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Firefox Will Run Chrome Extensions
An anonymous reader writes: Today Mozilla announced some big changes to its extension support. Their new addon API, WebExtensions, is mostly compatible with the extension model used by Chrome and Opera. In short, this means we'll soon see cross-platform browser extensions. They say, "For some time we've heard from add-on developers that our APIs could be better documented and easier to use. In addition, we've noticed that many Firefox add-on developers also maintain a Chrome, Safari, or Opera extension with similar functionality. We would like add-on development to be more like Web development: the same code should run in multiple browsers according to behavior set by standards, with comprehensive documentation available from multiple vendors."
... Firefox will be Chrome. Anyone who cared about extensive browser customization will simply abandon their addons. Why keep recoding them on Mozilla's whim?
For anyone who still cares about this stuff, the time to jump is most certainly NOW. I don't even think SeaMonkey is good enough - Pale Moon is a totally clean break.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
How about they upgrade it so it can run Firefox extensions?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Interoperability means everybody will start developing extensions solely for Chrome, since it's less work to make one build for every browser. So what's the point of Firefox after that happens?
I advocate for Pale Moon and Chromium. They're both FLOSS. Firefox no longer is, because it has integrated third-party binaries (Netflix DRM, Pocket). Consequently, Firefox is now less secure (see http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... ). This is also to say nothing about the build-in advertisements that read your browsing history, and the awful performance chokes it suffers from.
I have only one question about this move:
Will AdBlock Plus and NoScript still work? Chrome's extension model simply doesn't give extensions the control necessary to implement something like NoScript, which is literally the only reason I still use Firefox. Otherwise, there's no point: Firefox is the slowest, least memory efficient browser out there. It regularly breaks several GB of memory after only a day's use. In fact, Firefox is already up to nearly 3GB of memory use, which is somewhat worrying for a 32-bit process. Looks like I'm going to have to quit and restart after this comment.
I can make do without AdBlock Plus (there's always hosts, Firefox can't kill that), but I can only imagine this move is driven by the marketers in charge of Firefox to kill extensions like NoScript and AdBlock Plus.
The sole advantage of Firefox over Chrome these days is the fact that it's add-on SDK allows addons to modify just about any part of the browser. Chrome extensions are extremely limited in what they do. How will things like FileZilla work with this new API?
I'm convinced that either the Mozilla Foundation is run by complete mental midgets or plants by Google who are determined to sabotage the browser until the whole foundation shuts down.
FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.
I use firefox as my primary browser and it continues to serve my needs better than any of the alternatives. It's available on linux unlike IE or Safari and for my needs at least it is less buggy than Chrome. Google can't seem to stop breaking things in Chrome and while they usually fix them it's annoying in the meantime. I see no meaningful speed or performance differences between the major browsers. Firefox seldom has site compatibility issues. While I won't argue that FF is without warts, it is to my mind the best available option at this time. That may change of course but I don't see anything better out there for my needs at present.
It started as an effort to be lighter and faster than the old Mozilla suite. I actually like the mail client...
At one time I did too. However it stagnated and I move on to other things. 12 years have passed since the project was started and the web has evolved substantially since then. Things have gotten more complex and so has the software to deal with them. This isn't 2002 and expecting the software to be the same is kind of silly.
Completely lost sight of what they'd been trying to do.
What they originally were trying to do is not as relevant today. Perhaps you want a stripped down browser with minimal frills. That's fine but most of the rest of us are concerned with other things. So long as it let's me view the bits of the web I want and gives me options to configure to my particular quirks without crashing or causing problems, I don't really care if it takes up extra space or has a few features I don't use.
You are confused.
The problem of extensions breaking due to Firefox updates requires the solution of having a stable supported API for extensions to use. That is exactly what this announcement is about!
Mitchell Baker was never the CEO.
XUL was never great and almost everything good in XUL has been incorporated into Web standards supported across browsers (e.g. CSS flexbox).
Amazon recently started doing something pathological where they restyle and relayout their search results page every 100ms. The particular restyling and relayout scenarios happened to be very well optimized in Chrome, but not Firefox, so less noticeable in Chrome (though still waking up and doing unnecessary work every 100ms). The optimizations are mostly implemented in Firefox nightly, and will be completely implemented very soon, but obviously it takes a little while for them all to reach the release channel :-(. (And would take even longer if we didn't have that rapid update cycle that other people complain about in the comments in this article!)