Firefox breaking many add-ons soon

[cellio]

I found out today, via a notice provided by one of my add-ons (Stylish), that the next version of Firefox (57) is going to break most add-ons, which they are now designating "legacy". Firefox, like Chrome, automatically updates itself (I'm not sure that can be turned off any more), and these changes are coming "in November". I found this blog post from Mozilla from August, but I never received any sort of notification as a user and I don't make a habit of seeking out blog posts from vendors of software I use.

Why the hell didn't I get some sort of notification from Firefox? Is this news to you, too?

So now, the hunt for replacements commences. Gee thanks, guys.

Here's what I've found so far, untested unless otherwise noted:

• Stylish replacement (notice pushed by Stylish, apparently): Stylus. Listed as beta. I don't know whether styles will just work (after being manually imported, it appears) or if changes will be needed. ETA: I needed to rework one style, which had several blocks applying to different sets of (related) sites. I had to break that up. The style I was using to make tooltips bigger doesn't work (not supported by Mozilla's new API), but I found a workaround. The day after I got all this migrated to Stylus, I got a Stylish update -- but it couldn't read my existing scripts either, so I would have had to migrate to it in exactly the same way I'd just migrated to Stylus. (The UI was even the same.) So I punted that; I've already got Stylus working.

• Greasemonkey: Google led me to ViolentMonkey. Ditto about not knowing if things just work or require adjustments. ETA: ViolentMonkey is slow and times out about a third of the time for me, but TamperMonkey (which I already know from Chrome) exists and works fine. I had to manually add each of my scripts (to either), but I didn't need to modify them.

• NoScript: it looks like they're migrating, but I don't know if I'll have to do anything. ETA:* Seems to be broken in 57; supposedly they're working on it.

• Session Manager: is this built into Firefox now? It's very important that when I restart Firefox, I get the tabs and windows I had before. Can anybody who doesn't use an add-on for that confirm whether that works out of the box now?

• AdBlock Plus: this is my one extension not listed as legacy, so I assume it will keep working.

• Classic Theme Restorer: um, I found this github repository; haven't waded too far into the readme yet. ETA: this page explains how to move the tabs below the URL/extensions bar where they belong. The other look&feel stuff it did isn't as critical. (One could make a good argument that the URL bar belongs below the tabs, but all the other stuff the browser puts in that horizontal slice is more global, and having those reversed confuses me.)

Comments

[conuly]

Firefox, like Chrome, automatically updates itself (I'm not sure that can be turned off any more),

You can.

Menu, options, advanced, update. Done.

Weirdly, looking at my add-ons, the one I thought would not be updated (compassmenu) was, but the one I thought was sure to update (colorfultabs) wasn't. And if close tabs to the left isn't updated, I'm not updating either.

[cellio]

Thanks -- just set that to "ask" so I can take the hit at a time that's convenient for me instead of whenever they happen to push it.

[conuly]

Session Manager: is this built into Firefox now? It's very important that when I restart Firefox, I get the tabs and windows I had before. Can anybody who doesn't use an add-on for that confirm whether that works out of the box now?

Also, this seems to work for me without an add-on, but I can only do the exact session I had before (not an earlier one) and it fails if I have to hard restart the computer for some reason. It'll open up some much-earlier set of tabs, even if I've closed and opened Firefox between then and now. Weird, weird, so weird.

[cellio]

Thanks. The session management that I see offers several recent sessions, which I sometimes use to skip the most recent. I guess I'll go looking for a replacement, then.

[cahwyguy]

They've already broken Xmarks, and the Lastpass update is beta. This extension problem is so bad that I've switched over to Chrome until it settles. Take a look at https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/11/06/2026257/popular-firefox-bookmark-syncing-add-on-starts-losing-bookmarks?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed for an idea of the problem. Bad move on Mozilla's part.

[cellio]

Ugh. I'd heard that LastPass was messed up, but I didn't know the cause.

I use both Chrome and Firefox, so that I can easily separate identities. I want to be able to access my Gmail without auto-syncing all my bookmarks, for example, and I want session management so "do everything in incognito windows" isn't really an answer. So maybe I need another browser; Chrome is already spoken for on this machine.

[marahmarie]

The beta's been working fine for me (and it's actually 57+ compatible; it's just being held in beta until Mozilla releases 57). I wrote on my own blog how to get it to work if one has or had an older, non-beta version version of LastPass installed (the non-beta must be removed "completely" or it kind of messes up the beta; see here for more: https://marahmarie.dreamwidth.org/357152.html) but once that's done the beta seems fine (I've had literally zero issues in however many days/weeks since writing up that how-to).

[cahwyguy]

The Beta for Lastpass is working; however, the beta for Xmarks is still having trouble.

[madfilkentist]

I ran into this a while ago, while trying to figure out why NoScript seemed to have broken. That problem has been resolved, but things could get messy. As far as I can tell, Firefox on the Mac still has the manual update option, and I'll wait till the smoke clears.

[metahacker]

I did hear about this a while back; it pissed off most of the plug-in creator ecosystem. :-/ Firefox PR folks seem to have a huge blind spot with regards to it; when pressed the best I heard was "Well the new thing is better so people will just change" or "We have to do this because security", neither of which is really true or especially relevant...

Meanwhile, it forced me to switch to Safari and Chrome, depending on who I am that day.

[cellio]

Apparently it didn't occur to Firefox PR that they should maybe tell their *users* about this upcoming massively-breaking change. Sheesh.

I guess I should try out Safari. The last time I did, which was probably when I first got a Mac and found it pre-installed (so, uh, 2009?), it didn't support any customization. That's probably changed in the intervening years.

[metahacker]

It's come a long way--I think the massive surge in phone popularity, and the shared codebase between mobile and desktop, has helped. Now the fastest and most stable of my browsers, with *some* plugins (including the all-important uBlock, which replaces ABP/ABP+), and LastPass.

[cellio]

Thanks for the info. Fast and stable is good. :-) Do you happen to know if it supports (plugins that support) userscripts and CSS overrides? Those are pretty essential features to me; if I can get those, then chances are good that the rest will work out somehow (either by being popular enough that somebody's made it happen or being minor enough that I can live without).

[metahacker]

I have not found a replacement for Stylist or GreaseMonkey, no. :-/

Hmm. A websearch turns up a Stylist-named thing for Safari, but the provenance is questionable. Same for Greasemonkey; a few ports, a few hacks, nothing solid. Maybe dsrtao knows of a better one...

[dsrtao]

Sorry, I know nearly nothing about Safari. My main use for it is to get Firefox and Chrome on to a Mac.

[dsrtao]

There are bubbles.

I know this, because I've been angry at Mozilla about this for nearly a year now.

On the other hand:

57 is much, much faster and much, much less RAM-hogging.

You'll want to replace Adblock Plus with uBlock Origin. Faster, more powerful. It can also replace NoScript, though the UI isn't as well tuned.

If you stay with NoScript, you won't have to do anything to get the new version.

All old themes will be dead; there will be a bunch of new themes.

A basic session manager is built in, Tab Session Manager might be more useful for you.

[cellio]

Thanks for the pointers! I've installed uBlock Origin, and will check out the rest soon.

I'd certainly like for Firefox to be faster and less of a memory hog. I just need it to not break what for me is basic functionality, like adjusting fonts and colors and stuff to things I can actually see...

[marahmarie]

ABP is actually 57+ compatible now, and the featuresets between it and UBlock Origin are...somewhat different.

is there a CSS person in the house?

[cellio]

In Stylish I had this global style to make tooltips more readable (mainly bigger), which I downloaded, err, somewhere, way back when. Most of my Stylish styles seem to work fine in Stylus, the will-still-work-with-Firefox replacement for Stylish. But one of them doesn't. Stylus says the style is active, but it's not taking effect. I've tried commenting out everything except the size setting and then changing that around; no effect. So that makes me think the problem is in the set of stuff to match on, which is the part of this I know least about. (That list of classes and IDs came with the style. I don't know from tooltips and CSS.)

If anybody reading this can spot the problem in the following CSS and suggest a fix, I'd be grateful!

#btTooltip,
#un-toolbar-tooltip,
#tooltip,
.tooltip,
#aHTMLTooltip,
#urlTooltip,
tooltip
{
  font-size: 16px !important; 
  background-color: #FFFFE0 !important;
  color: #000000 !important;
  -moz-appearance: none !important;
  border-color: #000000 !important ;
  background-position: center center !important;
  background-repeat: no-repeat !important;
  background-attachment: scroll !important;
}

Re: is there a CSS person in the house?

[metahacker]

Hmm.

So the selectors (the stuff before the {}s) are a mix of IDs (#whatever) and classes (.whatever), plus an entity (tooltip). The IDs and classes try to match what various sites call their tooltips, plus the html entity tooltip, which probably isn't all you want. Another easy way to get tooltips in HTML is to use the "title" attribute:

<a href="the link" title="this is the tooltip">the display text</a>

This question talks about it:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2011142/how-to-change-the-style-of-title-attribute-inside-the-anchor-tag

Sadly, you can't use CSS to fix such tooltips; they're rendered by the browser, which makes them system dependent. But the top answer talks about copying the contents of the tooltip into a CSS-created tooltip (CSS now lets you add content directly--very odd). You see both tooltips, but for me if I hover, then move onto the "new" tooltip, the second tooltip doesn't obscure the first.

The following snippet should make there be a tooltip for any element ("*") that has a title attribute ("[title]") when you hover over it (":hover"), by putting a new element after it (":after"). The contents of this new tooltip are sourced from the title attribute of the existing tooltip (..."content: attr(title)"). The rest is positioning and style to make it look okay; feel free to tinker with color, background, padding, etc. to make it how you like it.

*[title]:hover:after {
  content: attr(title);
  position: absolute;

  padding: 0.5em;
  left: 0;
  top: 100%;
  background: white;
  color: black;
  border: 1px solid black;
  white-space: nowrap;
}

edit: Since this is a new element, you don't need the !important part; you're not overruling the webpage's particulars (and !important doesn't always win, either...)

Re: is there a CSS person in the house?

[cellio]

Thanks. adding tooltips for titles sounds like a win. I suspect I wasn't clear enough about one thing: that CSS I showed works in Stylish and does not work in Stylus. This made me wonder if, as with browsers, there's more and less pedantic and the thing that works in Stylish isn't actually *correct* but is liberally interpreted by the add-on, or something like that.

(Thanks also for telling me what the category name is for those classes and IDs that say what the CSS applies to.)

Re: is there a CSS person in the house?

[metahacker]

The CSS inside the {}s all seems fine (other than some vendor-specific prefixes that may not be necessary any more), which is why I ended up focusing on the selectors.

Looking through the Stylish source, I think "tooltip" (without a class or id) is a Stylish invention. It's not a standard HTML tag/entity, so I suspect Stylish is doing some preprocessing similar to the above--or Firefox gave them access to some underlying presentation (XUL?) that can't be expressed in CSS.

Re: is there a CSS person in the house?

[cellio]

Ah, apparently the problem is that Stylus can't modify the browser itself, only page content. (Response to my support request.) I did see that in the Stylus doc but didn't make the connection that these tooltips, which I think of as coming from the page content (so should be ok), are actually internal browser elements that cannot be modified.

The hunt is on for some other way to solve my tooltip problem in FF 57. "Don't update" isn't a long-term solution, after all, though "switch to a different browser" could be. I need to evaluate my browsing ecosystem both at home and at work...

Thanks for the help!

Update: Firefox has a hook for user-supplied CSS (link from the answer to my Super User question). That works in 56. Mozilla hasn't added any warnings of doom to that page, so it seems plausible that it will continue to work in 57.

[mdlbear]

The one I'm really having trouble finding a replacement for is make-link. If I can't find one I'll go to Chrome full time. (I'm pretty close to that now, and have been for months.)

[marahmarie]

(see ETA at end: 57+ nightlys and "unbranded" betas will run legacy add-ons; "branded" betas and release candidates won't, unless "Signed by Mozilla internally")

---

I haven't tracked down when or why this change was made, if it was ever formally announced, and so on, but according to an older blog post I found tonight, legacy add-ons will still work in 57+ (if I'm reading things right; hopefully I am). To keep this comment brief, I quote the Mozilla post in question here: https://marahmarie.dreamwidth.org/358969.html

It's very confusing to find out when/why the decision was made when the blog post I'm quoting just says Update at the top, twice, but doesn't give a precise date/dates. Talk about not wanting you to know.

Also/also, there is supposed to be some sort of functionality in the add-on manager to sort of IFTTT the legacy add-ons (a recommendation engine Mozilla created to help those of us whose fave add-ons are sunsetting entirely, at least for now).

But for one, I can't find it and for another, I think it's kind of a slap in the face to private add-on devs who can't update fast enough owing to Mozilla's lacking the APIs for them to refer those add-on users to other (mostly lesser) add-ons, so I don't know....I just think they're going about many parts of this all wrong.

ETA: just did another search and came up with this: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Firefox57 which indicates - weirdly enough - that once 57's released, legacy add-ons won't be compatible in the "branded" betas or release versions (unless "Signed by Mozilla internally"), but will be compatible in nightlys and "unbranded" betas going forward, which is sort of the exact opposite behavior I would expect, but OK then, very well *sigh*.

Will add an ETA to my own post soon to reflect this added...

[kyleri]

Yeah, this process broke ForecastFox for me in unrecoverable ways a month or so back, & I am REALLY angry about that. Chromium hangs my laptop, & I have moral issues with Chrome anyway...

...in other words, urgh.