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Mozilla to Remove Legacy Firefox Add-Ons From Add-On Portal in Early October (bleepingcomputer.com)
Mozilla announced today plans to remove all Firefox legacy add-ons from the official Mozilla add-ons portal in early October. From a report: The move comes after Mozilla updated the Firefox core to use a new add-ons system based on the Chrome-compatible WebExtensions API. This new add-ons API replaced Firefox's old XUL-based add-ons API in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57. All Firefox legacy add-ons stopped working in Firefox 57, but Mozilla continued to support them in the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) 52 branch. Support for Firefox ESR 52 will end on September 5, in two weeks, meaning there won't be any official Firefox version that supports legacy add-ons anymore.
Two things keep me on Firefox 52:
1. Debian's preference for the oldest supported ESR version
2. The fact that Mozilla still hasn't fixed bug 1325692 that blocks WebExtension-based successors to Keybinder from being able to effectively unbind the Ctrl+Q=quit shortcut on Linux
I suspect 99% of developers are sick of Mozilla breaking their extensions ans simply won't bother.
Only the really famous ones will be updated. Anything new will simply be coin-miners disguised as youtube downloaders.
No sig today...
The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?
There seems to be little evidence that they made any serious attempt at this at all, beyond the top N very high visibility extensions.
The main advantage of using Firefox, other than not using Google's browser with its questionable privacy implications, was how customisable it was. There have been five major releases with WebExtensions now, and after the first two, not a single thing I missed from before has been fixed. Being able to save files directly to places outside the downloads directory, customising parts of the UI like the bookmark dropdown so they're bigger than postage stamps, disabling things like JS or animated GIFs without reloading the whole page... I'm still waiting for a tab tree extension that actually works properly.
To add insult to injury, my previously 100% stable for years Firefox probably crashes out on startup every third or fourth time I load it, then does some half-baked restore of the tabs from the previous session that apparently closed down properly, then needs restarting again. Either Firefox itself is quite badly broken for the past couple of versions, or one of the much more limited number of extensions I now have installed is destabilising it, but wasn't the point of the new architecture that crippled all those extensions that at least they would be fast and reliable now?
Firefox is no longer my default browser for everyday use as a direct result of this farce, but since I still have to use all the major browsers professionally, it would be nice if they could at least undo some of the damage.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
On the contrary, I'm actually going back to Firefox after being on PaleMoon for years. The new add-on system, improved security/performance and especially the built in privacy enhancements make it worth using again.
PaleMoon is okay but a couple of things piss me off about it. Firstly their update system is broken. Sometimes when you update it forgets your settings and uninstalls your add-ons. Whatever the add-on update mechanism is seems to be broken too. A while back an update deleted a lot of people's bookmarks too.
The other issue is performance. The most recent update fixed a problem with images not loading (!) but it still has problems.
PaleMoon always had poor compatibility with extensions and now that Firefox is ditching the old ones it will only get worse. For example you need a modified version of GreaseMonkey and it's old, and now basically unmaintained as the upstream project drops support for the codebase. uBlock is the same, all the work is on the new Firefox/Chrome extension API.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC