Mozilla described the plan to destroy Firefox in detail

[JustOff]

Firefox 53, April 18th release

• Firefox will run in multiprocess mode by default for all users, with some exceptions. If your add-on has the multiprocessCompatible flag set to false, Firefox will run in single process mode if the add-on is enabled.
• Add-ons that are reported and confirmed as incompatible with Multiprocess Firefox (and don’t have the flag set to false) will be marked as incompatible and disabled in Firefox.
• Add-ons will only be able to load binaries using the Native Messaging API.
• No new legacy add-ons will be accepted on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). Updates to existing legacy add-ons will still be accepted.

Firefox 54-56

• Legacy add-ons that work with Multiprocess Firefox in 53 may still run into compatibility issues due to followup work:
• Multiple content processes is being launched in Firefox 55. This enables multiple content processes, instead of the single content process currently used.
• Sandboxing will be launched in Firefox 54. Additional security restrictions will prevent certain forms of file access from content processes.

Firefox 57, November 28th release

• Firefox will only run WebExtensions.
• AMO will continue to support listing and updating legacy add-ons after the release of 57 in order to have an easier transition. The exact cut-off time for this support hasn’t been determined yet.
• Multiprocess compatibility shims are removed from Firefox. This doesn’t affect WebExtensions, but it’s one of the reasons went with this timeline.

Via Mozilla Add-ons Blog.

[dark_moon]

So the deadline is december 2017.
Lets see how many users they lose just because of addons.

[JustOff]

So the deadline is december 2017.

According the plan a lot of troubles will arrive much earlier even then in November.

[GreenGeek]

A more realistic deadline is March. Anybody going past 52 will see the light slowly going out.

[Sajadi]

No big loss. Origin Firefox and Mozilla are dead. Hello Chrome imitation faculty and good bye more market share!

[joe04]

When I first learned of this overall direction of Firefox back in that now infamous August 2015 blog post announcing the death of XUL/XPCOM, like many long-time users I was more frustrated than anything. But thankfully I soon made the switch here (after first learning the existince of PM from some disgruntled comments on the blog post). Now watching the continued demise from "the outside" makes me kinda sad. It's a shame that so much of that beneficial community code and the sense of community has gone down the drain.

To be fair, the "Quantum" Firefox (they plan to rename Gecko to Quantum sometime after FF 57) may have certain advantages with some of the newer stuff from Servo replacing older Gecko components. But for me things like better GPU support for rendering heavy-duty pages means virtually nothing compared to my highly-customized Pale Moon experience.

My only concern for PM is if Firefox continues to lose marketshare, what if Mozilla has to reduce staff and thus can't/won't keep patching the parts of the code that are still relevant for us. That could be a potential security problem down the road. (I'm not that concerned, but mention it as a sobering possibility.)

[Sajadi]

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02 ... ent-223537

Jorge Villalobos more or less makes it clear that ui features have no longer a place in Firefox. That means also bad news for Classic Theme Restorer. Congratulations, Google will have a major victory in some versions!

[Moonchild]

It's been known for a while already that CTR is something the UX theme hates and wanted to make impossible.

[JustOff]

It seems like it was just yesterday:

We knew from the beginning that we would have to trade off truly limitless customizations to produce a more stable API/pseudo-API, but we felt that was worth it to achieve our long-term goals for the project. To compete and lead in the browser market now, we want and need to be able to move faster, and not have our hands as severely tied by add-on compatibility. We also want it to be safer to run with addons, and less disruptive to increasingly longer-lived and more complex browsing sessions. All of these requirements meant major technology changes, and some sacrifices.

This is a strategic product decision, intended to grow our developer ecosystem and broaden the scope of potential developers as much as possible, and deliver a much better user experience with customizations across core application updates. Deprecating the old systems in favour of the new systems is a required part of the strategic plan, because it is not enough to simply build a better system, we must migrate our users and our developer ecosystem to that system to reap the benefits. That does mean, in effect, that we are discriminating against the old systems, and I am personally at peace with that.

Mike Connor, Mozilla, January 2010

[Moonchild]

And my question to that is: why has this been dragging on for 7 years, with another to go at the very least to even begin to "migrate"?

In more detail: Why did Mozilla not have the vision to actually make these changes when they were prudent, instead of somehow hoping to get back all those users who have been leaving Firefox? Why the pretense of progress when still on the old systems that are going to be abandoned, and why not just try to make the old systems as good as possible before moving to the ultimate goal of the new system? Why sacrifice stability for rapid movement in a direction that is a dead end?... Why drag this out for years?

[lyceus]

Well as you can imagine this are good news for Pale Moon.

Even Slashdot now cites Pale Moon as an alternative for Firefox!

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/02/17/1635216/mozilla-will-deprecate-xul-add-ons-before-the-end-of-2017

Mozilla has published a plan of add-ons deprecation in future Firefox releases. Firefox 53 will run in multi process mode by default for all users with some exceptions. Most add ons will continue to function, however certain add ons have already ceased to function because they don't expect multi user mode under the hood. Firefox 54-56 will introduce even more changes which will ultimately break even more addons. Firefox 57, which will be preliminarily released on the 28th of Novermber, 2017, will only run WebExtensions: which means no XUL (overlay) add ons, no bootstrapped extensions, no SDK extensions and no Embedded WebExtensions. In other words by this date the chromification of Firefox will have been completed. If you depend on XUL add ons your only choice past this date will be Pale Moon.

[Latitude]

Well as you can imagine this are good news for Pale Moon.

Even Slashdot now cites Pale Moon as an alternative for Firefox!

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/02/17/1635216/mozilla-will-deprecate-xul-add-ons-before-the-end-of-2017

Mozilla has published a plan of add-ons deprecation in future Firefox releases. Firefox 53 will run in multi process mode by default for all users with some exceptions. Most add ons will continue to function, however certain add ons have already ceased to function because they don't expect multi user mode under the hood. Firefox 54-56 will introduce even more changes which will ultimately break even more addons. Firefox 57, which will be preliminarily released on the 28th of Novermber, 2017, will only run WebExtensions: which means no XUL (overlay) add ons, no bootstrapped extensions, no SDK extensions and no Embedded WebExtensions. In other words by this date the chromification of Firefox will have been completed. If you depend on XUL add ons your only choice past this date will be Pale Moon.

Pale Moon usage would be skyrocketing....

[Sajadi]

Pale Moon usage would be skyrocketing....

I fear there will only be one winner - and that will be Google Chrome/Chromium based browsers. Most users are not wanting to use a real fork which has it's sadly existing webcompatibility issues and more likely switch to a different browser wich is in their opinion "state of the art" - Pretty sure the majority will simply move on to Chromium based browsers which offer customizationtoo, for example Vivaldi.

I really do not believe that the Pale Moon project will see a massive user base gain.

Also, most of advanced users already have moved on and the majority of Firefox recent user base are simple users, the one group in which Mozilla is putting all their faith into these days. People will leave with the end of XUL, but everyone who was at least a bit of realistic had seen that coming after Australis was landing and was moving on during that phase, so Mozilla's user loss will for sure not be that massive. They know that and they do not care.

It is exactly how Opera has reacted.

[GreenGeek]

I agree it is reminiscent of Opera's decline. Opera 8.5 was the peak IMO - they started adding unwanted features in 9 and especially 10. Too bad Vivaldi can't be based off of old Opera rather than Chromium; it uses 10x the memory of Opera (and double PM). Vivaldi has virtually no useful UI customization yet (just colorization, can't even move extension buttons off address bar). I think I read they aren't planning to deal with that until after 2.0. OTOH, Otter which uses a lot less memory lets you move buttons, replace their icons, etc. But Otter has no extension support yet except scripts (haven't even tried adding any of those). Qupzilla is similar to Otter and has some built-in extensions but no way to add more. Development of Qupzilla has stalled so I uninstalled it in favor of Otter, but none of these are an ideal geek browser. That's why I went backwards and installed Firefox 24.8ESR (the most up to date pre-Australis build) as an alternate, and why I have kept Waterfox+CTR and SeaMonkey updated but updates for those are about to end for me. I won't use Mozilla's new architecture not just because of extensions but also their demonstrated attitude toward power users and the recent issues with privacy that show their real priorities.

[Sajadi]

I agree it is reminiscent of Opera's decline. Opera 8.5 was the peak IMO - they started adding unwanted features in 9 and especially 10. Too bad Vivaldi can't be based off of old Opera rather than Chromium; it uses 10x the memory of Opera (and double PM). Vivaldi has virtually no useful UI customization yet (just colorization, can't even move extension buttons off address bar).

You can use CSS to make larger rewrites of the UI - You can place bars at different positions and more. The customization abilities from Vivaldi are not bad if you do know how to write CSS stuff (or find helpful already existing css examples) - The most biggest issue is that it is Chromium. That is a clear no-go.

[137ben]

The most biggest issue is that it is Chromium. That is a clear no-go.

I'm not really sure why you consider a Chromium base worse than a Firefox base. There are things I used to like about Firefox over Chrome(ium), but they're all gone now (hence why I am using Pale Moon as my primary browser and Vivaldi as my secondary browser). Actually, for me, Vivaldi's use of Chromium is an advantage:
there is a website that I have to use for work, which mostly works in any browser (including Pale Moon.) There is, however, one feature on that website I have to use occasionally which doesn't in Pale Moon...and also fails to work in Gecko-based browsers, and Webkit/Safari based browsers, and MS Edge. When I asked the IT team at my office about it, they said that, due to budget constraints, they can only support one browser, and so they chose the most popular one. While I can still use Pale Moon most of the time, I can't get out of using a Blink-based browser occasionally, and so I've chosen the most customizable Blink-based browser as my backup browser. Right now, that backup browser if Vivaldi. Obviously, it's still not as customizable as Pale Moon, but it's a good backup for when PM doesn't work.

Is there a reason I should be more concerned about a browser using Chromium as a backend than one using Gecko/Servo/Spidermonkey?

[joe04]

Is there a reason I should be more concerned about a browser using Chromium as a backend than one using Gecko/Servo/Spidermonkey?

No, not really. There may be privacy conerns about phoning home to Google, but that's less of an issue in a Chromium fork than Google's own browser. Vivaldi, like Linux builds of Chromium, need Google for essentials like the Certificate Revocation List, which is definitely something you want to keep. But non-essentials like blocklists and on-the-fly URL vetting from Google's services can all be disabled (in GChrome too).

But in terms of functionality, I certainly prefer Gecko to Blink. Gecko provides more options like zooming only text and disabling page styles that I would sorely miss if I had to use anything Chromium-based as a primary browser.

[half-moon]

Another issue with chromium is that is responsible for all these pointless chrome-clones, further strengthening a web mono-culture which is a bad thing to have.

[BenFenner]

I truly don't understand how anyone can get by with a Chromium-based browser. How do you search a page with a case-sensitive search? How do you view the source of a page without refreshing the request? How do you move the tabs elsewhere other than on top? How do you hide the tabs bar entirely? How does anyone get by with that abortion of a menu system? I am baffled by my fellow web developers at work who use one. I would give up the Internet before having to put up with a half-baked browser like that.

[Tomaso]

And here we go..
The announced death of Cyberfox:
https://8pecxstudios.com/Forums/viewtop ... =6&t=1756/