Add-ons in 2017

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/11/23/add-ons-in-2017/

by nachtigall • 10 years ago

136 119 10 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

morinted2• 10 years ago

I'd love some figures on whether the main popular extensions will continue working, as well as how many in the Firefox Add-ons site are already web extensions.

I'm curious about my mains:

- Classic theme restorer

- uBlock

- DownThemAll

- Markdown Here

As I'm already using electrolysis, I know Markdown Here basically doesn't work. How I can check whether things will break or not.

Amezarak• 10 years ago

I think it's safe to say that many if not most popular extensions will be provided API support and converted over.

I think the real issue is that innovation in the extension space is effectively over - the Firefox extension system is so vibrant because anything was possible. Now Mozilla is reducing the possibility space to that which is provided by the much more limited WebExtensions and adding in support for existing popular extensions. But new extensions, doing things yet undreamed of, will no longer be possible.

I'm not sure what the distinguishing features of Firefox will be moving into the future. More and more, I think it's becoming Just Another Browser, with a better ideology behind it. Well, that's not a winning formula. I'm really disappointed and I don't know what to do other than stay on old versions of Firefox as long as I can.

vanni2• 10 years ago

About DownThemAll:

http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-end-of-downthemall/

oblio• 10 years ago

That article is more than 1 year old. And Mozilla is going beyond the Chrome APIs, they are implementing shims and additional APIs to port almost everything over.

detaro3• 10 years ago

uBlock and Markdown Here also exist for Chrome, so they'll very likely work or be ported.

The DownThemAll devs have been very vocal about "WebExtensions being the likely end of DownThemAll", although I don't know if due to understandable unwillingness to redo a lot of their work or actual technical limitations.

Classic theme restorer probably relies on XUL/features unlikely to be re-implemented, see dev response to this review https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/classicthemerest....

Ironically the long-term ideas of having a HTML based GUI could enable heavy modification again, at least in modified "distributions" of FF? Doesn't solve the now/next year though :/

tn1239• 10 years ago

I am the DownThemAll! developer. First and foremost it's technical limitations, other than that it's also time.

bhrgunatha• 10 years ago

Mozilla have said they will adapt Web Extensions along with consulting add-on developers in order to bring along the maximum number of add-ons.

For me, if DownThemAll isn't one of them, I'll either stay with the last compatible version of firefox or, more likely switch to one of the alternatives that does support it and the others that have become such an integral part of my browsing behaviour.

I've been burned so often by the changes made in recent years, so much so that I have next to zero loyalty to them anymore. And I've been using firefox since the browser was still part of the Mozilla suite.

myfonj2• 10 years ago

You can consult https://www.arewee10syet.com/ ; seems authors are mostly showing some efforts to migrate their extensions. CTR: seems OK, uBlock: uBockO: seems OK, DTA: bug, but at least tries to be e10s compatible, Mardown here: unknown (supposedly not compatible?)

You can try yourself: either install https://nightly.mozilla.org/ and load it with your addons (it uses different profile) or use your stable one and look at about:support page for "Multiprocess Windows" cell if it states 1/1 and does not mention "(Disabled by add-ons)" you are covered. You can try some about:config alterations [0] to force it if you are adventurous. In this case, it might be nice to install "Add-on Compatibility Reporter" [1] for tracking and sharing your findings.

[0] http://superuser.com/questions/1096974/how-to-check-if-multi... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

yoodenvranx• 10 years ago

Total Mozilla noob here: Tab Mix Plus shows up as compatible. Does that mean that I will be able to use it with the new extension system?

majewsky• 10 years ago

Careful. The e10s transition is a much smaller step than the move to WebExtensions. To witness, notice how (higher up in this thread) the DTA developer once again said that there will be no DTA as a WebExtension.

gorhill• 10 years ago

uBlock Origin was first developed as a Chromium extension, so converting to WebExtensions API is a non-issue. There is currently a dev build for the WebExtension version of uBlock Origin in the latest release.[1]

FYI, uBlock is abandonware[2].

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases (search for "webext")

[2] https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/releases ("released this on 31 May 2015")

morinted2• 10 years ago

Thanks for your comment. I should have specified uBlock Origin; I meant it as, as you said, uBlock is abandonware.

dvh• 10 years ago

RSS reader, Another RSS reader, Dictionary, something for user scripts, domain white list, Another dictionary, Gmail checker, uBlock origin. 4 of those extensions are my own. NIH much :(

_pdp_2• 10 years ago

The decline of XUL started around 2009. I spent months building a very complex app around XULRunner only to find out that Mozilla had no interest to support the technology in the future.

So I decided to leave the platform and put my efforts on native and web and frankly it was a good decision.

The WebExtensions API is no match to XUL and XPCOM but I only hope that now that we have Mozilla behind the technology we will see further API improvements.

vdfs• 10 years ago

Google is behind WebExtensions API (aka Chrome Extension API) Mozilla is behind XUL/XPCOM and look were we are now ;)

sudshekhar• 10 years ago

I decided to leave the platform and put my efforts on native and web

For the sake of curiosity, did you create extensions as side-projects/startup ideas? Do people pay for extensions or are we talking about patreon funds here (Or startups like pocket whose extensions are ways to get more crowds).

_pdp_2• 10 years ago

It was a desktop app that was based on top of XULRunner and yes it was for profit and people payed for it. I have no experience with selling extensions but I would imagine it is a very hard market to crack unless it is targeted towards enterprise customers.

Based on my experience, I can only advise not to base your entire business model on browser extensions as you will become dependent on platform moves (again unless enterprise).

newscracker• 10 years ago

I hope the "end of 2017" deadline is flexible to change based on what's supported and what's not supported for current extensions. As people have said on the comments on the Mozilla blog post, Firefox will die without the popular extensions, of which there are many. Even today, Firefox extensions are far ahead of extensions on other browsers in what's available and how well they function.

speps• 10 years ago

Anyone knows about the fate of SeaMonkey? It's still based on XUL as far as I know and supports a lot of existing Firefox extensions.

mgbmtl• 10 years ago

There are constant references on forums to how they want to move away from XUL, for both Firefox and Thunderbird. XUL works, but I feel like very people are able to improve the guts of XUL, and that can be a huge risk for the future of the project. Pale Moon seems to be the main contender willing to maintain XUL, but presumably not improve it (changes to XUL can break extensions).

As someone working on another free software project with an aging code base, we see this debate all the time: limited funds, limited interest to maintain the old core, but users rely on it. However, users also want performance improvements, more reliability, new features... not to mention what do you do when security issues pop up. At some point you need to cut your losses and find a model easier to maintain.

hsivonen• 10 years ago

Has anyone taken the Firefox security advisories since Pale Moon forked and checked how well Pale Moon has addressed the vulnerabilities?

hucker4• 10 years ago

Extensions is currently the only thing FF is better than the competition at, and they scrap it to copy Chrome APIs... I just can't understand why they would scrap XUL-based extensions before their new APIs reach feature parity. The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

laurent123456• 10 years ago

I can see where they're coming from though. Today, developers need to create two versions of their extensions - one that works on Safari, Chrome and Opera (and Edge?) and one specifically for Firefox.

As the market share of Firefox is not that high, maybe extension developers eventually won't be bothered with supporting that extra version, which means Firefox extensions will be less up-to-date and there will be less of them.

That's probably a trade off they have to make, though I imagine they're aware that some add-ons won't work and that users will be annoyed by that.

hucker4• 10 years ago

That's an argument for providing similar/the same APIs as Chrome et al sure, but not for deprecating the old ones.

Endy• 10 years ago

Then stop developing free software for Google. Be Firefox and/or Pale Moon exclusive. Problem solved.

emptyfile• 10 years ago

Lunacy

Yoric6• 10 years ago

Well, XUL-based extensions are not scraped yet. They will, at some point in 2017, but we're not there yet.

The reason to scrape them is simple: the total API surface of XUL-based extensions is pretty much all of the internal APIs of Firefox, which means that any change anywhere in the code of Firefox breaks some extension accidentally. That's a compatibility burden that Mozilla could afford when the only competitor was IE, but it makes the development of Firefox much less nimble than that of Chrome & co. So a new, less invasive and more future-proof API is sorely needed.

nathancahill• 10 years ago

Surely the burden is on the extension developers and not Mozilla?

hucker4• 10 years ago

So, will extensions like pentadactyl or Tree Style Tabs be able to exist after "some point in 2017"? Ignoring rewrite time etc., will there be APIs available to do what they do today?

the84723• 10 years ago

is pretty much all of the internal APIs of Firefox,

But that's also what makes them more powerful than any other extension API.

If your box is airtight then there is no out-of-the-box thinking.

An almost trivial example: Internal APIs can inspect the current (as-enforced) sandboxing flags of an iframe. Which is not the same as the sandboxing HTML attributes on the frame, because those can be changed without effect after loading and also due to inheritance of sandboxing effects.

This tiny tiny tidbit is useful when making content-filtering decisions.

And it is just one among countless others.

gsnedders2• 10 years ago

And, related to this, it makes it easier to move to Servo's layout code in the future, as it avoids Servo having to implement XUL and XBL.

tn1239• 10 years ago

Firefox always broke stuff, since the very beginning. Mayor stuff, sometimes for no good reason, sometimes for very good reasons. Add-on developers learned to deal with it. A lot of add-on developers now have an alternative in WebExtensions, which will ease that pain indeed.

But those developers that cannot or will not use WebExtensions (e.g. I will not/can not port most/any of my add-ons incl. DownThemAll!), but probably would manage breaking changes (I did that for more than a decade now), are left in the cold, rainy dark now.

Macha• 10 years ago

which means that any change anywhere in the code of Firefox breaks some extension accidentally

So to fix this they're going to break every extension.

I think it's a fair assumption given how long the current extension API has been around that there will be more extensions that will die to disinterest or inability to move to WebExtensions than have been broken by all firefox releases from 4.0 to date.

jvehent• 10 years ago

pentadactyl is co-developed by a member of the Firefox Add-ons core team [1]. I don't know what the plan is to port it to web extensions, but at least you can be sure the team is aware of it ;)

[1] https://github.com/5digits/dactyl/graphs/contributors

alphapapa5• 10 years ago

The day pentadactyl stops working is the day I stop using firefox.

I'm with you. We should start moving to Pale Moon before the end comes.

dri_ft• 10 years ago

Didn't Pentadactyl stop working a while ago? For a while I was trying to keep it working, making the necessary changes on every firefox update, but eventually it got too much for me and I switched over to VimFX. At first I didn't think it would be satisfactory, but it actually is a quite good 80% solution. What seemed to be a weakness - the fact that it doesn't aggressively change how the browser works - now seems like a good design decision, making it considerably more robust than Pentadactyl/Vimperator in the face of the changes Mozilla is making, even at the cost of some of Pentadactyl/Vimperator's more advanced functionality.

hucker4• 10 years ago

Apart from having to manually up the maxVersion every now and then (and rebuilding from source), pentadactyl has Just Worked™ for me.

eitland2• 10 years ago

One of them answered here and IIRC what (s)he said was that they won't cut off the old APIs until every popular extension can be upgraded to the new api.

So it was less of providing a poor api like Chrome and more like creating a newer and better API that also happens to be a superset of Chromes API.

teh• 10 years ago

I just migrated a complex extension and with Firefox 52 most features are there. It was a bit painful but the new API is much better IMO. Also, we now have one code base less to maintain.

nachtigall• 10 years ago

Interesting. Mind sharing a link to your add-on?

anotheryou2• 10 years ago

Old or complex add-ons are what keep me with firefox. Will switch to qutebrowser¹ and probably chrome as my backup for what the cutie can't handle.

¹keyboard goodness: https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser

akkartik2• 10 years ago

Thanks for that pointer! I've been off Firefox for the past six months since they broke my private feedreader extension[1]. I'd been using Opera but I'm typing this out on qutebrowser.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287049

anotheryou2• 10 years ago

It's still quite young and you feel it at times, beware :)

aq3cn• 10 years ago

You can also try Vivaldi when something does not work in qutebrowser as it has support for single key keyboard shortcut s. I recently voted for native vim mode in Vivaldi reddit feature request thread. Worth checking out.

BoringCode• 10 years ago

As an addon developer, this annoys me. I've had to port my addons to different APIs twice in the last couple of years. Hopefully this is the end for a while.

wiiittttt• 10 years ago

Only accepting WebExtension based add-ons while not yet fully implementing the Chrome API seems like it would lead to a large number of unsupported add-ons.

Illniyar3• 10 years ago

As always, the only question for me is whether tree style tabs is going to work with WebExtenstions.

If not, then say hello to people staying with firefox 56 for years.

mistermann• 10 years ago

Is there still nothing comparable on Chrome? Is it not possible for some reason?

Illniyar3• 10 years ago

Chrome had it, but they killed the feature a few years back and are intentionally not bringing it back because of the low user adoption.

There are some hacks that open a new window with tabs, and resizes the main window to put it side by side, but it doesn't feel right.

Or at least that was the case the last time I looked a year or two ago.

Edit: also, yes, from what I understand, the WebExtenstions Api in Chrome does not allow these modifications.

tversteeg• 10 years ago

There is a native vertical tab feature in Test Pilot, the downside is that it doesn't support nesting (yet?).

Illniyar3• 10 years ago

What is Test Pilot? Another release channel?

bitL• 10 years ago

If I can't use Ghostery, Blend In, No Resource Leak (or they are watered down), I see no use for Firefox. Please Mozilla, don't kill some of your biggest attractions! You copied UI from Chrome, now you are copying Add-Ons, why would anyone need to use your product then? Aren't you shooting into your own feet? When are you going to pull off Opera and just skin Chrome differently?

smonff• 10 years ago

Firefox was supposed to be "slow" and they are trying to fix it radically with projects like e10s and Quantum.

If the browser is able to eat my RAM a bit less, I would be quite happy to have my add-ons off for some time.

Aardwolf• 10 years ago

I'm a bit worried that some lesser known extensions will be unimplementable... Would the following still be implementable?

"Open in Browser", which allows ignoring "content-disposition:attachment" to display pdf/image/txt in browser rather than save to disk

"Android Text Reflow", which allows wrapping text to fit the screen on Android after zooming in on a web-page

"Status-4-Evar", which adds back the status bar at the bottom of firefox

Thanks!

nv-vn• 10 years ago

And this is how Mozilla goes out. Their last remaining reason for existence is being destroyed. They've already gotten rid of Thunderbird, Tab Groups, full themes, and more, but left us with the things nobody wanted (Pocket, Hello, etc.). They've also slowly let performance go in many places, seemingly.

A few years ago, I switched to Firefox for precisely the set of features they've axed. It was also much faster than the alternatives for me, used much less RAM, and rarely locked up. Since then, I've seen performance decline, RAM usage ramp up, and watched the browser lock up nearly once every hour. At this point, I'm probably just gonna go to Chrome. What's the point if Firefox is just gonna be a shitty clone?

kigbljnkgk• 10 years ago

Try waterfox

jhasse4• 10 years ago

What do you mean by "full themes"? There are many different themes available for Firefox which still work with v50.

eitland2• 10 years ago

Not an expert but I think modern themes only style the top of the browser while traditional themes could style anything possibly including content.

asddddd• 10 years ago

I have to disagree, Firefox is in a much better position than a few years ago. RAM usage is lower, e10s works nicely. Tab Groups was spun out into an addon; a sensible decision for a feature extremely few people used. Test Pilot is a better solution for testing features like this.

Very relevant to this thread, addons and plugins are a huge cause of poor performance - I ran into this a while back, where an addon was leaking memory via zombie tabs. Have you tried disabling addons?

FatalBaboon• 10 years ago

I find firefox to be faster and less hungry than before as well. And let us not forget about the privacy killer-feature.

Also if you find firefox to be slow, try it with addons disabled (firefox --safe-mode).

MrBuddyCasino• 10 years ago

> performance decline, RAM usage ramp up

Thats what they want to fix by getting rid of XUL, among other things.

weaksauce• 10 years ago

Poorly written addons were precisely the reason that firefox got a bad rap in the past. I hope webextensions being more common and restricted will help this out.

jhasse4• 10 years ago

Doesn't make sense, since XUL has always been there, even when the RAM usage has been lower (if that is true as the OP states).

Sylos4• 10 years ago

If you have significant lock-ups once an hour, you should troubleshoot. Probably one of your add-ons causing the issue. Your RAM usage might very well go down with that as well, and if you disable a few of your add-ons during troubleshooting, chances are also that Electrolysis (multiprocess) will get enabled for you, which should significantly improve performance.

Grollicus• 10 years ago

Man I will be so sad if they finally manage to kill TreeStyleTabs

Manishearth3• 10 years ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13031013 regarding Tree Style Tabs. I suspect it will work in the new system.

HemantPawar• 10 years ago

So they are going to scrape their best selling feature. I'm just curious to know why you will use Firefox over Chrome? Privacy from Google?

dbalan2• 10 years ago

Slightly OT: There is another problem that most people seems to miss. Add-ons in their current form in ff are tightly coupled to the browser to the point that it's the browser itself. In the modern web, the browser knows too much about you, and so does the add-on, and it's not unheard of them to explore it[1]

How does that free webpage to PDF converter add-on make money? By selling your web history of course.

[1] https://www.google.de/amp/thehackernews.com/2016/11/web-of-t...

EDIT: added OT tag

jhasse4• 10 years ago

Web history is also available to WebExtensions, so I don't see how this is relevant to people missing XUL/SDK addons?

dbalan2• 10 years ago

Added OT tag, I was not comparing webextensions, pointing out, this is still an unsolved problem.

jmiserez• 10 years ago

Wondering if/how Zotero and similar applications will exist beyond 2017. Will they need to fork Firefox?

_lm_• 10 years ago

Zotero will work the way it does with Chrome now: there will be a plugin that integrates with Zotero Standalone, which will continue to be developed using XULRunner.

I think this will be good in the long run--Zotero is complex enough to merit being its own application, and separating Zotero and browser plugins will make it easier to migrate Zotero off XULRunner at some point, if the developers choose to do so.

pasbesoin• 10 years ago

There may be a lot of components and interests involved in this change.

As a user of, not developer for, Firefox with its extensions, it's this simple for me: The day my existing extensions stop working -- the day neither they nor an alternative under the new paradigm offer equivalent functionality -- is the day I no longer have any reason to stay with Firefox.

I'm not saying, "Stop, wait, a user is unhappy!"

I'm simply saying that, as a perhaps sophisticated user with some more advanced functionality, security, and privacy concerns, the set of extensions I currently use is my only compelling reason for using Firefox over Chrome.

Well, that and Google/Chrome's current trend towards its own version of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish wrapped within a panopticon.

I embrace the browser as the user client. I'm glad to have security issues addressed, but I also require that the browser do what I want, and not what -- a la Chrome, for example -- media interests want to dictate.

I'm watching 2017 with trepidation, and wonder whether and when something may fork. Not unrealistically, though; I'm skeptical any fork is going to have the resources and commitment to maintain a modern, full-featured browser in the face of current and future... err, developments.

Maybe such a fork will, both of desire and of necessity, look instead towards a bit of minimalism. Not doing "everything", but doing core functionality well and securely.

I guess then we'd have to see whether the content farms with their Javascript++, DRM delivered content, end up leaving such a fork too much out in the cold for it to maintain sufficient interest and/or usefulness to keep itself going.

brudgers2• 10 years ago

What, if anything, does this mean for GreaseMonkey?

duskwuff2• 10 years ago

Tampermonkey works fine on Chrome, so probably very little.

brudgers2• 10 years ago

TamperMonkey is not equivalent to GreaseMonkey in terms of development workflow because TamperMonkey stores scripts in a database and pretty much requires use of its built in editor which is of 'built-in-editor' quality. On the other hand, GreaseMonkey stores scripts in files and therefore allows any editor/IDE to be used in the development workflow.

Because scripts are stored in a database, TamperMonkey does not play swimmingly with GIT either. Finally, TamperMonkey is a third party tool that from time to time asks for money. GreaseMonkey is open-source.

The TamperMonkey EULA:

Your right to use Tampermonkey continues until terminated by the Company, which may terminate this Agreement and your license to use Tampermonkey at any time, without cause and without notice. You may terminate this agreement at any time by uninstalling Tampermonkey. This Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any of the terms of this EULA. Upon termination, you agree to stop using and to uninstall Tampermonkey.

Animats• 10 years ago

"By the end of 2017, and with the release of Firefox 57, we’ll move to WebExtensions exclusively, and will stop loading any other extension types on desktop. To help ensure any new extensions work beyond the end of 2017, AMO will stop accepting any new extensions for signing that are not WebExtensions in Firefox 53."

Based on Mozilla's track record, that's too soon. It took about three years after the announcement of the Jetpack API before it worked right.

threepipeproblm• 10 years ago

People inside institutions tend to have trouble admitting when they're wrong. They basically don't do it. So I fear for the worst with this.

Could be some kind of effort to fork the code and have users who care about Firefox rally around a non-hobbled version?

Add-ons in 2017

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