My Future With Firefox
The proverbial handwriting is on the wall. With the eventual release of Firefox 57, support for all XUL based extensions will end.
For a short term work-around I am moving to Firefox 52.0 ESR. That will provide me a full year before needing to deal with the loss of many XUL based add-ons.
The loss of user interface add-ons will be a struggle, such as Classic Theme Restorer, Tab Mix Plus, NoSquint Plus, and others.
Two productivity add-ons I use are ReminderFox and NewsFox.
I am concerned about the loss of privacy and security related add-ons. I use the following:
- CanvasBlocker
- Clean Links
- Decentraleyes
- HTTPS Everywhere
- I don’t care about cookies
- No Resource URI Leak
- Privacy Badger
- Refcontrol
I am not encouraged by this future.
I might use 52.x ESR long after end-of-life is declared. I block nefarious sites. I am diligent about white listing the bane of the web. For me, using an end-of-life browser will be low risk for quite some time.
I am not looking forward to testing alternate browsers. I probably should start with SeaMonkey. I do not want or need anything but the browser. I do not know whether the package can be compiled without the cruft. Possibly SeaMonkey will die with the withdrawal of support for XUL. I suppose this might affect Thunderbird too.
A possible replacement such as Pale Moon exists. With only a handle of developers I am doubtful of the future of such a project. Not to forget the ability to keep the browser patched for security issues. Possibly after Firefox 57 is released there will be a large scale exodus with a Firefox fork or developers moving to support to Pale Moon.
Something similar happened with OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
I wonder whether Firefox 57 will be the beginning of the end of Firefox.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Firefox
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