Invaluable developer extensions no longer available

Developer Tools
#1

OK. So I admit it. I am here because I am very unhappy with the way quantum has dropped support for extensions.

A lot of people are so just get over it and pay attention to why I am upset.

As a developer I found I relied on some extensions very heavily while a lot of the “kitch” extensions have been ported, for me the useful ones have not been and potentially cannot be due to the changes in quantum. This not only makes my day harder and more time consuming but also saddens me as to how Mozilla dumped its developer base to become another me too browser.

Mozilla does not and never will have the marketing power of google or microsoft. It is both foolish and egotistical to consider it can compete in the me too browser wars.

So why this forum? Well I came here hoping to find a developer enhanced version of firefox. Instead to my extreme disappointment I find a beta version of mainstream firefox. So its not designed for developers its actually just a way to get developers to help test a beta version.

How honest is that? Is this the new honesty bar in Mozilla? its a pretty low one.

So for the curious the extensions I so sorely miss are:

  • DNSFlusher
  • JS Switch
  • Saved password editor
  • Profile switcher
  • User agent switcher
  • NoRedirect

There are of course few more but each of the above saved me precious minutes each day adding up to many hours.

I am sure everyone has their favourite extensions for the way they work. The above are just some of mine.

If you are a developer and haven’t used the above extensions I advise you try them in waterfox while you still can, without mainstream support waterfox can only continue for so long.

I am so disappointed with Mozilla.

1 Like
#2

I don’t see Developer Edition as being about Firefox testing at all. Instead, it allows developers to get new DevTools features more rapidly than if you wait for them to hit Release.

Having said that, even Nightly (which is even more bleeding edge than Developer Edition) is quite stable overall.

It appears your disappointment is much more about add-ons in Firefox generally, and that’s really quite a separate topic from DevTools.

#3

Sorry about the confusion about the benefits of developer edition and the hassle with finding addon replacements.

As some of your extensions were developer related, I’d like to understand how they fit into devtools roadmap. But first here are some alternatives for either build-in features or new extensions that are maintained and updated:

Regarding the missing one, what problem does DNSFlusher solve for you?

Hope that helps for now.

#4

Sorry was away from work sick

DNSFlusher is the simplest tool and the one I miss the most!
It adds the pages IP address to the status bar (yes I miss status4evar too) and in one click it will flush firefoxes internal dns cache and refresh the page

I have disabled the DNS cache and that helps. but I’d prefer to keep it on and be able to flush it at will and more importantly see what IP address I am currently connected to.

Just found this… https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/server-ip/ Its just informational but might help

#5

A bit of an update on the plugins
Server-IP only works after the page has rendered and therefore is of no value if for some reason the page is not responding. That is the main reason I used DNS flusher (as a developer) it told me what IP I was trying to connect to irrespective of whether the connection was made or not. That saved me valuable time.

Using about:profiles to switch profiles does not work properly. It opens a new browser window in the same profile. To make it switch profiles you need to add the -no-remote command line to your launcher. Unfortunately once you do that you can no longer launch the browser from links in emails.

When trying to do so a message comes up to say …

“Firefox is already running, but is not responding. The old Firefox process must be closed to open a new window.”

This renders the profile switcher virtually useless.

1 Like
#6

About about:profiles, you’re painfully right. I found bug 1367743 about this.

My personal way of achieving this is manually running my main firefox with “./firefox -P” and other windows for other profiles with “./firefox -no-remote -P”. On Windows this could be 2 different shortcut icons. Not ideal but at least this works.

#7

I didn’t even think of looking through the bug database.

I have also noted changing the launch configuration in the registry (windows) causes Firefox to complain its not the default browser! it does a string comparison and any tweaking breaks it.

I have about 5 profiles I use for different purposes. While developing websites its great to be able to log in to each with a different profile to test role based rules.
So the loss of profile switcher for me is a pain. but its not the biggest pain.

The biggest pain is losing so many handy little plugins in one fell swoop.