Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported
I get that there are a lot of people here who are really concerned that, without XUL and XPCOM, there will no longer be a reason to choose Firefox over Chrome.<p>What I think they overlook is that, right now, it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome that no one will take such a recommendation seriously.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Firefox since back when it was still called Phoenix. I intend to go on using Firefox for as long as it still exists. But it&#x27;s been a struggle, these last few years. Having to kick over a primary application platform, losing effectively all state save what programs are running, and reboot it every day or two, because otherwise it gets so slow that it&#x27;s entirely unusable, gets real old real fast. People like to make jokes about Emacs, but even it doesn&#x27;t do this! My Emacs sessions last <i>months</i>, and die only when the machine loses power or I hose up the environment so badly while experimenting that it becomes unrecoverable without a reboot. And Emacs is thirty years old.<p>I don&#x27;t want to switch to Chrome. Its UI sucks and I&#x27;m no fan of Google. But if Firefox keeps getting worse, I&#x27;ll have to. So I am absolutely delighted to see Mozilla making real and tangible progress toward solving that problem. If doing so means deprecating an ancient plugin API that&#x27;s in any case dangerous and hard to use, I&#x27;m fine with that, especially since there is no reason in the world to believe that its replacement will not eventually gain back most of the relatively few capabilities we&#x27;re losing in the deprecation. Maybe I won&#x27;t be able to customize context menus for a while. That&#x27;s <i>fine</i>, if the browser regains the usability it&#x27;s lost over the last ten or so years.<p>I understand not everyone agrees with this point of view. That&#x27;s not a problem. But I should not like this point of view entirely overlooked by those currently proclaiming the imminent death of Firefox.