After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills 'Firebug' Dev Tool (infoworld.com) 148
An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
The Firebug web development tool, an open source add-on to the Firefox browser, is being discontinued after 12 years, replaced by Firefox Developer Tools. Firebug will be dropped with next month's release of Firefox Quantum (version 57). The Firebug tool lets developers inspect, edit, and debug code in the Firefox browser as well as monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in webpages. It still has more than a million people using it, said Jan Honza Odvarko, who has been the leader of the Firebug project. Many extensions were built for Firebug, which is itself is an extension to Firefox... The goal is to make debugging native to Firefox. "Sometimes, it's better to start from scratch, which is especially true for software development," Odvarko said.
As usual, Mozilla doesn't care about users (Score:1, Insightful)
And this is typical of open source software. The developers often make decisions against the best interests and needs of their users, removing necessary features and useful functionality while making the software more complicated. As if the WebExtensions debacle wasn't bad enough, Firefox 57 is shaping up to be the downfall of Firefox. Sure, Firefox 56 might be faster than its predecessors, but market share will continue to evaporate in favor of browsers like Chrome. Face it, Firefox is basically dead, and
Re:As usual, Mozilla doesn't care about users (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps if open source developers learned from these mistakes
What mistakes? Firebug has been merged [getfirebug.com] into Firefox Developer Tools. This happened a long time ago.
Re:As usual, Mozilla doesn't care about users (Score:5, Insightful)
Some features have been merged in. But firebug is still far better then what is build in to firefox. So no more firefox upgrades for me -(
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I agree. I have the new firefox and I REALLY miss firebug.
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Uh, no. see the tracking bug here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=991806
There are numerous parts of FB that are not in the FDT. A couple seem fairly basic (such as auto-completion) and FB as said for awhile that they won't do WebExtensions, so it sort of boggles my mind that they are not at parity yet.
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Whether or not it has parity yet isn't particularly relevant. Firebug was discontinued over a year ago.
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Holy shifting goal posts, Batman! First you claim that FB doesn't matter because it was nothing but a skin to the underlying tools, which was shown to be wrong. Now it apparently doesn't matter because it was discontinued years ago. Good to know that being the 15th most popular extension, which people can still download today, without a complete replacement doesn't matter because of lack of development. You know, despite the fact that WebExtensions was coming long before along with the known inability t
Re:As usual, Mozilla doesn't care about users (Score:4, Insightful)
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I will continue with the old version, Firefox 56. (Score:2)
It seems to me that software and hardware organizations are pushing for more and more control.
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A much better option is to go with Firefox ESR [mozilla.org], currently at version 52.4.1. I've installed it everywhere on all my Windows and Linux machines - it's guaranteed to be stable and supported until June 2018, which hopefully will be enough time for the new Firefox to stabilize (or worst-case scenario, give me enough time to find an alternative).
One warning though - it may be difficult to move your Firefox profile from 56 to 52, as from 54 onward Mozilla messed up some backwards compatibility in preparation for
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Waterfox, a fork that supports 'legacy' extensions and better privacy by default.
https://www.waterfoxproject.or... [waterfoxproject.org]
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Most of the major Extensions have a version compatible with FF 57, there are a few holdouts still, but everything should settle down shortly. The biggest surprise for me is that Session Manager appears to of done nothing towards the WebApi compatibility due to a handful of missing/incomplete API's that would impact a small portion of it's features. "Tab Session Manager," is a bit buggy atm and pretty barebones but functional enough for now.
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1 out of 6 of my extensions are OK to go for FF57. Some of them that aren't have issued statements saying that it's impossible to work with WebExtensions so they have no possibility to go forward. I basically have no choice but to stay with FF56 until they see the light and add back support for real extensions.
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Which extensions are those?
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Adblock Plus and FireFTP I've read statements from saying reduced functionality maybe and completely impossible. I also have CookieCuller, Cookie Manager, and Saved Password Editor which are all still saying Legacy. These 3 seem simple enough but maybe there won't be anything in FF57. I'm not going to waste my time upgrading and searching for replacements though just because FF wants to break backwards compatibility. Nuke Anything is the only extension that seems like it will work if I upgrade to FF57, and
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You really should be using uBlock Origin instead of Adblock Plus. It's faster and doesn't allow ads to slip through if the ad company pays off the devs, like with ABP's "acceptable ads".
Regarding FireFTP, it simply seems like the developer is butthurt for no reason, which seems to be ridiculously common among geeks, probably somewhere on the spectrum, usually considering themselves "omnologists". Yes, some functionality is no longer available, because it could be used as an attack vector by malicious XUL ex
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Most of the major Extensions have a version compatible with FF 57, there are a few holdouts still
Some of the WebExtension replacements for legacy extensions that I use are waiting for Mozilla to make equivalent functionality available. For example, I use Keybinder to disable the Ctrl+Q shortcut that I sometimes press by accident when aiming for Ctrl+W or Ctrl+Tab. The developers of equivalent WebExtensions are waiting on a fix for bug 1325692 [mozilla.org], which a Mozilla engineer has marked as wontfix for Firefox 57.
Loss of Ctrl+Q blocking causes data loss.
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The shortcut is now ctrl+shift+Q in FF57, probably for exactly that reason.
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That's still close to the "switch to previous tab" shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+Tab) on a non-French keyboard.
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You can continue to argue that all key combinations are close to other key combinations ad infinitum.
At some point you just have to slow down a teeny tiny bit, and not simply slam your clumsy meat mittens on the keyboard and hoping for a positive result.
Alternatively, you could enable "browser.showQuitWarning" in about:config. It'll pop up a warning if you accidentally press ctrl+shift+Q.
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Which extensions would that be?
List of add-ons I use. All but 4 listed as Legacy. (Score:2)
Add-ons Links
Firefox, WaterFox, and Pale Moon Browsers
For security: Get add-ons only from Mozilla.org web pages.
Pale moon add-ons [palemoon.org]
List:
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A hell of a lot of those extensions are completely redundant. Ublock Origin and Privacy Badger takes care of just about everything ad/privacy-related, perhaps with Decentraleyes on top to avoid tracking by JS hosting sites (including Google), and possibly speed up browsing.
That takes care of Adblock Latitude, Betterprivacy, Canvasblocker, Ghostery, Facebook Blocker, Stop Fingerprinting, Twitter Disconnect and Disconnect (Disconnect's filters can be added in uBlock Origin).
Classic Theme Restorer is more or l
Thanks for the information. (Score:2)
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I was a diehard Phoenix user way back since 0.1 in 2002, I defected to Chrome around Firefox 30-something around mid/late-2014, and I've been back on Firefox for a couple of months now since I was impressed at how good Firefox Quantum is looking (and I was getting fed up with Google's spying). I've probably installed, tried out and uninstalled more addons than most people ;-)
One of the great delusions of software development (Score:2)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com... [joelonsoftware.com]
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Meh, I've read that piece before and it's right except whenever it's wrong. I've ripped out smaller and bigger pieces of software and completely rewritten it from scratch, the problem is that you got people jumping the gun just like those who want to switch to fad language or framework or technology of the day. The people who clearly don't understand the complexity of the software but conclude that because I can't untangle this tangled mess it should be rewritten are dangerous as fuck. Then you have the peo
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In this case, Joel on software is right. I've used firebug for a long time and it's much better than the browser tools in Chrome or IE. Firefox will not improve the developer experience by reinventing firebug, they will just make it different and repeat mistakes.
Nonsense ... (Score:2)
Firefox is an excellent example of why that view lacks nuance. The Netscape code base had become bloated and unmanageable, so we got Firefox. Continuous re-factoring is essential to progress.
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Except that Joel thinks that he knows better the Fred Brooks [c2.com]
It is interesting to note that Brooks recants this in the latest version of MythicalManMonth, where he says "This I now perceived to be wrong, not because it is too radical, but because it is too simplistic. The biggest mistake in the 'Build one to throw away' concept is that it implic
They're not "killing" anything. (Score:2)
Firebug isn't alive. The proper title is "After 12 years, Mozilla discontinues 'Firebug' dev tool".
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for all intensive purposes.
You should of used spellcheck before post in you're message.
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for all intensive purposes.
Nicely done. For all intents and purposes Firebug was quite good at intensive purposes, like web development. Killing it makes me realize its a doggy dog world.
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Dog eat dog.
Whoooooossssshhhhhh!
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It was the last straw (Score:2)
It was the most powerful development tool a web developer had. Easy to navigate, great debugger, smooth css editing, told you exactly what the problem was. The day it stopped worked I dumped FF and never looked back.
Chrome dev tools are acceptable but just hard to navigate and find things. Have made strides in capturing events.
Killing Firebug forced me to switch to Palemoon (Score:1)
I tried migrating to dev tools but as I said somewhere above it was horribly slow and substantially impacted productivity. More importantly I was impacted by no migration solution for the loss of Firepath, a Firebug add-on. Sure there is an Xpath console in dev tools but it is broken for me and even if it worked the extra keystrokes to work in console rather than simply using the Firepath search box would slow me down - hamper productivity.
For anyone that has used both it is obvious how superior Firebug i
Gotta be said (Score:2)
Does anybody care what Firefox does anymore? They have taken themselves from being a serious contender for top browser to an irrelevant Chrome clone so comprehensively over the past three or four years that in a fair world, the top 100 people drawing a salary would be fired for cause.
SW freedom matters over popularity, convenience (Score:2)
Those who care about software freedom (which certainly should be people on technical discussion sites) care and don't cave into handing Google control over their data or their computer. Therefore running the spy agency's preferred browser (Google Chrome) is out both because it's nonfree software (which also eliminates other browsers from consideration) and because its owned by a known spy agency.
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FF57 is one hell of a browser, way better than Chrome if you ask me (and with none of the tracking and spyware).
XPath support is lacking :( (Score:1)
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Was just trying "Xpath Helper" extension in Chrome. Not integrated into the Chrome Dev Tools but make a pretty good replacement for Firepath. The dev tools in Firefox and Chrome are so similar but I just can't used to the selection behavior in Chrome and the usability of both. Chrome also runs slower for me compared to Palemoon and all versions of Firefox.
I would still prefer Firefox Dev Tools if it had the functionality. So my solution is either I could stick with Palemoon which has both Firebug/Firepa
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Something something Pale Moon.
Switched to it the other week, works well for me.
Re: Firefox is dead (Score:1)
What percentage of pale moon is Firefox, I assumed it was Firefox with ui tweets, making it have the same performance / stability as the version of Firefox itâ(TM)s based on
Re: Firefox is dead (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox remains the dominant browser
Bullcrap [statcounter.com]. Chrome has about half the market. Firefox is at about 6%, about half of Safari's share.
I only use Firefox for Selenium scripts, and even for that I have to use an old version since the latest releases of FF no longer work with Selenium. Web automation was the only area where Firefox was superior ... so they broke it.
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I think that is because of mobile, Android devices are way more popular than Apple and a small amount of people actually change the predefined browser or the predefined applications, also I think that all Apple users don't like to personalize anything, they don't like to play with settings and are less likely to change the predefined applications, they just use the device without worrying about anything else.
I do use Firefox for everything and Chrome for GMail and GoogleDocs since both have different JavaSc
Re: Firefox is dead (Score:2)
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Hey meant web browser usage is supposed to be fragmented, not standards usage.
Re: Firefox is dead (Score:1)
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Firefox remains the dominant browser
Bullcrap [statcounter.com]. Chrome has about half the market. Firefox is at about 6%, about half of Safari's share.
I only use Firefox for Selenium scripts, and even for that I have to use an old version since the latest releases of FF no longer work with Selenium. Web automation was the only area where Firefox was superior ... so they broke it.
Wow. How sad.
My father is retired and 70 now. He was once a nerd who used to do punch card programming back during the IBM mainframe 360 days. He is out of date with computer knowledge and industry for awhile now, but still uses Firefox. He is loyal because he saved us from MS owning the internet and reading about the nightmares of IE 6 early last decade.
I share his sentiment. I was a rapid Firefox fanboy back when it was called Phoenix and it was a secret geek thing like Linux today. My how times change an
Re: Firefox is dead (Score:4, Informative)
Remember Firefox was growing almost unstoppable in 2010 and within 2 years started declining FAST. Any piece of software it can happen too as we all remember the days of 90% marketshare of IE 6 too which started to wane in just a few years to Firefox previously.
A major difference: Internet Explorer was intentionally ignored and crippled by Microsoft to stall the development of web apps in favor of native apps. Firefox won because they pretty much got a walkover and everyone except Microsoft wanted it to win. Nobody at Mozilla wanted to lose users and few wanted a for-profit company to replace them but they lost anyway. IMHO because they took way, way, way too long to do multi-process. Close a Chrome tab and the resources get reclaimed. If it crashes, one tab crashes. In Firefox it all came crumbling down and you had to kill it completely. They lost to Chrome on merit and the sooner they get their head out of their ass and stop blaming other things the better. Yeah I saw the ads for Chrome too, but I wouldn't have switched unless it actually sucked less.
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Remember Firefox was growing almost unstoppable in 2010 and within 2 years started declining FAST. Any piece of software it can happen too as we all remember the days of 90% marketshare of IE 6 too which started to wane in just a few years to Firefox previously.
A major difference: Internet Explorer was intentionally ignored and crippled by Microsoft to stall the development of web apps in favor of native apps. Firefox won because they pretty much got a walkover and everyone except Microsoft wanted it to win. Nobody at Mozilla wanted to lose users and few wanted a for-profit company to replace them but they lost anyway. IMHO because they took way, way, way too long to do multi-process. Close a Chrome tab and the resources get reclaimed. If it crashes, one tab crashes. In Firefox it all came crumbling down and you had to kill it completely. They lost to Chrome on merit and the sooner they get their head out of their ass and stop blaming other things the better. Yeah I saw the ads for Chrome too, but I wouldn't have switched unless it actually sucked less.
Wait so IE was stalled and ignored only? Hmm. I beg to differ. True Firefox was more standard compliant and added more things quicker and that I agree. But it ignored it's users and it's core competency as a lean mean and detailed browser. By 2010 the world was moving towards having a browser fill out the forms, frequently used passwords, bookmark synchronization, modern security with threading, etc.
Maybe Mozilla suffered from too much technical debt with Gecko which had even more technical debt from Netsca
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IMHO because they took way, way, way too long to do multi-process.
Not disagreeing, but the fact that every time people visited YouTube, Gmail, or Google searches they got a little "try Chorme!" message probably didn't help either.
Personally I used Safari on my iMac at home, and Linux on my Ubuntu desktop at work.
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Firefox Quantum (in beta now, to be released mid-November) is one hell of a browser. You really owe it to yourself to give it a go.
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I was really excited about v57 (see my posting history), but when the 4 extensions I considered critical were all ported over to WebExtensions, I tried it for a fortnight and gave up.
For all the touting of how great v57 is at RAM usage, particularly for lots of tabs, it was a monster for me. Chrome is comparable. Also, I make use of multiple profiles, each of which has its own proc cluster.
Things about FF I rediscovered and briefly enjoyed: tagging bookmarks; hotkey-able search engines ("jira foo-85"); and
Re: Firefox is dead (Score:2, Informative)
This is not even remotely true, and former Mozilla execs know it:
https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/
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I'm running Firefox 56. I don'
Re:Firefox is dead (Score:4, Interesting)
What on earth are you talking about? You clearly DO NOT use Firefox at all. None of what you described has been a thing in Firefox for years. Memory leaks in the Firefox 4 days were a major issue but they're barely even on the radar today.
Actually, I've seen it bloat up to 3GB quite a lot lately on Windows at work. No idea what's causing it. Prior to v56 it was generally using about 500MB tops, but now it regularly goes over 2GB after an hour or so of casual use. And this is a bit of a problem because the work laptops only have 8GB and our dev environment wants most of that.
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Try running it in 32bit with 3GB total! (Score:1)
Linux's questionable io scheduling modules have been the biggest issue in that regard (as evidenced by bfq(?) becoming an in-kernel scheduler.) But a secondary one is that firefox just leaks, even the latest versions. NoScript/uMatrix/uBlock help, but only until you have to turn javascript on for a website, implying the problem is related to garbage collection with the javascript engine, or cornercases with tab/page state that never get recovered.
Even using about:memory 'minimize memory' button just leads t
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Horseshit yourself. My Windows FF session has been running for a day and a half, currently has *three* tabs open, and is using about 1.8 gigs of RAM. Mozilla couldn't do memory management properly if you gave them written instructions. Closing tabs does nothing to reduce the memory footprint in almost every case for me, so there are obviously problems. It's not even the memory usage that's the major problem for me - after a couple of days, the browser bogs down so much as to be unusable, requiring me to
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My Windows FF session has been running for a day and a half
Which version of Firefox with what add-ons installed on which version of Windows?
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Firefox 57.0b12 on Windows 7, 15 tabs open, using less than 500MB.
You're right that something is wrong, but it probably isn't Firefox.
Re:Firefox is dead (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, Firefox is getting neutered with the release of version 57.
You don't have to give up add-ons just because Firefox is. I've been using Waterfox [waterfoxproject.org] for years. It uses the current Firefox code but doesn't disable add-ons and it strips out all the tracking Mozilla puts in. The guy who maintains it started it as a 64 bit version of Firefox before Mozilla released one. I liked it so much I never switched back even when Mozilla released a 64 bit Firefox. He recently released an Android port and I even replaced Chrome on my device with it.
Re:Firefox is dead (but not its legacy) (Score:2)
I tried WF.. was ok, but too many compat probs with older FF (was still running last pre-4.0 version at the time) addins. Instead I later found Pale Moon, which has tried to provide compat support for many older FF addins. When I first found P.M. it was able to support FF's older plugins with few or no changes.
Pale Moon has moved forward, but not at the same pace as FF -- trying to provide support and ports of older FF extensions for years -- to allow gradual moving to newer extension-models. The project
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"You don't have to give up add-ons just because Firefox is. I've been using Waterfox [waterfoxproject.org] for years"
What's the fate of Waterfox & the old extensions model now that Firefox is moving to Quantum?
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Yeah, I thought all the browsers on my Mac sucked, in that they all used a lot of CPU (using 35-45% of 4 cores while just sitting there displaying pages), but it turned out that something was physically wrong with my Mac (not exactly what, but had to replace the motherboard). Get it back and now CPU is down to under 10% idle in browsers... yay!
And Firefox used to also be a memory pig, it would normally sit at about 4 Gb of VM (I normally have a lot of open tabs), but every once in awhile, it would just b
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it sure is better than Chrome which can't seem to stop spawning extra processes
They're not "extra" exactly, it's just that each tab is a process in Chrome, so if you are used to having 20 or 30 tabs open, that's 20 or 30 processes, plus generally one for each add-on and one for the browser. So it's not hard to get 50 processes going at once. You can see what they are by right-clicking on the title bar and selecting Task manager.
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That is because Firefox is catching up to Chrome 1.0 and IE 8. It now is getting duplicated memory support and new things called threads for added security, sandboxing on Windows, and SMP support. It is almost 10 years behind.
Too little too late. I say this in sadness as I was a firefox fanboy back in the day, but to me it is like using WinAmp or IE. Sure they are both better but are from a different era while others have been leading for a very long time now.
Firefox has it's chance with 4.0 to use the new
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Alternatively, you could try the current Firefox beta (57.0b12) and see just how mistaken you are. It's a wonderful browser, better than Chrome.
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LOL, you're so far off base that you've left the planet.
Yep which is why Statcounter has Firefox lower than IE with marketshare at 6%. I think I am not the one who is out of reality as the majority of us have moved on.
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I am a long time Firefox user and what you're saying is simply not true. Memory hogging is still a problem, not only in the sense that its base memory consumption is high but also in that visiting some specific common sites causes Firefox to consume much more memory than when using Internet Explorer. And it seems that after recent updates hangs have become more common, not less. I'm hoping that as Firefox's multiprocess support improves this will become less of an issue, but we've been promised the moon for
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Unfortunately, Firefox is getting neutered with the release of version 57
Nonsense. It's migrating to a significantly safer plugin structure, with much better support for multithreading, and sane limits to how much extensions will be able to fuck up.
The vast majority of reported Firefox stability issues over the years have been because of shitty extensions.
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That is false. Their "new" (chrome-parroting) WebExtensions API is horrible, but stopping the "fetch" of any resource at any stage is quite easy [mozilla.org]. It's also trivial to selecti
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Which extensions are you using currently, that will not be available for FF57?
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"Google it yourself" = "I'm lying and I know it"
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Right, George Soros, the marxist revolutionary. You have got to be kidding me
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Soros being a marxist is the other side of the coin of Trump supporters being nazis. That's how it works nowadays; first world problems are boring so people need to jazz things up by using extreme references.
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Being a Trump supporter does not make one a nazi, just a moron, but some Trump supporters are nazis and it seems that the radical right has latched onto Trump, so whether these are two sides of the same coin depends on how you meant it
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Class warfare is inevitable, he is not "using" it
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I meant inevitable as a part of socioeconomic reality
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And actually I should have said class struggle, but I was not thinking when first replying
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That and you obviously have no idea what Marxism is
He also doesn't know what globalism is, or who George Soros is.
Why do you reply to that guy instead of the OP? You're like a prison bitch whispering in the ear of his alpha.
Moderation (Score:2)
Downvoting is not and has never been equivalent to censorship. Your post is right there, unredacted. I read it. Surfing at -1 is as long a tradition here as trolling. What you object to is that people have exercised their free speech and labeled you a stupid asshole.
Supporting Linux is not some huge ordeal, and probably at this point it's mostly a sunk cost. Also, the Ubuntu software survey had Firefox as the overwhelming choice of Linux users. Linux marketshare is (shockingly) in the 3-5% range, and Firefo
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Do you even use either of these tools? I do every single day and as much as I tried to migrate to Firefox dev tools it is not yet a replacement for Firebug. It is slow, unwieldy and lacks the features of Firebug. See my post up a bit from this one.
"In that time we got better tools in almost every browser,". I also tried different tools since they are necessary to do my job on a daily basis. There is nothing comparable to the performance and usability of Firebug and Firebug Firepath.
Fact: If I was forc
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Your feeling would be wrong, then.
All of what you mention is still 100% possible.