overview for yoasif

TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make Firefox secure, fast or to try new things. On the other side, this growing cost progressively killed the community of add-on developers. Eventually, after spending years trying to protect this old add-on mechanism, Mozilla made the hard choice of removing this extension mechanism and replacing this with the less powerful but much more maintainable WebExtensions API. Thanks to this choice, Firefox developers can once again make the necessary changes to improve security, stability or speed. During the past few days, I’ve been chatting with Firefox users, trying to separate fact from rumor regarding the consequences of the August 2020 Mozilla layoffs. One of the topics that came back a few times was the removal of XUL-based add-ons during the move to Firefox Quantum. I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by this choice. And then, as someone pointed out on reddit, I realized that we still haven’t taken the time to explain in-depth why we had no choice but to remove XUL-based add-ons. So, if you’re ready for a dive into some of the internals of add-ons and Gecko, I’d like to take this opportunity to try and give you a bit more detail.

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Mozilla Did a Reddit AMA About Their 2024 Firefox Priorities… See What You Missed (www.quippd.com)

submitted 3 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

8 comments fedilink

Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they c...

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Mozilla Did a Reddit AMA About Their 2024 Firefox Priorities… See What You Missed (www.quippd.com)

submitted 3 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@fedia.io

18 comments fedilink

Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they c...

25

We’re the Firefox leadership team at Mozilla. AMA (live Thursday June 13, 17:00 - 19:00 UTC) (www.reddit.com)

submitted 3 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@fedia.io

1 comments fedilink

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Experimenting with local alt text generation in Firefox Nightly (hacks.mozilla.org)

submitted 4 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@fedia.io

2 comments fedilink

Firefox 130 will feature an on-device AI model that automatically generates alt-text for images, integrated into its built-in PDF editor.

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Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400+ Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years (www.pcmag.com)

submitted 4 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@fedia.io

25 comments fedilink

13

Keeping you in the loop: What’s new in our Knowledge Base? (blog.mozilla.org)

submitted 5 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@fedia.io

0 comments fedilink

Hello, SUMO community! We're setting the stage for something big: a revamp of our style guide designed to make our support content not just user-friendly, but user-delightful. To get a ...

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Improving Performance in Firefox and Across the Web with Speedometer 3 (hacks.mozilla.org)

submitted 6 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@fedia.io

0 comments fedilink

Today’s Speedometer release is more open and challenging than before and is the best tool for driving browser performance improvements.

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A New Chapter for Mozilla: Focused Execution and an Expanded Role in Charting the Internet’s Future (blog.mozilla.org)

submitted 7 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/firefox@fedia.io

2 comments fedilink

Today marks a significant moment in our journey, and I am thrilled to share some important news with you. After much thoughtful consideration, I have decid

Firefox Translation Engine in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago

Firefox translations are local and open source.

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/translations may be a good place to start to learn. https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/translations/index.html may also be helpful.

What user.js are you using? in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago

We don't recommend pre-built user.js files contributed by the community.

You can always look at my guide if you like, I suppose.

*Permanently Deleted* in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago

Seems to be an open enhancement: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1808766

fedia login error on some threads in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago

Added a comment on the fedia magazine: https://fedia.io/m/fedia/t/94499/The-fedia-struggle-continues#entry-comment-979192

Firefox not unloading tabs on MacOS reliably in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Question: Most of resources I've found online lead me to believe that all I need is to modify browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb. But it's nowhere to be found. about:config on MacOS is just returning an empty value and offers me to set it. Dare I? Would it actually work?

You can always remove the edit if it breaks things catastrophically. Why not try it and see?

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/xpcom/base/AvailableMemoryWatcherMac.cpp leads me to believe that this functionality should work if you can trigger it.

I currently have a puny 380 tabs open that consume 42GB RAM on my MBP '21 Max whatever (with 64GB total, shared with the GPU).

This seems like the bigger problem.

If Firefox is using an unexpected amount of RAM, report a bug by following the steps below:

Open about:memory in a new tab.
Click Measure and save...
Attach the memory report to a new bug
Paste your about:support info (Click Copy text to clipboard) to your bug.

If you are experiencing a bug, the best way to ensure that something can be done about your bug is to report it in Bugzilla. This might seem a little bit intimidating for somebody who is new to bug reporting, but Mozillians are really nice!

If you prefer not to open a bug, you can instead reduce the number of content processes used by Firefox to a lower amount by going to about:config and changing dom.ipc.processCount.webIsolated to a lower number.

Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago

@rantolo what news?

Firefox 116 Is Now Available for Download, This Is What's New - 9to5Linux in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago

changes the Ctrl+Shift+T keyboard shortcut to reopen the last closed tab or last closed window in the order they were closed or restore the previous session if there aren’t any tabs or windows to reopen.

Amusing that Firefox gets worse to match Chrome here. Oh well.

Firefox crashed after long inactivity in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago

Do you see any crash report ids in about:crashes?

How can i get Rid of this prompt. in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 1 points 1 year ago

You probably want to ask Google about that. You can modify the page using extensions like uBlock Origin as well.

Anyone else still kinda miss Reddit? in c/AskKbin@kbin.social

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 1 points 1 year ago

Reddit wasn't that good.

I am using Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection. This means my timezone is set to UTC. How can I change it to my local time while preserving the other elements of tracking protection? in c/firefox@fedia.io

[-] yoasif@fedia.io 1 points 1 year ago

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1364261#c41 and let us know if it works for you.