Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 336 posts

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#151

Post by [deleted] »

lucideer wrote: post #38
exceptione wrote: post #12

Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of les…

I agree generally with your points, but this doesn't really address the issues being criticised in comments here. I want to use Firefox (I do currently use Firefox, despite a lot of limitations), but there comes a tipping point where the balance of privacy (and apparent "user-interest") and actual usability and power leads to a not-so-good proposition. Someone has commented above that it seems like Mozilla management…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#152

Post by hackuser »

stewbrew wrote: post #145

They should conduct a survey how many add-ons will stop working, won't be ported to web extensions, and thus how many users they'll lose -- probably not that many because the majority most likely doesn't use add-ons but those people will most likely use anything other people recommend to them. I personally don't know if I'll continue recommending FF.

> They should conduct a survey ...

They have; I've seen the data on some Mozilla blog but I can't remember where.

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#155

Post by yellowapple »

callahad wrote: post #80
dagenleg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I want the addons to have full control over my browser, that's the whole point! It's my browser and I've tailored it to myself and my requirements. The one thing that is striking every time I try to use chrome/chromium is just how limited the addon functionality is and how much less freedom the user has. Have you seen "treestyletabs" implementation on chrome? It's a whole other window that has to be started and p…

> I want the addons to have full control over my browser I can assure you that you only want this if you can guarantee that your add-ons only do what they claim, don't have security vulnerabilities, and are never acquired and maliciously updated. Otherwise, a permissionless add-on model means a bug in TreeStyleTabs could potentially be used to exfiltrate your entire password database, plant malicious binaries on your…

"Firefox will not have this limitation."

Can you clarify/elaborate? Last I heard, UI modification by web extensions was still unconfirmed at best.

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#156

Post by Animats »

Firefox has 6.6% market share in browsers.[1] By the time Firefox 57 comes out, Firefox may not matter. Supporting Yahoo Search as the default didn't help.

Mozilla is dropping not only the old XUL interface, but the new Jetpack/Add-on SDK interface that's only worked right for about four years. Dropping XUL make sense; the mobile version of Firefox never supported XUL anyway. But there's no reason to drop Jetpack. That's essentially the same as the WebExtensions API, but with different names for the API calls.

I'll probably convert my one remaining add-on, but it's not really worth it.

[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#157

Post by jessaustin »

hoschicz wrote: post #45
darklajid wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use the LTS (Extended Support Release? Not sure about the Mozilla terminology) version. For a while..

It's called Firefox ESR

Is there a Patreon for that?

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#158

Post by aharju »

KeySnail[1] extension, which brings customizable Emacs and vi keys to Firefox, is the "killer app" I use Firefox for and it doesn't have a Chrome counterpart. Without this particular extension I wouldn't have a reason to keep using Firefox.

[1] https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki

Re: Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported

#160

Post by falcolas »

kibwen wrote: post #99
falcolas wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fix. It's not the only fix. I postulate that it's probably not even the best fix for Firefox. > Instead of allowing open access to the internals of Firefox, which will never be secure Android, iOS, and many other OSes do this all the time via rather granular ACLs. It can be done. All analogies are flawed - but Firefox is closing the theaters by completely killing off their add-on interface in exchange for a…

> Android, iOS, and many other OSes do this all the time via rather granular ACLs. If it were that simple, then the Chrome team would simply have asked the Android team to provide their expertise in designing Chrome's extension API. And of course, it's not like Android provides apps unrestricted access to the hardware (there's a reason that people bother to root their phones). Firefox addons are currently less restri…

> the Chrome team would simply have asked the Android team to provide their expertise in designing Chrome's extension API

Chrome's choice to not use such ACLs has no bearing on whether it is possible or reasonable for a web browser to use. Chrome is not the be-all-end-all of browser technology.

> Firefox addons are currently less restricted than Android apps.

And that's what could be changed. The lack of restrictions in the current state doesn't mean that it can't (or that it shouldn't) change.

Post reply on HN