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Mozilla Will Deprecate XUL Add-ons Before the End of 2017
Artem Tashkinov writes: Mozilla has published a plan of add-ons deprecation in future Firefox releases. Firefox 53 will run in multi process mode by default for all users with some exceptions. Most add ons will continue to function, however certain add ons have already ceased to function because they don't expect multi user mode under the hood. Firefox 54-56 will introduce even more changes which will ultimately break even more addons. Firefox 57, which will be preliminarily released on the 28th of Novermber, 2017, will only run WebExtensions: which means no XUL (overlay) add ons, no bootstrapped extensions, no SDK extensions and no Embedded WebExtensions. In other words by this date the chromification of Firefox will have been completed. If you depend on XUL add ons your only choice past this date will be Pale Moon.
Why bother using this bloated browser when it drops support for the incredible addon library it's accumulated over the years? Without customization, what exactly does Firefox offer over Chrome?
The justification they've given for removing classic extension support is that they depend too much on the internals of Firefox, for the same reason they also said they're a security risk.
They are valid technical reasons. Most people would agree that making extensions use a stable API decoupled from the browser's internals is a good thing for stability and compatibility in the long run.
But, and this is a very big but, that means many popular current extensions can't just be made to work with the new APIs. Also, the ones that can be adapted will probably need a good amount of work. The result is that many extension developers have said they will abandon their extensions.
Also, since those powerful extensions are one of the reasons many people keep using Firefox that will surely suppose a big hit on their maket share and that's the last thing Firefox needs.
Their stated mission is to fight to keep the web open, if nobody uses their browser they'll have no money and no influence and hence they can't fulfill their mission.
I know this must've been a hard decision to make at Mozilla but I feel it's not the right one.
This year, Mozilla Will Remove the #2 reason everyone started using Firefox in the first place.
Copying Chrome has been a bad strategy, and killing XUL is one of their worst decisions ever. I'm waiting for the announcement that Firefox will become a re-branded Chrome, like Opera. Yay for software monoculture!
The new WebExtensions API is capable of many things but there is going to be a lot of lost capabilities. There are some pages comparing the capabilities and you'll find WebExtensions is lacking in many areas.
WebExtensions versus XUL/XPCOM extensions - see "Services.jsm API" table.
WebExtensions versus Add-on SDK - see "Low-level APIs" table
I don't know if Firefox will recover from this kind of seismic shift in APIs. Let's just hope they were rarely utilized parts of the API or that they are currently developing new replacements for the parts that people loved.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If only they listened to ME they would succeed!
If I wanted to run Chrome browser, I would have installed Chrome and not FireFox.
The entire point of using their software was that I wanted to use their software, not something else...
I won't tell them or make my own {software} lest I be shown that my needs aren't the needs of everyone.
Why tell them for a hundredth and one time?
After telling them our needs a hundred times, and their staff delete the forum post or close the ticket or ban you from their support form for asking a "After version X how do I do Y" - we pretty much got the hint that they don't WANT to hear our needs.
Personally I ran FireFox for exactly two reasons:
It was light on resources and faster than alternatives, and for the many thousands of addons available to handle any want or need I've ever had.
Now firefox is more bloated than even IE let alone pretty much all other browsers in existence (except perhaps Chrome itself, as they play leap-frog in who is slightly faster every few weeks)
And now they are basically killing addon support.
If I needed no addon support I would be using IE, which has had the feature of no addons since the very start :P
You do a great job of outlining the pros and cons. That said, I do have to disagree that this isn't the right move. I would argue that it is in fact the right move; it's just that the right move is the most painful move.
Firefox is a wonderful browser. But I fear we're losing sight of just how limited its legacy core is. Legacy Firefox offers no threading, no privilege separation, and no meaningful isolation between tabs or windows.
The browser-as-an-OS concept is no longer a gag, but the actual reality of how browsers work. Browsers are expected to do everything from executing code (JS) to graphics (WebGL) to video (HTML5, etc). Furthermore they are being treated as a multitasking operating system - via multiple tabs - with those tabs all competing for resources. Worse, some of those tabs may be hostile to the system or to other tabs.
This is something Legacy Firefox is ill prepared for, and in doing so it's the odd man out among the major browsers. Legacy Firefox is the MacOS Classic of browsers; a time-tested piece of software with parts going back to the earliest days of the Web. But like OSes 15 to 20 years ago, the world has moved on; it's akin to MacOS Classic going up against MacOS X/WinXP/Linux. The lack of real, preemptive multitasking and security has become a major liability, and becomes downright embarrassing when you realize that Microsoft of all companies was doing things like putting their browser in a low-privilege context a decade ago. Similarly embarrassing is the fact that a single runaway tab can take out the whole browser!
But all is not lost. Firefox can and is being upgraded with electrolysis (e10k). e10k Firefox has taken far too long to be developed - Mozilla should have been working in earnest on this a decade ago - but at long last it's here. And it finally brings with it all of the threading and isolation features that will make the browser safer and more reliable. Or more to the point, it will make the browser competitive in these respects with Edge/Safari/Chrome.
However just like giving up MacOS Classic meant giving up the OS's legacy applications, there is a price to pay for giving up Legacy Firefox: XUL and legacy add-ons. XUL is incredibly powerful, but the Moz devs have laid out a very good case for why it (and the rest of the legacy add-on system) can't be used with e10k Firefox. There's no concept of threading or safety; it's an API that has an unsafe level of access to the browser and can't handle being split up among threads. Its power is why we power users love it so much, but that power is dangerous. Worse, maintaining that power ultimately gets in the way of operating the browser with a safer multi-threaded environment.
And I won't dance around the issue: losing XUL and the legacy add-on system is going to be painful. Just losing the Classic Theme Restorer alone is going to be complete and total hell for this crowd. Never mind the other add-ons that enhance privacy, block ads, and do so many other nifty things. And not all of those add-ons can be remade for e10k Firefox, since they rely on a level of power that will no longer exist.
But you know what? It has to happen. Just like with MacOS Classic, at some point we have to stop using an archaic, unsafe environment origially designed around unitasking in order to move on to something better that can actually fulfill our needs. Even if we were to explicitly design/limit Firefox to Slashdot-level power users - and I would argue that doing so would ultimately be the end of the browser - it's still not in our interest to be using a browser that, at the end of the day, relies on cooperative multitasking. It's a crappy (if not horrific) execution paradigm for the real world. And while I admire the Pale Moon devs for what they're doing, Pale Moon just prolongs the problem. We still have to face this demon some day, if not today.
Is it goi