I was an extremly happy Firefox user for years. It all changed from +10 ⭐ to -10 ⭐ when the horror transition from XUL to WebExtensions took place. With this update, practically nothing worked any more. Quite shocked, I switched to Vivaldi and waited the last 6 years for Firefox to implement something that would restore these beloved features. But that didn't happen.
What made the browsing experience so incredibly good was a mixture of different addons. Mouse Gestures, TreeStyle Tabs, MouseWheel on Tabs were the most important ones (some of them offered features I knew from Opera, and which allowed me to switch from Opera to Firefox). Today they have all been ported to WebExtensions, but none of them work half as well as they did before 2018.
The most annoying shortcoming for at the moment is that Mouse Gestures don't work on special pages. This is so frustrating that I stop using Firefox after a week of testing. These special pages include:
There's nothing you can do on these:
- Viewing an image
- Viewing page source
- Addon / configuration pages
- Developer Tools area
It's ironic that these mechanisms are trying to protect me: because of them I install unverified addons and disable the security measures in about:config globally - just to make Mouse Gestures work. This protection is ironically for me, against an addon which is recommended by Mozilla, that is used by 100,000 Firefox users with a publicly available source code. All that is truly hard to understand.
Idea
Allow the user to configure addons recommended by Mozilla to work on the aforementioned specific pages. Just provide any mechanism to which the add-ons can dock.
