Kitz Forum
Internet => Web Browsing & Email => Topic started by: broadstairs on December 17, 2015, 09:44:40 AM
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Firefox in my opinion is well on the way to shooting itself in the foot. This latest update WILL disable ANY extensions you use which are unsigned. On install it disabled my uBlock and FBP extensions which are unsigned. You can for now override this in about:config by changing the xpinstall option which says signatures required from true to false. Apparently Mozilla are adamant that even this will be remove in FF 44 and above which will mean that all extensions will have to be signed and I know there are some authors who object to this and refuse to do it. Also according to some stuff on the Mozilla forum even extensions will become a thing of the past with even more things being disallowed.
So now the search is on for me for a new browser to use, however Chrome is NOT an option.
Stuart
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I've been looking at Palemoon recently. This is a slimmed-down fork of Firefox 25.x, which precedes the most irritating user interface changes in more recent versions of FF. It supports many of the FF extensions, and in addition has some of its own. I'm close to the point where I'll dump FF in favour of PM.
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I initially looked at Seamonkey but I'm not sure about that yet. I'll take a look at Palemoon as well.
Stuart
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@roseway......Nice tip Eric, I'd recently tried Midori and Opera as alternatives to Firefox, but various issues made me move back. Palemoon seems just the ticket for what I need from a browser (after just a few hours dabbling with it).
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I have been playing with Palemoon some more today and although I do like it there are so far two issues I have with it. The first is a Linux issue in that it crashes every time I try to use any of the drop-down menu items, this is a bug in the Oxygen theme I use however it is only Palemoon that crashes, I can solve it by changing from the Oxygen theme but my problem is I prefer this theme to any other I've tried. The other bigger issue is that so far I've not been able to find any way to successfully import my usernames and passwords from FF 43 (or 42). Password exporter extension will not install in Palemoon as it thinks it is an old FF which is not supported. I might be able to find an old version of the extension and see if that works but from my point of view developing a browser without a facility such as this is not a good idea since everyone will be trying to migrate. I also dont want anything which will se the cloud for storing my passwords as I simply dont feel the cloud is secure enough for this information.
Stuart
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I don't use Oxygen, and I didn't try to import usernames and passwords (I prefer to enter them as needed) so neither issue affected me. There is a Palemoon forum, so it might be worth asking about those issues there.
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There is a Palemoon forum, so it might be worth asking about those issues there.
I have asked about the passwords there, the crash issue is well documented on there.
Stuart
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Although I've not had any answer to my Palemoon forum question I have solved my username/password issue. There is an archive of older versions of many FF extensions on the official site and I was able to find a version of Password Exporter which would install OK in Palemoon and it also imported the FF43 exported data fine because the export is in XML or CSV format and not FF dependant (note I did not obfuscate the passwords when exporting - just in case!).
Now to see if I can set it all up as I want.
Stuart
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Discovered today that there is another FF clone at least for Linux called Iceweasel (on Debian) and IceCat on Fedora which might be of interest to some. So far Palemoon has been OK although it wont run the Norad Tracks Santa or the Google equivalent both of which do run on FF, apparently there are some errors on these websites which Palemoon barfs at.
Stuart
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I've upgraded to the 64bit Firefox 43.0.1 (64 bit is now now officially released). None of the 20+ extensions I use were disabled. Whilst some people may be affected I reckon there may have been a little of an over-reaction to this.
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I've upgraded to the 64bit Firefox 43.0.1 (64 bit is now now officially released). None of the 20+ extensions I use were disabled. Whilst some people may be affected I reckon there may have been a little of an over-reaction to this.
I think this is just one issue and perhaps for some not a huge one but this combined with the declared direction of FF and the change to the theme a while ago has driven much of the dissatisfaction with FF. They are planning to remove much of the functionality which allows add-ons to work, apparently they think add-ons and supporting them is something which only pleases a very small minority of users. They believe the vast majority use FF completely native with no add-ons at all. It is becoming more and more difficult for some people to be able to continue with FF in the way they want which is why some of these alternatives based on pre-Autralis versions of FF are around now and gaining popularity.
Stuart
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I thought FF were simply removing NPAPI support and replacing it with builtin web API support.
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They should know what proportion of users have however many add-ons installed from the data collected and uploaded in the Firefox health report, except for people who switched that off of course.
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try cyberfox i think the dev said he will allow unsigned
Sent from my SM-G901F using Tapatalk
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try cyberfox i think the dev said he will allow unsigned
Sent from my SM-G901F using Tapatalk
Cyberfox is Windows only I'm afraid so no good for me.
Stuart
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Having been using Palemoon for a while now I am finding issues with it which is making me think again. It takes an age to load Instagram and while doing so the whole browser hangs up, it does not support CSS3 and so my login to the TT community screen is badly formed and a pain to enter credentials on. It also lags badly soemmtimes when typing stuff into search bars on web pages.
Also on Fedora 23 which is KDE/Plasma 5 the mouse cursors are not set correctly so they change from system default when the mouse is over the Palemoon screen but default on title bar and the main system panel. So all in all I dont believe it is yet a complete replacement. However this is also the case with every browser I've tried on Fedora 23 so I suspect that is a system bug.
I have tried Icecat which is a GNU version of Firefox but it also is much more current and I believe does have some of the FF issues relating to signed extensions etc.
Stuart
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I am still trying to get Icecat to import passwords/usernames from Firefox. So far this has proved impossible to achieve and no helpful replies from their mailing list so unless or until I can resolved that Icecat is a no-no. Which leaves me for now back at Firefox despite my worries about its future direction.
None of the browsers display correctly on Fedora 23 KDE/Plasma 5 which is a system issue so I guess I'll have to live with that for now until they get KDE sorted which might be a few months yet.
Unless that is someone comes up with another browser I can try ;) (Linux 64-bit of course).
Stuart
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Firefox is massively improved when enabling E10 (yes it can be enabled on stable) but they keep pushing its rollout back so i assume they still got issues developing it.
The signing system for extensions i think is no coincidence I think to get E10 working properly they need to lock down some extension functions.