These are the Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge Finalists
Mozilla changed the add-ons system of the Firefox web browser with the release of Firefox 57. The organization dropped the classic add-on system and switched the system over to WebExtensions.
Mozilla was certainly aware of the impact the switch had on Firefox's extension ecosystem. It was clear right from the get-go that some add-ons could not be ported over because Mozilla did not want to implement APIs that extensions required. Other extensions could not be ported because of missing WebExtensions APIs because the APIs were still in development. And then there were extensions that would not be ported because developers did not want to or because development had been abandoned.
New extensions would come out of this as well. Chrome developers could port their extensions to Firefox relatively easily, and developers would produce new extensions that offered new or unique functionality.
Note: Mozilla recommends that users install the extensions in Firefox Beta or other development versions of the browser as Firefox Stable may not support all APIs required to run the extensions properly.
Firefox Quantum Extensions Challenge Finalists
Mozilla's Extensions Challenge for Firefox Quantum is an attempt to highlight WebExtensions and promote the new standard.
The organization announced the finalists in the groups Best Tab Manager / Tab Organizer, Best Dynamic Theme, and Best Extension for Games & Entertainment on Friday on the Mozilla Add-ons blog.
Best Tab Manager / Tab Organizer
The following four extensions are finalists:
- Session Boss (read our review) -- Session Boss is a standalone session manager for Firefox. The extension saves sessions automatically or on-demand, and supports all kinds of cool features such as grouping sessions, restoring individual tabs or entire windows, or updating sessions.
- Session Sync -- The extension allows you to save all open tabs as bookmarks either automatically or manually. It supports sync services such as Firefox Sync or EverSync, restore functionality and advanced management options.
- Tabby - Window & Tab Manager -- Tabby adds an icon to Firefox's toolbar which you use to interact with the extension. It displays an overview of open tabs in all windows, and supports operations such as open, close, pin or rearrange.
- Tip Tab -- The add-on adds visual tab navigation options to Firefox. It displays tab previews and lets you navigate tabs visually. You may use it to display all tabs by window or container, use the built-in search functionality, and rearrange tabs using drag and drop operations.
My favorite: Session Boss. Excellent extensions.
Best Dynamic Theme
- Envify -- Extension for developers to change the theme based on the Development Environment that you use.
- Midnight Lizard --Â The extension adds dark night mode support to all websites and changes page colors, brightness and contrast. Comes with lots of settings: whitelist and blacklist support, color scheme presets, options to modify colors, brightness, saturation and other parameters for text, images, background and other page elements, and a lot more.
- Native Dark -- A dynamic theme for the Firefox browser that colorizes tabs, title bar, and the URL Bar based on the accent color of Windows.
- Weatherlicious -- Pulls weather data from OpenWeatherMap to change the theme of the web browser based on the weather condition. (similar to dynamic weather theme which we reviewed)
- Window on Earth -- The extension displays photos of earth taken from space and switches photos at sunset and sunrise. It changes the theme of the browser from dark to lighter and vice versa as well.
My favorite: Midnight Lizard. Impressive functionality and works really well.
Best Extension for Games & Entertainment
- Find the Fox -- A game that integrates with your browsing history. Find on which page of the browsing history Gerty the Fox is hidden.
- Mouse Pet -- A simple extension that adds a creature to the screen that follows your mouse cursor.
- YouTabMan -- Control all running YouTube videos in a single place to play, pause, replay, mute or switch to the next video.
- Web Invaders -- A simple game that turns any web page into an arcade game. Use the mouse to move your spaceship and the left mouse button to fire at aliens that spawn on the screen.
- Worldwide Radio -- Worldwide Radio gives you access to Internet Radio stations from around the world. Select a country or region and browse the available radio stations once you have made your selection. Click on a station to start playing, favorite stations to find them more easily, or use the built-in search to find specific stations.
My favorite: Worldwide Radio. Great selection of radio stations from around the world. Only thing missing is recording support.
Now You: What are your favorite Firefox WebExtensions?
Richard Allen said ” piece of cake” & it was
many thanks for the code ,it works well :) I nearly forgot to check back as i thought who’s going to bother with that , very glad i did
tabs are just right at 150
Holy cow, Midnight Lizard and Session Boss are high quality addons.
I would never have known these addons existed. Thanks Martin Brinkmann.
Oh, and just now, trying to use FF Quantum (I’m still on pre-Quantum ESR most of the time), my browser… stopped… to a crawl. The Task Manager showed that it had eaten up the whole memory, after maybe a few hours of running and no more than 4 or 5 tabs open.
My FF Quantum does that regularly, and I’m not the only one, judging by the Firefox Reddit thread. So, one of the main arguments for switching to Quantum — speed — has resulted in the blasted thing getting so slow that it has to be closed, and relaunched. I’m seriously considering ditching FF altogether.
Well… every browser is going to work different with different hardware and different configs. That said, I also have an old laptop with an Intel Core2Duo, 4GB Ram, GT 230m on Win7 x64 and I can use it for hours without ‘ever’ using all of the memory, that includes watching video and with 12 or more tabs open. In the settings I have it set to use 2 content processes which ends up being 5 processes in the Windows Task Manager when 3 or more tabs are open. If you change it to 1 content process in the settings that will force FF to use a maximum of 4 processes, regardless of how many tabs are open. Or, you can disable multi-process by setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to false in about:config. And of course the type and number of extensions used will play a part in it. A content blocker will reduce memory use compared to not using one.
There are some well know about:config settings that have been used forever that will reduce memory use:
user_pref(“browser.sessionhistory.max_entries”, 5); I use 10. *50=default
user_pref(“browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers”, 2); *-1=default e.g. 4GB ram would save 8 pages.
user_pref(“browser.sessionstore.interval”, 60000); 1 minute – I use 30000. – default is 15 seconds ‘15000″
user_pref(“browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo”, 5); *10=default
user_pref(“browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo”, 1); *3=default
Disable animations:
toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled=false – I use true.
Some cache settings I use that should be safe for most everyone:
browser.cache.disk.capacity=”179200″ (175MB) *256000=default
browser.cache.disk.max_entry_size= “8192” (8MB) *51200 (50MB)
browser.cache.frecency_experiment= -1
media.cache_readahead_limit=300 – 5 minutes
media.cache_resume_threshold=180 – 3 minutes
My desktop has 16GB of ram so I’ve increased some memory settings but that’s a different discussion.
“Still no way to Close Tabs to the Right / Close Tabs to the Left / Close Other Tabs / Close All Tabs ?”
Are you talking about the default in FF? Close Tabs to the Right and Close Other Tabs has been in FF forever. Which browser has “Close All Tabs”? I’m not aware of any. And Close Tabs to the Left I would like to see in FF myself but ‘supposedly’ it’s not something used often by the herd. Damn them! ;)
I’m saving this, too. Thank you. I have uMatrix on all my Firefoxes.
I meant pre-Quantum FF ESR + Tab Mix Plus (which I use most of the time) = Close All Tabs, plus all the rest. Which all browsers should offer without extensions. Everybody copying other people’s bad ideas is not a good idea. I use Close All Tabs all the time.
Actually…I thought that Close All Tabs was the red button in the top right corner. LoL Just messing. ;)
Ha ! I can see you are… Actually, I can explain why the Close All Tabs command is needed.
Fisrt of all, the equivalent exists in all desktop software : I can close all tabs on my PDF viewer/editor (and I’ve actually put a custom icon in the menu to do it), I can close all documents in Word and still have the program open…
In a browser, if I’ve finished looking at whatever sites I have been using, I don’t want one last random site staring at me, for no reason at all. Especially since many sites are so visually agressive.
On the other hand, I don’t want to close the browser, because just closing it takes a while (I have an extra bookmarks backup routine set to activate when closing), and re-launching it takes ages — especially with Firefox.
uMatrix, Greasemonkey, In My Pocket, Popup Blocker Ultimate, Video DownloadHelper
I used to like Tab Mix Plus & reduce the width of the tab , as i work from the left side , having to close the tab way over the right side is tiresome , it is not implemented yet it TMP
Piece of cake! Add a folder named chrome in your profile, create a text file, name it userChrome. Change the extension name of the text file to .css, then add the following to it:
/*Adjust Tab Size – Remove Selected Tab Line – NewTab Button
.tabbrowser-tab[visuallyselected] .tab-line { visibility: hidden; }*/
#TabsToolbar .tabbrowser-tab .tab-line { display: none !important; }
.tabbrowser-tab[fadein]:not([pinned]) { max-width: 150px !important; min-width: 76px !important; }
.tabbrowser-tab:not([selected]):not([pinned]) .tab-close-button { display: none !important; }
.tabbrowser-tab:not([selected]):not([pinned]):hover .tab-close-button { display: -moz-box !important; }
.tab-throbber { color: #666 !important; }
.titlebar-placeholder[type=”pre-tabs”] { display: none !important; }/*{ width: 0 !important; }*/
.tab-loading-burst[bursting] { display: none !important; }
.restore-tabs-button { opacity: .3 !important; }
#reader-mode-button { opacity: .5 !important; }
/* unread tab */
.tabbrowser-tab[unread=”true”] { color: #BFBFBF !important; font-style: italic !important; }
Then line with “max-width: 150px” is of course the tab width. You can delete everything else if you want and just use the line by itself. :)
“Piece of cake !” (Followed by 10 lines of code…) That was funny. It’s a piece of cake, provided very knowledgeable people such as yourself are around, and willing to share their expertise…
*The line with “max-width: 150px†is of course the tab width. The one line:
.tabbrowser-tab[fadein]:not([pinned]) { max-width: 150px !important; min-width: 76px !important; }
p.s. to my no-complaints…it shows 11:11 pm in entry when it’s 2:11 p.m.
i don’t have any complaints
Are the old add-ons anywhere to be found or did Mozilla bury them completely?
What old addons …. SARCASM BTW.
Mozilla has decided they know what YOU want.
Still no way to Close Tabs to the Right / Close Tabs to the Left / Close Other Tabs / Close All Tabs ? You’d think that should be as basic in browsers as Copy / Cut / Paste / Delete in all programs, but no.
Either you need some devilishly difficult programming to that effect, or the people in charge for drawing specs are exceptionnally moronic. Vivaldi can’t do that either, by the way.
I mean : with or without extensions, but of course you shouldn’t need an extension for such plain-vanilla features.
Yes, you can Close Other Tabs in Vivaldi, then close the remaining tab, but why can’t you close all of them with a single command ? That’s beyond stupid.
Does the Firefox Quantum doesn’t have those options? I’m still using the old Firefox and the only option that does not exist is Close tab to the left.
Here’s what my menu looks like: https://i.imgur.com/dV0BSOB.jpg
FoxyTab does all those things, as far as I can see.
Thanks, Shinto Plasm, but I have it installed on my FF Quantum, and, as far as I can see, it does not. Moreoever, what it does needs too many clicks. When I right-click on a tab, I can :
Close Tabs to the Right
Close Tabs to the Left
Close Other Tabs
Close All Tabs is missing.
Then there’s a Foxy Tab menu command, which needs clicking to open a sub-menu. There, I have again another Close Tabs to the Left, which is totally redundant, I don’t have Close All Tabs, and I have a bunch of less often used commands. Many of them need opening one more sub-menu, which means 4 clicks in total.
The choice of features is not well thought-out. You can save the page as pdf, but much more useful than that is saving it as mht, which is missing.
Also, you don’t have any help. You have what is called a support page, which needs a bazillion clicks jumping through God knows how many sites, just to get there. And where you’re finally here, all you can do is ask questions. Or search haphazardly.
You don’t have a godforsaken table of contents, you know, the sort of thing men have used for centuries, when they used to be able to think by themselves, instead of relying on some sort of non-existent “community”.
All in all, this extension, which is supposed to be one of the best (or so I understand), supports my theory : you should not have any extensions at all on a browser. Browsers are used by grown men, who have long past stopped to play with Lego bricks or Meccano parts. They are also designed by grown men (supposedly), who should make it a point of honor to deliver a finished and well thought-out product, working out of the box.
Now extensions might be a welcome thing if they were offered on top of that, to do some things even better (or differently) than the original product, or add some very specialised functions. But the whole “extensions” racket, nowadays, is organised so that you absolutely need a bunch of them to do completely basic things, none of them does the job fully or really well (because most of them are unpaid work on the side by one individual), so you actually end up having serveral extensions do to the same thing, and they overlap, and you never know which one to use, never can get to learn the damn thing, have icons all over the place, and users crying bloody murder when extensions either stop being compatible, or the whole extensions system changes, and everything needs to be written all over again.
Incidentally, such a browser used to exist a hundred years ago, it was called Maxthon, worked like a charm, and whas the most advanced you could use at the time. Indeed, it did what Firefox did without needing the extensions. And there were probably extensions available on top of that.
As someone who has used firefox from the begininning, I really fail to see what all the bitching is about. The 2 things I have noticed since the beginning is the main theme is squared instead of being rounded corners and I have to use ccleaner to turn off all the stupid built in addons I did not ask for. Other than that ublock, decentraleyes and privacy badger seem to work properly. Overall the browser seems faster as time has gone by. I guess if I used a bunch of addons that don’t work now or are not available I could see being upset.
I agreed with 420. I also have been using Firefox since long time ago.
What are those people bitching about for? As long as I have my addons working perfectly I really don’t understand why you all are bitching! What I need is privacy and speed! I need 0.1s faster opening the site! Can’t you notice that Firefox now is superior to Chrome in speed and privacy!?
I honestly don’t understand why people are bitching about Firefox Quantum! Oh please explain people!
I suggest if you want to troll, what your name is indicating and your comment too, please do it elsewhere. We are all adults aren’t we? And thanks to the finally more strict commenting rules we should use the opportunity to make “Ghacks great again”!
@Vakarian
I guess you never heard of sarcasm
+25 for Vakarian
“As someone who has used firefox from the begininning, I really fail to see what all the bitching is about.”
The bitching is because Mozilla has turned its back on the old userbase that hadn’t already given up of Firefox in order to chase the Chrome userbase. Whether or not that’s a good business decision remains to be seen, but it is undeniably problematic for many, perhaps most, of the remaining original userbase.
Thanks @John Fenderson for your wise words… You describe things best for most of the time :)
Firefox is no longer “your browser your way”. Mozilla has made it clear that it is “their browser their way”. In the process Mozilla alienated millions of loyal users. That fact is proven by the number of users before and after the changes brought about by v57.
Mozilla has alienated many dedicated and hard working addon authors who provided very useful addons. Anyone who used Tab Mix Plus will know exactly what I mean.
Yes, a few people like you see no problem with Firefox. That’s great. But the number is much smaller than it was in the past.
Be prepared. At some point Mozilla is going to have to pull the plug on FF because there is not a large enough audience to justify having valued staff members working on such a project.
And all that without giving all that people who wanted more and now are left with nothing at least an apology in the form of “Thanks for all the years you have used Firefox, we are sorry not to be able to support you any longer”
At least give people respect when you already decide you can not support them any longer and you have been all the time before in support of them.
That is called respect, which Mozilla is clearly missing.
Before you had almost unlimited abilities to change the UI – Now you have only very limited abilities.
Before you had almost unlimited add-on and theme abilities – now you have only very limited options.
That is what people are bitching about. About Mozilla restricting their product as much as possible so it is compatible for the Chrome user base and at the same time giving zero interest for all the original people using Firefox who do not like bowing down to another product just because Mozilla management believes they should have all the users of this competing product.
The upheaval in the development of the Firefox WEB browser strongly suggests that there is an inner political struggle within the parent company Mozilla.
The FF fan base (among users and addon developers) is a mere shadow of what it once was. I used to be a fan. I switched to Google Chrome after FF v57 because there is no upheaval in Chrome and the extensions available are good enough to get by. I can’t say that for FF any more.
If the management team at Mozilla doesn’t get their act together very soon, Firefox will probably will be gone in a couple of years.
I switched to Chromium and strangely it use lot less memory than Firefox and it is a lot faster… It’s sad to see where Mozilla dragged Firefox.🤢
Don’t use Chrome, use Chromium. Chromium is open source unlike Chrome.
Chromium is OK for us technical people. But it has some nagging issues for the many non-technical users out there. There’s a good article on How To Geek about this.
We also could say … Don’t use Firefox, use Pale Moon. Pale Moon is still “your browser your way”.
But, let’s be honest here. The user bases for PM and Chromium are tiny compared to Chrome.
How long do you really think PM and Chromium are going to continue before the developers start to wonder if the project is worth their efforts?
@pHROZEN gHOST And exactly the reason why i am using Chrome too these days. As there is really no difference anymore between developer related politics, features and add-ons.
And with Chrome i use an original browser and no remake of an utterly successful original product.
Another tab manager, window switcher and auto dark mode extension. The final retardation of FF user experience is almost complete.
Mozilla has killed fantastic and useful addons, the new addon website is impossible to maneuver through. Mozilla may have created more security but I am not sure about it, since some of the security addons have become a nuisance, so some may turn them off and go without them. I am sure there were better ways to improve Firefox than the way Moz did it. Guess it’s all about the money since it is a nonprofit organization. Sometimes they are the worst.
Does anyone know of an extension or a hack to get the topbar to auto-hide when scrolling, as it does in the Android version ?
Excellent selection, thank you very much !
As i wrote once.. rather sad to see the Firefox community being turned into a pro-simplicity and contra-features troll meadow. The logical outcome if most serious users have moved away and ignorants reach the majority.
Compared to that “high level of intelligence”, shown by @Mozilla did the right thingy – the Chrome community is Grade A+++. The Vivaldi community is compared to this A+++. Even the Pale Moon community is compared to this still with a grade B.
“but when a browser developer goes downhill and makes questionable decisions and goes the political influenced way and is heavily humiliating a rather big amount of users or developers because of that reason, you know it is time to uninstall.”
That is more relevant than ever before.
For Best Dynamic Theme category :
DarkReader
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
Firefox+Stylo+WebRender+other-rust-stuff-that’s-coming-over+WebExtensions-only >> Firefox+No-Stylo+No-WebRender+XPCOM/XUL-addons
Thank you Mozilla for making the right decisions!
“@Mozilla did the right thingy” Trolls like you are the main reason why Mozilla is in such a bad shape today.
Mozilla’s simplicity and Chrome developer fans and their (paid) fan trolls like you are only make Mozilla more and more embarrassing.
As Ex-Firefox user this really pains me to see. You show no respect to features and user choice at all. And the same time users like you will have the nerve to complain that now Google developers are going to borrow UI aspects from Australis.
As said, you and the modern Mozilla developers and their leadership putting the company and the browser in a more and more bad light.
Nothing left to add.
No
Mozilla is in bad shape today because it has become a left (il)liberal corporation who advocates LGBT rights, Feminism and “Diversity” policies, who openly donates to anarchists groups ($100,000 to RiseUp) and who also forced Brendan eich to resign with lynch mob tactics.
The Mozilla you once knew is dead
https://blog.mozilla.org/inclusion/2018/04/19/diversity-and-inclusion-at-mozilla/
@fauxts Radical liberal developers and most new users are also radical liberal. What else can you expect from such a combination?
/Fatality-sarcasm-warning-on
What we call radical liberal or radical leftwing has the overlaying agenda to remove everthing “conservative” – excluding conservative opinions, conservative users, conservative features.
What those guys understand of diversity is a joke. And those guys seriously call themselves as “progressives” :D
/Fatality-sarcasm-warning-off
@Fauxts
You are absolutely right, you missed to mention that mozilla is collaborating with George Soros, one of the biggest criminals in the history of mankind.
“Who openly donates to anarchists groups ($100,000 to RiseUp).”
Really ? I did not know about this one. This is a bit rich. Rise Up is far-left. If I buy a power drill, I don’t expect to support a political organisation with my money. It’s the same thing when I choose a browser.
This mix-up of politics and commerce has to stop. If I want to donate to the Party for the Betterment of Mars Dwellers, I can do that by myself, thank you very much.
@Fauxts It may be true that Mozilla has joined the side of actually anti-diverse-lliberals which are indeed anti diversity spreading, no matter how they say it is the opposite, but the main issue is still that all great developers have left the building, that intelligent management has left the building, that most intelligent users have left the building.
What is left is a money and market share ranks centered Google Chrome cult that is doing mistake after mistake.
That is the actual real truth.
With intelligent developers and intelligent managers the so-called die hard liberals who are in reality anti-diversity spreading would have no chance at all.
Simple add-ons which can not change big stuff inside the browser… themes which are limited in what can be themed… simple games…
If one compares that to CTR or The Fox only better or a full theme – or many other classic Firefox extensions – which have been giving the user amazing control over the Firefox UI and have been able to change Firefox functions/UI in a rather incredible way….
Firefox+Stylo+WebRender+other-rust-stuff-that’s-coming-over+WebExtensions-only
Damn you Mozilla for making Chromium users focused decisions!
I guess kids and teenagers will like this challenge. Like horror movies.
The new Firefox addon repository looks like a scammy chinese shopping site. So disappointed with their new design.