Firefox (52) remains my browser of choice – entirely because of plug-ins. When Firefox completely destroyed the UI/UX with “Australis,” a horrific UI change that basically made Firefox into a crappy clone of Chrome, the only thing that made Firefox usable was “Classic Theme Restorer.” Apparently, unsatisfied with the damage Mozilla had managed to wreak on their user-base with idiotic UI decisions, over the past year or so, a new version called “Quantum” (57) was rolled out that broke the functionality of almost every important plug-in.
This utterly disastrous and truly unforgivable transgression against the user-base was only slightly mitigated by sustaining 52-ESR, at least until the Sept of this year. After that, everyone who cares about having a decent alternative to Chrome will have to migrate to Waterfox.
In the mean time, one really important thing you have to remember to do if you stuck reinstalling your system on Linux (e.g. Linux Mint) is to immediately uninstall Firefox before using it even once. Then change your install version to ESR and install. If you let Quantum run even once, it will mark all your good plugins as disabled and you need to reinstall them one at a time to get them working again.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/firefox-esr sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install firefox-esr
Well, that’s the end of Firefox…. Sad to see it go after all these years, but the new plugin concept has made Firefox a subordinate version of Chrome rather than a powerful, customizable tool.
I followed these fine directions and now have waterfox running.
echo 'deb https://web.archive.org/web/20190207094152/https://dl.bintray.com/hawkeye116477/waterfox-deb/ release main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/waterfox.list curl https://web.archive.org/web/20200209091904/https://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=hawkeye116477 | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get update sudo apt upgrade sudo apt install waterfox
Just import your firefox preferences on starup and walla, you instant happiness with all the plugins that Quantum broke restored, including such absolute essentials as “Classic Theme Restorer” (which undoes the absolutely horrible UI changes that Mozilla adopted) and downthemall, privacy plugins, etc. If you’ve updated some plugins to be Quantum compatible, you’ll have to back those up (for me that’s things like FoxClocks and Noscript, which managed to hack together semi-viable Quantum compatible plugins after slogging through Mozilla’s buggy WebExtensions API and HTML5 quirks).
This whole translation is quite unfortunate. Waterfox is dependent on the Firefox code base, so this solution may have a finite lifespan, but for now it works and undoes the horror of Firefox 57+/Quantum.
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