Why did Mozilla remove XUL add-ons? (2020)

https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/

by imiric • 3 years ago

111 103 3 years ago

yoric.github.io

cuteboy192• 3 years ago

Such a post at that time would have greatly improved people's response to the change. Instead what we usually get is a PR sanitized gobbledygook which occupies space without speaking much at all. Now a similar thing is happening with Firefox Android and their extensions. Firefox can easily run most extensions but it's hidden behind a config in a canary release of the browser. No doubt there are some good reasons for it but we simply do not know. Ultimately this is a fault common among almost every product designer. They refuse to explain their decisions fearing (perhaps justly) that they may be proven wrong. Many such cases

commoner2• 3 years ago

Now a similar thing is happening with Firefox Android and their extensions. Firefox can easily run most extensions but it's hidden behind a config in a canary release of the browser. No doubt there are some good reasons for it but we simply do not know. Ultimately this is a fault common among almost every product designer. They refuse to explain their decisions fearing (perhaps justly) that they may be proven wrong.

There were no good reasons for Mozilla to restrict extensions on Firefox for Android. It was a stupid decision that alienated Firefox's user base on Android with no real benefits.

However, Mozilla has finally listened to the negative feedback and custom add-on collections are now available on Firefox Beta for Android:

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/10/20/firefox-beta-for-android-n...

Mozilla also said they would start working on WebExtensions on Firefox for Android this year. The goal is to have feature parity with desktop Firefox, which includes retaining the Manifest v2 features that uBlock Origin uses:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/12/15/new-extensions-av...

While Mozilla has made numerous missteps in the past, it looks like they're finally moving in the right direction.

m-p-3• 3 years ago

What also annoys me is they disabled about:config on the Firefox for Android Stable release..

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

However, Mozilla has finally listened to the negative feedback and custom add-on collections are now available on Firefox Beta for Android

Anything to avoid putting a useful feature in a stable release or making it convenient, I suppose...

its-summertime2• 3 years ago

The API being unfinished, meaning web extensions could fail in random, unexpected ways, sounds like a good reason to me?

wolpoli• 3 years ago

The product designers don't realize that a lot of the backlash comes from the technically-minded audience, and that their usual approach of highlighting user benefits only further fuels distrust among that vocal community.

imbnwa• 3 years ago

I remember using Songbird in the late 00s, a music player built on top of XULRunner, as well as a twitter client. They're not exactly 1-to-1, but there's something funny to how Electron provides that browser-based platform for desktop apps now.

Semaphor• 3 years ago

It's even mentioned in the article.

I think I tried it back then, but preferred foobar2k.

notRobot• 3 years ago

I remember getting a fork of it, Philips Songbird, with an MP3 player and using it for a few years on a Windows XP machine. Worked much better than iTunes, and I actually kinda miss it a lot.

TedDoesntTalk2• 3 years ago

I worked hard to keep my addon compatible with Songbird.

giantrobot2• 3 years ago

I was partial to Flock, another XUL browser. It integrated a bunch of of social media APIs of the day in interesting ways.

thakoppno• 3 years ago

I remember Flock fondly. Any recall why it didn’t work out? Did Firefox’s ascendency stall out Flock?

spankalee• 3 years ago

Firefox developers started porting components from XUL to HTML5

More specifically, Firefox's UI wasn't just ported to HTML5, but to web components. This means much of two of the three major browsers (also parts of Chrome and Chrome OS) are using web components for the UI.

Part of what enabled a move from XUL was that HTML finally got custom elements, where XUL/XBL had had custom components for a long time.

chrismorgan2• 3 years ago

I don’t believe that Web Components had anything to do with it at all.

When you control the scripting environment, and would be instantiating in scripting rather than in serialised markup, Custom Elements are one of the more superfluous features of the web platform: everything you can do with them, you can do every bit as effectively without them, at no meaningful cost or cost saving.

The point where things get a little more interesting is when you introduce Shadow DOM, because then you do have genuine capabilities that can’t be expressed in other ways (though whether you want to may be another matter).

But the real kicker, in my assessment and conclusion, is that both of these features landed after the migration from XUL to HTML began. (Not all that long after, and they have since been used variously, but the moving initiatives began before they were available.)

bgrins• 3 years ago

I worked on this project - Web Components had a lot to do with it. It's true they weren't feature complete in Firefox when we started the project (notably missing Shadow DOM) - but the first migration from late 2017 was XBL->Custom Element (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1500626), and we used the migration project to inform performance and feature work for Web Components within Firefox.

We could have converted the bindings to JS modules (and we did plenty of that too), but Web Components were key because they allowed us to migrate in-place with near API compatibility rather than rewriting the UI. I have a post at https://briangrinstead.com/blog/firefox-webcomponents/ with more detail on that point.

MollyRealized• 3 years ago

I have to say, I miss Keyconfig SO badly.

metadat• 3 years ago

I'd never heard of KeyConfig.

To save others the effort:

It was a keyboard customizer XUL extension for Firefox and Thunderbird.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyconfig_extension

ashtonabc• 3 years ago

Keyconfig and other legacy extensions are still available for modern Firefox with a modified userChromeJS: https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...

cycomanic• 3 years ago

For thunderbird there is tbkeys which is the spiritual successor. I use it to implement mutt like keybindings.

dang• 3 years ago

Discussed at the time (of the article):

Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231017 - Aug 2020 (336 comments)

sabellito2• 3 years ago

I might be one of the dozens of people in the world who actually shipped production software using XUL. It's a generic admin software for recruiting companies, still has some 200 daily users.

At the time, in 2004, PrototypeJS was all the rage, and XmlHTTPRequest didn't exist yet.

XUL helped us ship a more rich user experience without extreme pain. The whole thing was even a pseudo-SPA, using iframes everywhere, which we also used to fetch extra data for some pages without navigating.

fzzzy• 3 years ago

XmlHTTPRequest existed, it's just that Firefox hadn't implemented it yet. IE had it since 1999.

unscaled• 3 years ago

XMLHttpRequest was available since Firefox was called Firefox[1], and it should have been at least partly functional in 2002 when Phoenix 0.1 (the predecessor to Firebird and Firefox) was released. In 2004, Firebird just got renamed to Firefox (on version 0.8) and Safari implemented XHR. Opera and Konqueror would implement it in 2005.

The main issue obstructing the use of XHR was not browser compatibility. Internet Explorer still had 95% market share, and almost nobody cared about compatibility with other browsers then. The issue was mostly about awareness, and lack of proper tooling. The term AJAX was only coined in 2005, so the technique of using XHR to reduce page refreshes and improve page responsiveness didn't even have a name. It was used here in there by savvy web developers, but it wasn't systematic.

Before 2005, very few websites were built entirely on XHR. It was out there, lurking in the shadows, but not transforming the way web was done yet. Outlook Web Access (for which XHR was developed) is an obvious mention, but the first site that got XR popular was probably Gmail Beta, in 2004. I think a lot of developers suddenly wanted to replicate it, and with the popularization of AJAX in 2005, learning resources become easier to find, libraries and frameworks got developed to make its usage easier (anybody said jQuery?) and so on.

[1] See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237606. Interestingly enough, this bug report was about trying to access an XPCOM component from a web page, not about an incompatibility with whatever IE was doing. IE didn't even have XPCOM after all!

sabellito2• 3 years ago

You are, of course, correct!

ammmir• 3 years ago

I remember building an XULRunner-based OpenVPN client GUI for a customer, before there were sane web-like cross-platform UI toolkits.

Yeah, I remember having to call out to XPCOM to do stuff like HTTP requests or TCP socket communication IIRC.

It was the Electron of its time. RIP.

superkuh• 3 years ago

You can still use XUL based add-ons. You just can't do it in the chrome-in-spirit modern Firefox. There are plenty of great Firefox forks still maintained to this day that support XUL add-ons. And despite Mozilla's attempts to stop it users have scraped and collected together all the old addons in various archives.

I'm not saying this is a good solution for facebook/youtube/twitch/etc users that treat their browser as an OS to run applications. It's not. But if you surf with javascript disabled and tend to only use actual websites written in HTML it's still viable. (the html web still exists, it's just not as loud and attention grabbing as the megacorp javascript silos)

smabie• 3 years ago

who actually surfs with js enabled? gotta be less than 1%

throwaway2904• 3 years ago

You wouldn't know because none of the trackers would fire...

jerrysievert• 3 years ago

I was very sad when XUL disappeared from Firefox - I had written a serial plugin in c++ via XPCOM, which had allowed us to more easily test and deal with firmware updates in the hardware we ran, and having XUL in Firefox meant for fairly quick and lightweight touchscreen applications that could be shipped to customers with very low hardware requirements, nothing like you'd need for electron today.

these were for point-of-decision kiosks, and were so easy to build and maintain, truly a great era.

2h2• 3 years ago

Firefox Android has been awful for a while now. You cant sideload extesions on Android for at least two years now, with the only workaround being use an older Firefox:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20736

then they close the issue and move to bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1796184

tredre3• 3 years ago

This has nothing to do with the XUL addons discussed in the article.

binarysneaker• 3 years ago

But you can run Firefox Nightly and use a custom extensions list. This is how I have all my regular extensions running great on Android.

2h2• 3 years ago

that requires registration on AMO. I should not have to do that to install an extension that I WROTE

figital• 3 years ago

Being able to script buttons in my browser's toolbars is a feature I miss (circa the Jetpack era of Firefox). It greatly increased my productivity.

Doing some of this now on my Linux desktop using jgmenu ... it's not a browser though ... it's a floating data-driven start menu. Very fun.

schneems• 3 years ago

It’s been over a decade since I touched a Firefox addon and I still remember their ghostbusters easter-egg/joke.

Went something like:

keymaster/gatekeeper/thereisonly.xul

chrismorgan2• 3 years ago

http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xu...

bitwize• 3 years ago

Also explains why their in-browser debugger was called Venkman.

qwertox• 3 years ago

XUL was great. There was this tabs extension which allowed to have multiple rows of tabs open and even more rows accessible through scrolling with the mouse wheel.

Or another one which allowed to tile pages in one browser window.

51Cards• 3 years ago

I still miss TabMixPlus in my daily browsing. Haven't found a tab manager since that can match what it did for me.

yoasif_4• 3 years ago

You could try TabMixPlus: https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus

pmoriarty• 3 years ago

I miss Pentadactyl

ZekeSulastin• 3 years ago

Have you given Tridactyl a shot?

mariusor2• 3 years ago

Tridactyl is nowhere near as usable as Pentadactyl was, and its injection of JS/CSS in every page you visit is very, very intrusive. Sadly it's the only option that is usable for me at the moment, but I think everyone - including its devs - would agree that it can never reach the same level to Pentadactyl due to not having access to the browser's chrome.

michaelmrose3• 3 years ago

https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl

cultureulterior3• 3 years ago

There was no excuse, they should just bring xul back

michaelmrose3• 3 years ago

https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

People wanted a faster, more secure, multi-threaded experience.

Note: Having read in comments that some users apparently do not care about security, let me add that being secure is a really, really important point for Mozilla and has been since the first day. Regardless of add-ons, not having security means that an exploit is eventually going to show up that will steal user’s passwords and use them to steal their bank accounts – and that exploit will get sold around and will soon show up everywhere. Firefox developers fight this threat daily by all sorts of means, including code reviews, defensive programming, crash scene investigations, several types of sandboxing, static analysis, memory-safe languages, … Consequently, for Mozilla, if a feature prevents us from achieving great security, we always pick security over features.

You should read the link.

cultureulterior3• 3 years ago

I did. The security argument is a poor one- tab managers are way more "secure" than the millions of chrome extensions that require total control of all websites you browse to. The multi-threaded and faster experience is just a matter of redesign. If UI people followed Linus's adage of never breaking compability with APIs we'd all be happier

roenxi3• 3 years ago

As we read this, let us reflect that this reasonable and mature position resulted in a ~2% market share [0]. Still respectable at 1 person in 50, I suppose, but not trending in a way people are going to feel proud about.

Mozilla accepted Google's framing on what a web browser should be, and ended up in a world where it only makes sense to use chromium-based browsers since they better implement that vision. Firefox was always going to be a niche browser once Google got serious, but at least it could have been an interesting niche. Possibly it could be compared to Emacs - some people just love it because it was that customisable but it doesn't get a lot of love in the mainstream.

Now it is just unimpressive. Which is remarkable given the wide range of impressive things it could do up to 2016 that it cannot do today.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid...

retcond• 3 years ago

That interesting niche is at the Pale Moon browser initiative and their very interesting derivatives. Pale Moon still runs XUL.

cmeacham983• 3 years ago

Correct, which completely disproves the idea that FF adoption is in any meaningful way driven by (the lack of) XUL support.

If that was true, we'd expect to see forks like Pale Moon be _way_ more popular.

TwoNineFive• 3 years ago

What is really astonishing is the denialism that Mozilla as an organization, and it's individual employees and contributors, engage in, along with the associated toxic positivity and emotional abuse heaped upon the userbase.

Mozilla has made a number of obvious mis-steps, but not only is there virtually no acknowledgement of the negative impact of these mis-steps, but they are often falsely lauded as successes, when they are obviously massive failures.

The user is then confronted with language typically associated with emotional abusers, such as "We know how much you love Firefox!". Googling the words "you love" against Mozilla's website turns up hundreds of bizarre examples.

hulitu3• 3 years ago

Private: it connects to Google servers for "safe browsing" and was pushing hard for dns over http to circumvent the user supplied name server.

Security: as soon as it starts it connects to e100.net.

Configurable: say what ? (configurability died with the XUL).

I only use it as a Chrome replacement, when webpages don't play nice in PaleMoon or Seamonkey.

I need to set up a PiHole to make it behave but a minicomputer with ethernet interfaces and a resonable price is hard to find.

justin66• 3 years ago

It is just not that serious.

dathinab4• 3 years ago

As we read this, let us reflect that this reasonable and mature position resulted in a ~2% market share

I would disagree.

Many other changes together lead to this outcome.

Many by Mozilla, some not by Mozilla, some you could say Google actively abusing their power to sabotage them.

AFIK the amount of people stopped using Firefox because of XUL isn't to big, you could say a vocal minority.

The problem is compatibility with websites in aspects unrelated to XUL, mostly due to it being way to hard to be bug and feature compatible with chrome and even back then most web applications being written for chrome only.

Two major pain points which make people stop using Firefox would be 1) media support, which partially is the fault of stupid patent issues and partially because programs relaying too much on non standardized aspects 2) CORS, mainly due to Chrome last minute deciding not not implement the standard as standardized and forcing an exception into the standard to still be compliant.

The 2nd point is I think the most common reason I run into cases of web sides not working at all. While I very well do understand that Mozilla devs don't want to make their browser less secure, I don't think they have any other choice and should have done so years ago.

The 1st point is complicated as it involves patents to codecs and the pain of video codec drivers as well as companies like Slack or Teams refusing to even _try_ to work with Firefox when it comes to video calls even through it should work in most cases. This is a major problem and against all best web practices (also a lot of smaller companies which have way less resources have Firefox support for such use cases....).

But IMHO the web needs a cut, it's unacceptable that it's way easier to write a production ready new OS from scratch then a browser which is an essential tool.

roenxi3• 3 years ago

AFIK the amount of people stopped using Firefox because of XUL isn't to big, you could say a vocal minority.

The amount of Firefox's entire userbase isn't "to big" either, that is part of the problem. They can't put out a good web browser to give the silent majority something they want, they can't make in interesting web browser to give the vocal minority something they want.

Why are they building this web browser? Who is supposed to use it? The only argument I've heard is from people who want to support an open rendering engine, which has to be a smaller group than people who want support for weird extensions. And the Chrome-based engines are open already making the whole thing a bit moot.

The Mozilla corporation turns out not to have an interesting plan for Firefox. So cutting extension developers out from trying new things was a massive blunder that has basically doomed them to their current path - they don't know how to make an interetsing web browser and they've locked anyone else out from using their toys. Konqueror of all browsers spawned this massive ecosystem of successful spin-offs [0]. Mozilla failed to do anything useful.

Thank goodness the KDE devs were on their game, I suppose. Turns out in hindsight they were building the OSS flagship and foundation of the modern internet.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline...

PurpleRamen• 3 years ago

AFIK the amount of people stopped using Firefox because of XUL isn't to big, you could say a vocal minority.

The vocal minority is making the mood for the silent majority. Of course are there multiple reasons for the drop of Firefox, but public awareness is probably the strongest for this. If the laymen hear how much Firefox sucks now, instead of the praise of how secure and awesome it is, they will have no reason anymore to cope with the flaws.

throwayyy12399• 3 years ago

As we read this, let us reflect that this reasonable and mature position resulted in a ~2% market share [0]

Throwaway since I used to work at Mozilla:

You are 100% wrong in your analysis, metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons (even if you add the people disabling telemetry).

The real culprits to Mozilla's market share downtrend are:

1. Google started advertising Chrome on every single property they own (e.g. Google search) and made deals to pre-install Chrome on new computers. On mobile devices with Android it's even worse: if the default is good enough, why change?

2. During that time Firefox was playing catch-up: for a long time it was multiple times slower and crashier (and still is to a small extent) due to its older architecture. Meanwhile, Google with 2-3x more engineers on Chrome can deliver a better browser and pump out new w3c standards every month.

3. The Mozilla leadership reacted too late, too slow and with the failure of Firefox OS they've become risk averse and they'd rather become irrelevant than dead.

happy-dude• 3 years ago

I wanted to chime in here that I agree with (1) as well.

In the time before Chrome, Firefox market share grew in part because of how aggressively Google and the rest of the web advertised for them. However, that market share peaked and shrunk after Chrome was released; Google shifted _all_ of their advertising from Firefox for Chrome.

roenxi3• 3 years ago

I shall clarify:

There is nothing wrong with having an irrelevant share of the market. Most software I use has a market share in the 0-2% range.

However, Mozilla screwed up quite badly because their response to being pushed out of the mainstream was to gut everything that would have made them an interesting niche player. Their niche could have been "OK, this isn't Chrome but you get an IRC client and a bunch of crazy capabilities that are fun at lan parties. We'll train the next generation of devs by giving them cool capabilities to experiment with!". Instead, the niche is the worse version of Chrome.

metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons

Now the metrics show people don't use Firefox. Funny thing, life. I think it was a bad time to make a metric-driven decision.

RedShift1• 3 years ago

metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons (even if you add the people disabling telemetry)

How do you know?

mariusor2• 3 years ago

You are 100% wrong in your analysis, metrics have shown over and over again that people didn't use XUL addons (even if you add the people disabling telemetry).

And yet, the anecedata here on HN suggests that you are probably surrounded of those people that did use them. Deciding that suddenly the longstanding demographic of Firefox users - tech people - are no longer relevant to the company strategy was a shitty move, and it drove them away.

cultureulterior3• 3 years ago

I have been the person who made the final decision about default browsers for a company several times. You'd better believe after you killed xul I never chose firefox again.

clouddrover• 3 years ago

Which is remarkable given the wide range of impressive things it could do up to 2016 that it cannot do today.

Like what?

c-smile2• 3 years ago

Sic transit gloria mundi...

XUL, WPF, XAML ...

Main characteristic of these markups is that they define not semantic but presentational DOM.

Presentational DOM is what old HTML (v.1..3) was all about: all those <FONT>s, etc. So layout has not one source of truth (CSS) but also presentational elements (<hbox>, etc). Systems with multiple sources of truth do not play well as we know - person who has two watches does not know real time.

Problem is that XUL was naively transformed into display:flex and now CSS declaration width:100px is not a source of truth either, display:flex in galaxy far, far away can change real box width in non-obvious manner.

Spivak• 3 years ago

How could flex work without the ability to deform anything not explicitly nailed down? You need to specify the relative sizes of things, some of those things might be rigid, and the division of how much each item is deformed is dynamic. You would need all new flexi-units like fpx, fem, f% or you could just say everything in flex is now flexi- unless you say it’s rigid and use the same units which is more sane to me.

c-smile2• 3 years ago

This

   div {
     width:100px; 
     height:100px; 
     margin:1fx; // all margins, horizontal and vertical
   }

will place div in the middle/center of its container.

a) is significantly easier to understand b) is more flexible than bunch of flexbox props and c) does not break CSS box model and d) has clear physical model, see : https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/11/10-years-of-flexboxi...

Just try to define same thing using flexbox...

devwastaken• 3 years ago

The removal of XUL is when Mozilla's position as an innovator and industry leader showed it had died.

Chrome is ubiquitous not because of chrome, but because chromium is the most friendly open platform to use. V8 regularly runs laps around spider monkey, and has been embedded into thousands of critical business infrastructure. V8 isolates being a big feature. Spider monkey hasn't kept up. It's Firefox only.

Chromium can result in things like electron. Firefox could have positioned themselves that way, but chose isolation. They only want to develop Firefox, and because of that they are doing a poor job.

The math doesn't work out, eventually Firefox will have to become a chromium skin, and it will be all the better for it. Google is, after all, the ones paying for Mozilla to exist outside of their yahoo deal.

yoasif_4• 3 years ago

Spider monkey hasn't kept up. It's Firefox only.

That isn't true though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey#Use

fidgewidge• 3 years ago

It's interesting to think about what alternatives to this path could have existed.

The author makes what he thinks is a watertight argument about security, but it's a lot leakier than is made clear. Mozilla didn't actually have an extensions malware problem at any point. That's why he won't cite any actual examples, saying in the comments he's afraid of lawsuits because the extensions came from "high profile apps". High profile apps the user is choosing to install are by definition not malware, yet Mozilla allowed a bizarre authoritarian impulse to develop amongst its engineers that let them rationalize to themselves that any desktop app that extended Firefox (i.e. outside the add-ons site they controlled) was "malware" regardless of what it did or whether users actually liked it. That's a totally incorrect definition, which is why they are so squirrelly about it, any why users reject it.

Nor is the API stability argument well founded. Nothing would have stopped them introducing stable APIs they could commit to and helping extension authors migrate. They could have implemented WebExtensions as well as continuing to allow XUL extensions, which would have given the extensions that didn't need more functions stability without killing the others. Why could Google design such APIs but not Mozilla?

The real reason they didn't want to does seem to be described - designing APIs and then sticking to them is tedious and boring work. The chrome guys didn't have to do that, at least for a while. What fun!

In a parallel universe, Mozilla realized that whilst performance and security are important, they're also largely a pure function of how much you depend on engineers and thus they could never win against Chrome in that department. The only battlefield on which they could gain advantage was the field of ideas. Features were the one place their smaller engineering budget wouldn't automatically lose against Google, but clearly by this time Mozilla had run out of ideas for features users might want. XUL extensions were a valuable proving ground for features they could then later have merged into the main browser, potentially finding even just one idea that Chrome would struggle to match.

Reducing the maintenance burden could have been done in all sorts of ways, for example by using a Linux Kernel style model in which popular extensions are invited to be developed in tree where they can be activated during testing cycles and refactored atomically as the browser changes. Typescript would have made this easier, but xpcom already offered some type safety.

imiric2• 3 years ago

I agree.

I don't doubt that XUL had severe limitations, security issues, and was a nightmare to maintain. But all of those were mostly problems for Mozilla developers to deal with. Users didn't experience them, and any security and performance issues could've been addressed without scrapping the entire framework.

But Mozilla chose to prioritize developer well-being over the needs of their users, and chase some performance and productivity metrics compared to a novel browser built by a company with enormous amount of resources to throw at it.

And years later its old user base is still salty about that decision, watching how Mozilla becomes even more irrelevant, while being in denial and celebrating their current direction. It's a sad state of affairs, and a documentary should be made once Mozilla finally shuts down.

scotty792• 3 years ago

For me moving to Chrome was a simple case of, wow, it's fast and when it dies a single tab dies not the whole browser. I lingered a bit in Firefox professionally because of FireBug but once Chrome Dev Tools got decent I switched completely.

Now Chrome stopped showing me more than n tabs when I open too many and doesn't show UI to scroll invisible ones into view. This happens on my every windows machine. Chrome feels janky nowadays for me. So I'm trying to get back to Firefox but it's a bit hard. Recently I couldn't even get Bitwarden to work in Firefox on Windows. Fortunately I managed to switch to DucDuckGo browser on Android.

yoasif_4• 3 years ago

Recently I couldn't even get Bitwarden to work in Firefox on Windows.

That is weird - works fine on my end. What happens?

scotty792• 3 years ago

When I try to log into bitwarden I see that something (captcha?) was blocked in the small area undee the login and password inputs.

Error message there doesn't point me out to any resource about how I could make it work.

tinus_hn• 3 years ago

In a few years Chrome will be dominant and Google will be tempted to rest on its laurels, remove resources and let it stall. It wouldn’t surprise me if the only free reasonable alternative has another comeback in the cards. If it still exists by then, of course.

Why did Mozilla remove XUL add-ons? (2020)

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