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.

Comments

Nails in the coffin

[sinij]

At this point they are just hammering additional nails into Firefox's coffin.

That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[UnknownSoldier]

Joking aside, is it REALLY that much a of a problem to keep Legacy extensions, sorry, "Add-Ons" on a different "space" of the website??? Are they afraid people will get "confused" and try to install them on the new version? Mozilla is losing out on the ability to see WHAT is popular and WHY it is popular. If they were smart they would provide alternative URLs for extensions that work in the new version. Too bad this "telemetry" data doesn't have any value for them.

I get it that they want to push everyone onto the latest shiny. Unfortunately, the harder they push, the more backlash there will be and people just go "Fuck it. I'll just use Pale Moon, etc." where their extensions continue to work.

Guess it is just another sign of Mozilla continuing to jump the shark / nuke the fridge / etc. on slowly becoming irrelevant and losing touch with what people want in a browser.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the harder they push, the more backlash there will be and people just go "Fuck it. I'll just use Pale Moon, etc." where their extensions continue to work.

Guess it is just another sign of Mozilla continuing to jump the shark / nuke the fridge / etc. on slowly becoming irrelevant and losing touch with what people want in a browser.

The people running Mozilla completely lost their minds a few years ago and it's been nothing but a constant stream of "Fuck You" to users. Somehow, Firefox dropping to single digit market share hasn't been enough to convince them that butchering Firefox is a bad idea.

Instead, they seem to suffer from some sort of bizarre mental illness where the more people reject Firefox the more determined they become to fuck it up and make it useless and irrelevant.

So glad I switched to Palemoon a couple of years ago.

Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Alternatives

[slickwillie]

WaterFox and PaleMoon are FF alternatives that support the old add-ons. I wonder if the add-ons will be available somewhere else?

Re:Alternatives

[mi]

WaterFox and PaleMoon are FF alternatives

Yep. I symlinked ~/.mozilla/firefox as ~/.waterfox and the Waterfox-browser started right up. Things "just work" — the add-ons, which Firefox has earlier declared "obsolete", started to work again, etc.

many backups will now popup. who do you trust?

[denis-The-menace]

Thank you Mozilla.
The gold rush is now on to create clones of the Add-on website.

Who will we trust now that Mozilla is abandoning the legacy users?
PaleMoon?

Re:Used to be the best browser

[tepples]

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

Re:Pressing F.

[nmb3000]

Those, plus:

Classic Theme Restorer
LiveHTTPHeaders
Session Manager
Tab Mix Plus

Plus versions of NoScript, AdBlock+, Greasemonkey and Stylus (Stylish) with functionality and UI that's not hamstrung by WebExtensions limitations.

Better on Desktop

[PineHall]

Those numbers include Mobile and Tablets. Firefox does not have a presence on phones or tablets. Firefox has 11% market share on the Desktop. It does have a declining market share but it is not as bad as that 5% number.

!pulseaudio ?

[Freshly Exhumed]

Does Waterfox support ALSA without pulseaudio? I cannot seem to find an answer to that on the Waterfox site. Pale Moon works perfectly with ALSA on the lennart-freed Devuan and Heads systems I support.

Re:We need to take action against Moziilla

[Merk42]

Go ahead, it's FOSS, you'll all band together and make a great browser because you know what is the best and will completely satisfy everyone. Right? Any day now...

Re:Pressing F.

[Joce640k]

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.

Waterfox

[Artemis3]

Waterfox the developer mentioned somewhere that he made a backup of the addons.

Re:Pressing F.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:Pressing F.

[arglebargle_xiv]

Oh dear God Mozilla, why don't you just put a gun to your head and pull the trigger instead of putting everyone through this years-long, agonising death spiral.

Re:I understood every word in that summary

[jouassou]

Not a webmonkey, but I'll give you a layman's summary.

Firefox launched a new version 57 almost a year ago, which made broad changes to its core and architecture. Some users were very happy: it replaced parts of the rendering engine with some new stuff written in Rust ("Firefox Quantum"), which made the browser much faster. Other users were not very happy: they basically scrapped their entire plugin ecosystem, and adopted a chromium-like plugin API ("WebExtensions").

The upside is that by Firefox aligning themselves with the Chrome ecosystem, it's much easier to port plugins between them, which can be a boon since Firefox is not really that popular these days. But most people that use Firefox for non-political reasons do so because they love its plugin ecosystem, and were thus not happy with the change. Especially because some plugins turned out to be impossible to port, and some plugin authors were not interested in rewriting their projects from scratch.

Some Firefox-forks like Palemoon kept supporting the older plugin API, and Firefox also officially had an "Extended Support Release" that they kept around while waiting for plugin authors to rewrite their plugins with the new API. The last part of the saga is that Firefox has now ended their official support for these legacy versions, and removed the corresponding plugins from their repository.