people who know about this stuff are pronouncing Firefox dead. It's not so much that its market share is down, though that get mentioned in passing. It's that Mozilla intends to do away with its existing structure for add-ons and extensions in November, when the new version comes out. They are telling us that it's for security, and don't worry, all your favorite add-ons will be fixed by the time, and and everything will be quite seamless.

The programmers are saying something else. Some of the major extensions, without which Firefox is barely worth using, have not been adapted, and it begins to look more like they won't be. Various reasons are given, but I don't know the exact technical issues here.

What I do know is that would be a deal killer for me, and I'd be using Chrome. Unfortunately, many of the corresponding Chrome extensions are pretty lame by comparison. For example, Chrome lacks a NoScript, and the closest things it has are clunky and not very usable.

Not a happy time. Ideas?

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

Seems like folks been prognosticating the demise of Firefox for many years, already.


It also seems to have become a mainstay for the Linux world, so sort of doubt it will disappear anytime soon.


A quick search (in Chrome, through Google, on a Linux computer, no less) suggests that what you are encountering is Firefox saying they will be discontinuing legacy support for add-ons prior to a particular build of the Firefox browser.


Looks like what you are encountering is the end of support for a good many add-ons that are no longer being properly supported by their original creators or current caretakers.


This may also mean that Firefox is re-positioning the structure and nature of its algorithms in ways that will be beneficial in the next few years. (Were I one to place bets, this is where I'd probably place one.)

I don't know about that. LastPass and NoScript are certainly under continuing active development, and in both cases the non-legacy versions have been promised again and again, but nothing happens. There seem to be issues that I don't understand regarding the API or lack thereof, and also lack of a stable beta version for testing. There's a lot of bitching on forums about this, and right now unless something changes we might be looking at a monumental clusterfrack.

I hope not, because like I said, Firefox extensions are way better in many cases.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

Well, here's an update on NoScript:

https://forums.informaction.com/viewtop ... =30#p90133

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

And here's something about LastPass:




So it appears that there's hope for those.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

Seeing as how Firefox is open-source, I would keep an eye out for simple ways to adjust the code so as to allow for those older add-ons you might wish to see functioning properly continue to do so.


Not sure how much of a cluster fuck this will turn out to be. For the most part, feels like the usual happenings with regard to how hardware and software change over time.

FF 57 shipped today, and everything works except NoScript. They've been promising a compatible version for months, assuring everyone it would be yesterday, didn't happen, today, didn't happen, tomorrow ???????

This is mostly due to Mozilla's delays in getting the API out, and these will continue until at least mid-next year.

Not a deal breaker because uMatrix does some of the same things, though its user interface will take days to learn.

But for now, at least, Firefox is not dead here. I can't say for other users.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

Also the advertised speed improvement for FF 57 is real. It feels like Chrome.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

Reviews look promising and I even heard someone say that it looks pretty.


I've downloaded it, but have not yet installed.


"Anticipation is making me wait."

Certain HTML5 content that never worked on Firefox, now works.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

Upgrade went through, seemingly bypassing the setting where my approval of any upgrade is required.


And of course, video down loaders no longer work properly.


But hey, it's pretty, so what the heck? No need to panic, just gonna invest a bit of time and effort to get things working better.




You have now entered the Quantum realm, where anything is possible.

One of them, "Video Download Helper" seems to work better than ever. (the "helper" developers upgraded it.) Although, now you have to also download a "helper app" for it to work properly.

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"When the rich take money from the poor it's called business, when poor people resist it's called violence." –Mark Twain

Probably good news, that "Video Download Helper" got their algorithm working well with a Mac.


Looks like things with "Video Download Helper" are not yet properly optimized for Firefox 57 on a linux OS platform. Or perhaps I've not yet found the golden key to make it work anywhere near as well as it did in 56.


Whatever, just more hurdles to figuring out how to make things work well.

Lots of geeky reasons why the transition is a rocky one for add-ons. They went to a web extension system like the one in Chrome, or at least I think Chrome is web extensions. The API got delayed, and some of it won't be out until mid 2018 earliest.

The saga of NoScript continues. The developer of that one is an Italian programmer who works very closely with Mozilla. He's the Official Mozilla WebExt Falloon, or something like that. In other words, he developed a lot of the new setup.

Supposedly he's been hard at work on NoScript for months. He knows more about how to write extensions for Firefox than anyone else on this planet. But it obviously doesn't work. They've run through any number of promised release dates. Latest one is November 19. In Italy, that's not far off.

We'll see what we'll see.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

By my count, the week that NoScript would definitely absolutely be available at the end of, ended an hour ago in Italy. It's 0038 GMT/UTC, and Italy's CET, an hour ahead of that.

The comments on the blog are getting entertaining:



He's right.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

LOL.


Yeah, the usual freak out about adjusting to a new piece of software that has been somewhat radically altered from previous versions.


My suggestion: folks should just shut the fuck up and get on with the business of figuring out how to properly utilize this new piece of software or simply walk away. The rest is just a waste of bandwidth.

That's what I did with uMatrix. It exposes all its parameters and you have to know which ones do what. So I worked it out. Musicians call this woodshedding. Working on fundamentals.

I was thinking more of the uproar over the missed release dates for NoScript than the sudden switch to Firefox 57, though some people seem to think that's a plot too. It's not. It's just a great example of how not to do a rollout of drastically changed code. I actually would have given a B- except for the badly botched API thing, because that means they weren't really ready. So they get a D.

Had the programmer, who has a solid rep in that community, simply said he was working on it, and the fabled version 10.0 would have come when it functioned properly, quite a bit of this kerfuffle might have been avoided. It was all about the whole string of missed release dates. The especially humorous part for me was when everyone was checking their time zone maps to see when it was midnight in Italy, when apparently he would turn into a pumpkin. I didn't do that either. It's 9 hours before L.A.. These are things one learns from doing business back at home from over there.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)

Can totally imagine that the programmer is working frantically, 'round the clock, to get it done.


It's good to have deadlines, but when it comes to things of this nature, especially an open-source code and radically underpaid venture, the deadlines need to be flexible.


No doubt, this dude is working as hard and as fast as he possibly can on this project. I'd say that folks should lighten up and give him some room to operate.


In the end, this bit of software is likely to be as good and probably better than anything else that exists, which is pretty much par for the course for Mozilla products.

A stable version of NoScript (10.1.1) was released today. He didn't miss by much. It inherited my old whitelist and seems to be working OK.

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"Our democratic institutions... seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California," remarked Canadian politician Charlie Angus. (BBC, 11/27/18)