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Add-ons in 2017

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Add-ons in 2017

#11

Post by bhrgunatha »

morinted wrote: post #2

I'd love some figures on whether the main popular extensions will continue working, as well as how many in the Firefox Add-ons site are already web extensions. I'm curious about my mains: - Classic theme restorer - uBlock - DownThemAll - Markdown Here As I'm already using electrolysis, I know Markdown Here basically doesn't work. How I can check whether things will break or not.

Mozilla have said they will adapt Web Extensions along with consulting add-on developers in order to bring along the maximum number of add-ons.

For me, if DownThemAll isn't one of them, I'll either stay with the last compatible version of firefox or, more likely switch to one of the alternatives that does support it and the others that have become such an integral part of my browsing behaviour.

I've been burned so often by the changes made in recent years, so much so that I have next to zero loyalty to them anymore. And I've been using firefox since the browser was still part of the Mozilla suite.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#14

Post by laurent123456 »

hucker wrote: post #10

Extensions is currently the only thing FF is better than the competition at, and they scrap it to copy Chrome APIs... I just can't understand why they would scrap XUL-based extensions before their new APIs reach feature parity. The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

I can see where they're coming from though. Today, developers need to create two versions of their extensions - one that works on Safari, Chrome and Opera (and Edge?) and one specifically for Firefox.

As the market share of Firefox is not that high, maybe extension developers eventually won't be bothered with supporting that extra version, which means Firefox extensions will be less up-to-date and there will be less of them.

That's probably a trade off they have to make, though I imagine they're aware that some add-ons won't work and that users will be annoyed by that.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#15

Post by hucker »

laurent123456 wrote: post #14
hucker wrote: post #10

Extensions is currently the only thing FF is better than the competition at, and they scrap it to copy Chrome APIs... I just can't understand why they would scrap XUL-based extensions before their new APIs reach feature parity. The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

I can see where they're coming from though. Today, developers need to create two versions of their extensions - one that works on Safari, Chrome and Opera (and Edge?) and one specifically for Firefox. As the market share of Firefox is not that high, maybe extension developers eventually won't be bothered with supporting that extra version, which means Firefox extensions will be less up-to-date and there will be less…

That's an argument for providing similar/the same APIs as Chrome et al sure, but not for deprecating the old ones.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#16

Post by emptyfile »

hucker wrote: post #10

Extensions is currently the only thing FF is better than the competition at, and they scrap it to copy Chrome APIs... I just can't understand why they would scrap XUL-based extensions before their new APIs reach feature parity. The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

Lunacy

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#17

Post by oblio »

vanni wrote: post #4
morinted wrote: post #2

I'd love some figures on whether the main popular extensions will continue working, as well as how many in the Firefox Add-ons site are already web extensions. I'm curious about my mains: - Classic theme restorer - uBlock - DownThemAll - Markdown Here As I'm already using electrolysis, I know Markdown Here basically doesn't work. How I can check whether things will break or not.

About DownThemAll: http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/

That article is more than 1 year old. And Mozilla is going beyond the Chrome APIs, they are implementing shims and additional APIs to port almost everything over.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#18

Post by vdfs »

_pdp_ wrote: post #6

The decline of XUL started around 2009. I spent months building a very complex app around XULRunner only to find out that Mozilla had no interest to support the technology in the future. So I decided to leave the platform and put my efforts on native and web and frankly it was a good decision. The WebExtensions API is no match to XUL and XPCOM but I only hope that now that we have Mozilla behind the technology we wil…

Google is behind WebExtensions API (aka Chrome Extension API) Mozilla is behind XUL/XPCOM and look were we are now ;)

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#19

Post by detaro »

oblio wrote: post #17
vanni wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About DownThemAll: http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/

That article is more than 1 year old. And Mozilla is going beyond the Chrome APIs, they are implementing shims and additional APIs to port almost everything over.

Is there a statement otherwise from DownThemAll? I haven't found anything, just references to that blog post.

Re: Add-ons in 2017

#20

Post by wiiittttt »

Only accepting WebExtension based add-ons while not yet fully implementing the Chrome API seems like it would lead to a large number of unsupported add-ons.
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