Big Changes From Mozilla Mean Firefox Will Get Chrome Extensions

Posted by timothy on Saturday August 22, 2015 @07:36AM from the can't-please-everyone-all-the-time dept.

Mozilla announced yesterday a few high-level changes to the way Firefox and Firefox extensions will be developed; among them, the introduction of "a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers." (Liliputing has a nice breakdown of the changes.) ZDNet reports that at the same time, "Mozilla will be deprecating XPCOM and XUL, the foundations of its extension system, and many Firefox developers are ticked off at these moves."

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Re:The End by SeaFox · 2015-08-22 08:42 · Score: 4, Informative

In 2-3 years Firefox will be nothing more than another shitty Chrome clone. I can only hope this absurd move leads to a serious fork of the browser that focuses on getting back to the original goals of Firefox.
That already exists in Pale Moon. It avoids the Australis interface that is just a clone of Chome's toolbar style, doesn't have the new start tile page with the "suggested" additions, or Pocket, or the earlier "social" additions.
What it needs is more developers and a plan on how to move forward and improve the browser until it stops being a tweaked third-party Firefox.