Firefox

If you want to tear your hair out because Plucky doesn’t well support Firefox, please let us know why a Chromium-based browser won’t work for you.

How to enable support for Firefox

Plucky’s support for Firefox is not as good as it is for Chromium-based browsers such as Brave , Chrome , Edge , and Vivaldi .

To enable Firefox support on Windows and macOS, invoke: pluck + okfirefox and pluck repair, and then restart Firefox after the delay has elapsed.

On most Linux distributions, Plucky should support Firefox out of the box, unless Firefox is a snap in which case take a look at the Linux notes for information on getting a real browser.

Why is Firefox support worse?

For years, Plucky supported Firefox, but not Chrome. But as time passed, many Plucky users and prospective Plucky users asked for Chrome support. Meanwhile, Mozilla decided to abandon their traditional add-on architecture and to instead copy Chrome. And so Plucky was ported to Chrome. For a few years after that, Plucky supported both Firefox and Chrome, and periodically Plucky docs would recommend one or the other browser, based on whichever worked better with Plucky at the time. But over time, Firefox grew less and less relevant both because of its declining market share and because of its declining, sometimes seemingly abandoned, infrastructure.

Eventually, Mozilla changed policies and infrastructure in a way that broke Plucky’s support for Firefox. The decision to “abandon Firefox” was really not so much a decision as it was a result of inaction. Could Plucky support for Firefox have been fixed? Yes. Would it have taken hours of work? Yes. Was this work more important than the hundreds of other tasks that needed attending to? This is the critical question, and the answer is and continues to be a resounding, “No!”

While Chrome has some flaws, in terms of functionality that Pluckers need, Firefox has historically had more, and some of them have been critical to the Plucky user. Worse, code patches that would have fixed these flaws were rejected by the powers that be at Mozilla as the Plucky use case was determined to be insufficiently compelling to them. On the bright side, seeing that Mozilla rejected code contributions that were important to Plucky users made it much easier to decide to let Firefox go its own way when Mozilla made Firefox support even more costly.

A silver lining in all this for the Firefox supporter is that Chrome has many forks, some of which are explicitly focused on privacy, so the majority of users who care about Mozilla’s marketing values can still support organizations with similar marketing values. Brave and Ungoogled Chromium are two well-known examples.

Will Firefox support be revived?

Whether Plucky will improve support for Firefox in the long haul is yet to be determined. Mozilla’s current policies make doing so time consuming, most people use browsers other than Firefox, and Plucky’s resources are too scant to spend on a nonessential project such as supporting Firefox while alternative and easier-to-deploy-to browsers exist.

The primary author of Plucky himself used Firefox for many years, but finally switched to Brave because it took so very long to address issues in Firefox. He misses the awesome bar but is otherwise happy with using Brave, and he is even happier he has fewer Plucky bugs to investigate.

Getting Firefox ESR instead of Firefox 127+

Plucky will not support Firefox 127 or above because Mozilla changed signature requirements such that Plucky will no longer load. Those who really want to use Firefox can use their ESR release to buy a little more time.

Windows

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/enterprise/#download

macOS

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/enterprise/#download

Linux

Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
sudo add update
sudo add install firefox-esr
sudo add remove firefox-esr
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:mozillateam/ppa