I’m a diehard Firefox user and supporter, but with every release there are still things I wait on the WebExtensions support to improve:
1. There’s still no full featured Tab Mix Plus possible with the current APIs. That’s been a big bummer for some years now.
2. The most downloaded session management extension now is still not as rich and good as the old XUL extension Session Manager (from mozdev).
3. I probably have to search again for a WebExtension equivalent for this one. Lazarus was a nice form saving extension in the past. Not sure if something similar exists or is even possible.
Best not hold your breath. You are an old-school power user and 99.9% of users no longer know or care about any of the functionality you're talking about.
I don't have any specific retorts to your points other than pointing you to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cach... for a Lazarus replacement (although I thought Firefox does this by default, and I don't understand why you need an extension at all).
Thanks for the pointer to this extension. I'll check it out. One of the things Lazarus provided (at the cost of adding some effort in maintaining privacy) was to save the history of form fields across sites and across restarts. In my knowledge, Firefox allows saving text fields, but not text areas. Periodic saving and history were quite helpful especially when writing longer walls of text like on HN comments or posts on other platforms.
I also come to the comments on every Firefox release to see if anything improved on that front. We've been waiting for years indeed, and I guess the only way to get the functionality back is to maintain a set of custom patches (forking basically)... Still disappointed about pushing web extensions with no alternatives available at the time, and if I had looked into the future, I'd have thought the crystal ball was broken as there is still no compatibility years down the line.
I've tried the 64 bit version of Pale Moon several years ago and it didn't seem as performant as Firefox (could've been due to the setup and environment; I didn't bother to investigate deeper). The fact that many XUL extensions have been abandoned or have stopped development is a concern though. Thanks for the Basilisk mention. It may be a good alternative for older machines that the current Firefox doesn't support.
1. There’s still no full featured Tab Mix Plus possible with the current APIs. That’s been a big bummer for some years now.
2. The most downloaded session management extension now is still not as rich and good as the old XUL extension Session Manager (from mozdev).
3. I probably have to search again for a WebExtension equivalent for this one. Lazarus was a nice form saving extension in the past. Not sure if something similar exists or is even possible.