...in the techie industry, this mostly means inherited old software that nobody loves but cannot be done without. In Mozilla's world, it means stuff that was useful and loved yesterday, but nuked by them today.
Honestly? I'm pretty torn about the whole issue, since on the one hand, I'm also pretty bitter about them moving on from the old XUL architecture and removing support for pretty much every decent plugin that ever existed, ever. But on the other hand, FF was getting _slow_, and I didn't even realise until I tried an e10s build back when it was opt-in for Nightly.
I'm honestly more resentful of people trying to push everything into legitimately awful Javascript emulations of solved problems. I don't think I'd be quite as unhappy with the state of modern browsers if my laptop was able to handle sites that should honestly be ultra-simple. I mean, implementing a light chat client isn't hard (I've done it before), but Slack and Messenger?
Somehow web dev these days has reached this perverse goal of extracting as much CPU from your computer just to be functional. I don't know of any major site that loads in under a second these days, despite computers getting faster, and my internet being the same speed it has been over the past decade. The old Firefox JS engines just weren't cutting it in the last 15 releases or so.
@kitantisune, I share your frustrations. In fact, I am no great lover of "legacy" FF. It is just that I have spent the last fifteen years or so making it how I like it, and want it to stay that way.
As for my current situation: the new Firefox engine is here to stay as far as I can tell, and meh-inducing WebExtensions to go with it. I'm hoping for the Tridactyl extension effort to fill the hole in my heart that is extensible keyboard-driven browsing, but for the moment I guess I've settled for the buggy saka-key.
Although I do have a techie background (Unix, retired long since) I never did any web work, and therefore do not know what bits to blame for what. But it does seems absurd to me that I just upgraded my system because /a browser/ did not have enough memory to function smoothly.
@Thad E Ginathom let me know if Pale Moon or any FF forks turn out to be good. Given my experiences with past ESRs, I'm not expecting any miracles from what's probably going to be more of the same... I feel it's a pretty terrible time to be a web user these days, anyway. Change is inevitable, but it'd be nice if it was for the better, hey?
For sure I am set to dump FF when the ESR no longer gives me what I want.
As this is a look&feel issue as much as functionality, simply switching to Chrome is not an option for me. Palemoon and Waterfox are getting occasional trial
If I was sensible, I'd be preparing for the end right now. But, being me, it will probably be a last-minute, or even an oh-shit thing!
Waterfox seems to be a drop-in. It even imports the whole FF profile. It might be a no-brainer, but I suspect that the development may not have the same resources behind it as Palemoon.
Palemoon is not able to use many of the old FF extensions, but I won't need classic theme restorer as it is committed to not changing to the the recent FF look anyway. I suspect the resources are stronger.
Which will continue if the developer has an unfortunate encounter with a bus? Which is more likely to get updates as more web dangers unfold? Important questions.
I switched to Chrome a while back for several reasons. One is no active flash updates as those are done automatically on Chrome’s end (and I was previously using VMware desktop emulator quite a bit on iPad and Chrome is just plain better for that), another is that it runs lighter and feels quicker. I will prob give the new FF a try though.
Hopefully we can find & settle on a fast, properly-supported & worthy-enough Fork... before the final ESR v52 comes out, I think by June 26th(?), as that's when the Official Security/Patch Support gets dropped permanently. *Sigh* :(
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