I really miss the old Firefox. I miss how I could quickly cut through mountains of pages with hierarchical vertical tabs, and export or mirror groups of urls in bulk. And it was faster, because I had a lot more power to restrict what content was loaded.
There were so many powerful extensions that gave me direct access to the content I wanted, which are impossible to use now.
Yes, it had security problems, but those are solvable. Just on my own, I cobbled together some fairly good sandboxing systems. I wish they had just worked to improve XUL.
It's worth noting that Tree Style Tabs still exists and works really well. You can multi-select tabs and move them around or bookmark them, too.
Firefox is dramatically faster now, and you still have full abilities to restrict content loading with WebExtensions like uBlock Origin and NoScript. What functionality relating to restricting content loading are you missing?
Excuse me, but post-e10s Firefox is not anywhere near as fast as old Firefox. It's a slow mess that freezes constantly, and the switch from XUL to WebExtensions (and the changes to the rendering engine resultant from that) have made it agonizing to even load basic HTML without CSS, ECMAScript, or XML content.
I switched to Pale Moon for performance and philosophy, and because it has worked since then exactly as I need it and want it to, and has been uniformly faster (now I can confirm on all three machines I use - the x64s at work and x86 at home), and it has given me no security concerns, I've made a 100% switch.
> "It's worth noting that Tree Style Tabs still exists and works really well."
YMMV. I use it but I find it buggy and slow. Once or twice a week it seems to crash completely and although it comes back up by itself, it takes a minute or so with large numbers of tabs. In the past, although not recently, I've also had trouble with it flattening my tab hierarchy when firefox is restarted, and having tabs at the wrong indentation level or no longer displayed under their parents.
Also, you can't have the bookmarks sidebar and the TST sidebar open at the same time anymore, which is a real bummer.
I tried it recently and it was buggier and slower than in 2011. It's pretty heartbreaking for me, I don't want to do it.
I heard that it wasn't going to be possible to do tree style tabs, but Mozilla hacked it enough so that it would work, and convinced the original author to re-implement it. It feels like a hack.
Maybe, but I don't think so. It tends to happen when I'm interacting with it, often dragging subtrees around. It might be coincidental, but it sure seems to me like there are lots of unstable edgecases.
There were so many powerful extensions that gave me direct access to the content I wanted, which are impossible to use now.
Yes, it had security problems, but those are solvable. Just on my own, I cobbled together some fairly good sandboxing systems. I wish they had just worked to improve XUL.