Yeah, when they did the big performance rewrite(quantum?) and killed pentadactyl (vim mode), I was really upset. I remember using Firefox 52-esr for as long as I could to keep my workflow the same.
In my mind, that was peak Firefox. Yes performance wasn't great, but I didn't care. It was good enough and I mostly browsed with JavaScript disabled.
The new vim mode plugins can't compete with the old plugins because they are much more restricted in what they can do.
The really galling thing is they lied right to our damn faces about how "the new faster systems breaks the old add-on system" while they were still using XUL behind the scenes. In fact an HN reader compiled versions of Firefox 57 and above with user-installed XUL enabled and they work perfectly well.
Nothing is really stopping people from keeping those extensions compatible. Unsupported doesn't mean impossible - it just means you need to do some tweaks: https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io
I'm not understanding how that relates to the fact that the only thing stopping users from installing their XUL extensions on FF57 was a software switch they weren't allowed to touch without editing and compiling from source.
No editing or compilation needed. You just needed to disable signature checks (xpinstall.signatures.required) and enable extension experiments (extensions.experiments.enabled) in a developer edition version (or nightly) version of the browser.
I feel like if it was that simple, someone would have written instructions somewhere at the time. I remember having to set xpinstall.signatures.required before FF 57. I am not sure about extensions.expirements.enabled.
Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I can't be bothered constantly fucking around with my setup and have resigned myself to just accepting whatever Mozilla wants to shove down my throat.
From what I can tell, the community has forked pentadactyl[0] and are using it on Palemoon[1]. I'm guessing if it could still run on Firefox today, they would do that instead of using Palemoon (but I could be wrong). Anyway, I still hate that they killed what made Firefox unique. Trying to beat Chrome at it's own game seems like a pointless battle.
Download managers/mass downloaders have been similarly rendered impotent (can't download to outside of the Downloads folders without individually prompting for each and every download [1], can't intelligently handle naming conflicts between new downloads and existing files [2], etc. etc.)
And somewhat ironically, while I already had it installed for quite a while, I only really started seriously using and valuing DownThemAll after Firefox 57 had already come out.
[1] Eventually they relented somewhat and said that they would accept an API extension whereby an extension could download to the last downloaded-to location (even outside of the Downloads folder) without having to explicitly prompt the user again – but until now it was never actually implemented (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1342563).
[2] You can only choose between "automatically rename" or "overwrite", and you can only choose in advance (!) when you don't actually have the necessary information to make that decision (especially seeing as Webextensions can't read any local files, so they have absolutely no idea what sort of filename conflicts could potentially exist). There's no "skip" option, and while there's a "prompt" option (however well/badly implemented that might be), Firefox doesn't even support it.
In my mind, that was peak Firefox. Yes performance wasn't great, but I didn't care. It was good enough and I mostly browsed with JavaScript disabled.
The new vim mode plugins can't compete with the old plugins because they are much more restricted in what they can do.