Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Firefox Will Run Chrome Extensions

Posted by Soulskill on from the mi-casa-es-su-casa dept.

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."

19 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Never mind run Chrome extensions... by jez9999 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... 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.
    1. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by jez9999 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wow, a whole year. Sorry, where's the good news?

      --
      == Jez ==
      Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
    2. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by DarkOx · · Score: 3, Interesting

      FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.

      It started as an effort to be lighter and faster than the old Mozilla suite. I actually like the mail client, occasionally use composer to put something together quickly and Chatzilla is fine IRC client as often as I still want to use IRC. I stayed on the SeaMonkey side of the house on my personal systems this entire time.

      It was funny as hell to watch FF get bigger and more bloated than SeaMonkey, and its performance plummet. SeaMonkey's UI in the mean time only got faster with fixes and improvements and the browser just got better with all the gekko and js improvements that came downstream from the Firefox project. SeaMonkey was always the better browser for my particular needs, but after perhaps FF3 and later it was the better browser over Firefox for pretty much all the reason FF was selected over it in the first place. Completely lost sight of what they'd been trying to do.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    3. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you check out NoScript itself, you'll see that it's written using an XPCOM object. This update kills XPCOM, so, no, the new API will not allow NoScript. It can't block at the same level as NoScript, because Chrome offers no method to modify the DOM before the document finishes loading, which means scripts embedded in the document can't be blocked.

      So, yes, this absolutely kills NoScript in future versions of Firefox.

    4. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.

      It doesn't spy on you.

      Seriously, there was a time a few years back when many people (including me) switched away from Firefox because it had memory leaks, and didn't work very well. Now, it's a fine browser, and I don't understand why anyone would use Chrome over Firefox. Forget that spyware.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by mlts · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Another nice thing about FF is that it has its own FIPS compliant data stores for passwords as well as its own separate keystore. Chrome and IE use the system's keys on Windows.

      This is important, because if someone gets a bogus root CA into the Registry, Chrome and IE will happily honor it, while Firefox will stop and point it out.

      FF also provides password protection for the keystore data. This way, if FF is left unattended (and a timeout is set), an intruder can't just walk away with a user's password stash.

    6. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Informative

      Chrome does provide support for modifying the DOM before it finishes loading.

    7. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Mozilla, for the love of god, stop breaking APIs, you morons.

      That is the goal. The reason the 'API' kept breaking is because there wasn't an API at all: extensions were able to access the internal firefox code. Every time an internal function changed, it caused problems for extensions. Obviously that is bad, there needs to be a clear interface (like a wall) between the outside and the inside.

      Firefox here is finally making a good interface. Their plan is to extend the Chrome API so it contains all the functionality needed for current Firefox add-ons.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by chefmonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Mozilla, for the love of god, stop breaking APIs, you morons.

      That's actually the entire point of this move. The problem is that the current addon "API", such as it is, is literally every class in the entire freaking browser, which is an untenably huge and perpetually changing surface to maintain. The only way to keep the current API and stop breaking stuff constantly is to freeze all development on Firefox now and forever.

      That's not really a viable approach.

      The alternative is to come up with a more stable API surface, from the ground up, and provide a transition period for add-on developers to move from the large, unsupportable infrastructure to the stable one that won't be -- as you correctly observe -- constantly breaking.

      Rather than developing a new API, the add-ons team decided to leverage the work that Chrome has already done in this space, which has the nice side effect of making life much easier for developers who want to write cross-browser add-ons.

      One of the things that's getting lost in the noise here is that the portion of the API based on Chrome's current design is just the start. There will be additional API surface to enable some of the things that had been possible with the legacy wild-west-style Add-On approach. Since reading articles is not particularly trendy, I'll quote the relevant passage here:

      A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons cannot possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they currently exist. Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox extensions as possible.

    9. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by Darinbob · · Score: 3

      But Chrome is just as bizarre though. Both have utterly insane rapid fire update schedules designed to put features that benefit developers or developers' whims and not that of the customers. If I ditch Firefox it most definitely will never be for Chrome.

    10. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by roca · · Score: 3, Informative

      The old addons model isn't going away until the new model is as capable as the old model supports NoScript, the better-than-Chrome AdBlock, Tree Style Tabs, etc at least as well as the old model currently does. Although the new model is largely based on Chrome's extension API, we're not limited to that API; we're adding the features those extensions need even though Google didn't want to add them to Chrome.

    11. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

      in Chrome, I can do a shift-esc, and kill a lot of memory hogs per tab. No real way to do that in FF.

      about:memory estimates how much memory each tab is using. Close the hogs and then click "Minimize memory usage".

    12. Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... by Giorgio+Maone · · Score: 3, Informative

      Some hints at what's happening with NoScript, with my proposal to preserve the edge Firefox has over Chrome in terms of innovation through extensions, despite the limitations of a Chrome-compatible API: https://hackademix.net/2015/08...

      --
      There's a browser safer than Firefox, it is Firefox, with NoScript
  2. Old extensions by penguinoid · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  3. So what's the point of Firefox anymore? by LichtSpektren · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:So what's the point of Firefox anymore? by roca · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Pocket issues had no effect on Firefox users not actually using Pocket, i.e. you (I assume). Furthermore the Pocket integration code in Firefox is open source.

      The Adobe DRM module is closed source but integrated in the best way possible given the DRM requirements. You can delete the module without breaking anything except DRM. If you don't, the module is very tightly sandboxed so it can do nothing but decode video and audio. It is thus much more privacy and security friendly than, say, Flash. (You have already removed Flash, right?) I'm glad you don't want to watch Netflix, but it turns out a lot of people do, and "can't watch Netflix!" is not a great feature.

      The new Firefox extensions model will support extensions like Tree Style Tabs and better ad blocking than Chrome's API provides. We're not limiting ourselves to Chrome's API.

  4. Fucking morons by damicatz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Fucking morons by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      They are planning on extending the add-on API so it still has most of the functionality of the current add-ons. It will be much more sophisticated than what Chrome allows now.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  5. I like firefox over any of the alternatives. by sjbe · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.