tux.
Member
My first steps into web technologies were long before I actually had some internet access. I started playing with the still young HTML standard some time in the end-90s when the Netscape Navigator/Communicator was still gaining momentum. I registered my first website around 2000 (it has, however, been offline for more than a decade now) and I was pretty happy with my "toolchain" (random editors and Netscape Something). The Internet Explorer came too late to be of any use for me.
When Netscape started to implode and some of its creative members started the Mozilla project, I went with them. After all, the Mozilla Suite was still just a rebranded Netscape Communicator without the AOLisms of Netscape 6 (Preview Release something) that had already reached the surface in 2000. When the Mozilla Suite was again split into Minotaur (later Thunderbird), Phoenix (later Firebird, even later Firefox) and what is called SeaMonkey today, I slowly adopted it and finally settled with Firefox which already had its final name and was a nice, clean and fast browser by then. Thunderbird came somewhat later (I did not do much e-mail for a while, so Outlook Express was good enough for me).
I must admit that mail clients come and go here. My current setup does not involve any Thunderbird anymore (except as a fallback for very special things like broken GPG signatures). Firefox was harder to trade in, it had served me pretty well over the years. Yes, it had become fatter and I was indeed giving Pale Moon, Waterfox and Cyberfox some love for a while, but I always came back for the "real deal". Firefox's unique feature, the virtually unlimited extensibility had always made me chuckle about weird niche browsers like Chrome. Seriously, they don't even support Tree Style Tabs! Also, Firefox had FlashGot and DownThemAll!, an unbeatable combination to download anything you could imagine from any website.
Well, it was fun while it lasted.
The Chrome-like Australis UI was still easy to avoid, I just had to add a certain extension to Firefox (or use Pale Moon or Cyberfox) and everything was working nicely again. But Mozilla did not show much interest in letting the users choose between Chrome and something that is not Chrome at all. Yes, sure, why would they?
Starting with Firefox 43 (beta), DownThemAll! 3.0 does not work OOTB anymore because Mozilla decided that extensions from third-party websites are auto-magically insecure backdoor viruses. Even worse, Mozilla announced that some day in 2016 they'll stop supporting XUL, the interface language you could use to modify any part of Firefox as you liked to. The official reason is "security" (yes, an extension which has full access to the browser can do anything with the browser, you don't say...), the community's outcry did not matter much. They said they would be working together with the community in order to improve their new Chrome-compatible API. Well, the last Chrome extension API I saw restricted modifications to adding new toolbar buttons. No more DownThemAll!, no more Vimperator, no more Tree Style Tabs. Oh, wow.
Mozilla is basically removing everything I liked from Firefox. That leaves me with two options:
1. Use Pale Moon instead. Pale Moon has been forked from Firefox 25 (recently including a fork of Gecko called Goanna), its author promised to support XUL for some more time. Still, as Pale Moon is mostly a one-man show, it remains unclear how long he will be able to maintain the browser without entirely losing the grip. This is too risky for now, but I'll surely keep an eye on it.
2. Choose another browser and try to simulate my Firefox environment in it. Interestingly, since Mozilla decided that Firefox should be a weird Chrome clone, my reason not to choose Chromium or, at least, WebKit/Blink-based browsers suddenly vanished. So I played with Midori (which lacks functionality yet), Otter (blazing fast but developed slowly) and Vivaldi, a modern Opera 12 replacement made by some guys who had worked for Opera before they went insane and dumped their fast and small browser for some weird Chropera experiment.
Indeed, since Vivaldi supports most of Chrome's extensions out of the box and comes with an impressive feature set right from the start, the last thing missing is a good DownThemAll! replacement. But I guess those days are gone.
Goodbye, Mozilla. Hello, Vivaldi. Good to be here.
When Netscape started to implode and some of its creative members started the Mozilla project, I went with them. After all, the Mozilla Suite was still just a rebranded Netscape Communicator without the AOLisms of Netscape 6 (Preview Release something) that had already reached the surface in 2000. When the Mozilla Suite was again split into Minotaur (later Thunderbird), Phoenix (later Firebird, even later Firefox) and what is called SeaMonkey today, I slowly adopted it and finally settled with Firefox which already had its final name and was a nice, clean and fast browser by then. Thunderbird came somewhat later (I did not do much e-mail for a while, so Outlook Express was good enough for me).
I must admit that mail clients come and go here. My current setup does not involve any Thunderbird anymore (except as a fallback for very special things like broken GPG signatures). Firefox was harder to trade in, it had served me pretty well over the years. Yes, it had become fatter and I was indeed giving Pale Moon, Waterfox and Cyberfox some love for a while, but I always came back for the "real deal". Firefox's unique feature, the virtually unlimited extensibility had always made me chuckle about weird niche browsers like Chrome. Seriously, they don't even support Tree Style Tabs! Also, Firefox had FlashGot and DownThemAll!, an unbeatable combination to download anything you could imagine from any website.
Well, it was fun while it lasted.
The Chrome-like Australis UI was still easy to avoid, I just had to add a certain extension to Firefox (or use Pale Moon or Cyberfox) and everything was working nicely again. But Mozilla did not show much interest in letting the users choose between Chrome and something that is not Chrome at all. Yes, sure, why would they?
Starting with Firefox 43 (beta), DownThemAll! 3.0 does not work OOTB anymore because Mozilla decided that extensions from third-party websites are auto-magically insecure backdoor viruses. Even worse, Mozilla announced that some day in 2016 they'll stop supporting XUL, the interface language you could use to modify any part of Firefox as you liked to. The official reason is "security" (yes, an extension which has full access to the browser can do anything with the browser, you don't say...), the community's outcry did not matter much. They said they would be working together with the community in order to improve their new Chrome-compatible API. Well, the last Chrome extension API I saw restricted modifications to adding new toolbar buttons. No more DownThemAll!, no more Vimperator, no more Tree Style Tabs. Oh, wow.
Mozilla is basically removing everything I liked from Firefox. That leaves me with two options:
1. Use Pale Moon instead. Pale Moon has been forked from Firefox 25 (recently including a fork of Gecko called Goanna), its author promised to support XUL for some more time. Still, as Pale Moon is mostly a one-man show, it remains unclear how long he will be able to maintain the browser without entirely losing the grip. This is too risky for now, but I'll surely keep an eye on it.
2. Choose another browser and try to simulate my Firefox environment in it. Interestingly, since Mozilla decided that Firefox should be a weird Chrome clone, my reason not to choose Chromium or, at least, WebKit/Blink-based browsers suddenly vanished. So I played with Midori (which lacks functionality yet), Otter (blazing fast but developed slowly) and Vivaldi, a modern Opera 12 replacement made by some guys who had worked for Opera before they went insane and dumped their fast and small browser for some weird Chropera experiment.
Indeed, since Vivaldi supports most of Chrome's extensions out of the box and comes with an impressive feature set right from the start, the last thing missing is a good DownThemAll! replacement. But I guess those days are gone.
Goodbye, Mozilla. Hello, Vivaldi. Good to be here.
