Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated :)
You can still install Tridactyl in a normal installation of Firefox by following the instructions on our readme [1]. Admittedly, that may cease to be the case if Mozilla ever tire of us; people in locked-down corporate environments would then find it hard or impossible to install Tridactyl but we'd make it as easy as possible for everyone else.
On topic, I'd argue that Mozilla are just desperately trying to cling on to ordinary users; the "war" against power users is a war of (totally understandable) neglect rather than spite.
Firefox gained the marketshare it did because power users relentlessly evangelized it to non-power users.
There was some of the same phenomenon with Google, but the real difference is that Google pushed Chrome very strongly on the biggest web properties in the world, had it packaged in some other software installers, and advertised it. That's why Chrome has the market-share it does today.
Mozilla appears to now be courting the ordinary user market without having either the passion of power users driving it, or the world's biggest web properties shilling it.
To this day, visiting google.com (#1 website) in my default browser pops up a large notification informing me I need to switch to Chrome to 'hide annoying ads and protect against malware on the web.' Visting YouTube.com (#2 website) pops up a slightly less annoying notification on the bottom that says "Google recommends using Chrome, a fast and secure browser."
I haven't been able to figure out for years now how they think this is going to work. Ordinary users are going to do what their IT administrator/IT friend says, use the OS default, or use products recommended by massive marketing campaigns.
This is it, exactly. No browser has ever gotten a dominant market share by convincing user Joe Average that it was better for their needs. That is an approach that is doomed to fail.
Just about every person I know that uses or used to use Firefox does so because I told them to use it or (more likely) I installed it for them. That's how most people start using Firefox.
I know Tridactyl is still installable, but the situation is not exactly reassuring about the viability of the extension in the future. Instead of a future in which Tridactyl asymptotically approaches the smoothness of Pentadactyl/Vimperator, I now have a vision of a future where a moderate-to-high amount of work has to be periodically invested in order to perhaps maintain the same level of functionality.
> On topic, I'd argue that Mozilla are just desperately trying to cling on to ordinary users; the "war" against power users is a war of (totally understandable) neglect rather than spite.
Perhaps, but meanwhile, as we muse about Tridactyl and the abandonment of userChrome and userContent, a thread about the possibility of Firefox removing webRequest in the future rises to #2. It's getting harder to justify Firefox and Mozilla by the moment.
