Regarding the second big breakage of Firefox extensions

I can see Firefox is trying to get better. E10s was a great addition, before it Firefox could hang for several seconds trying to open heavy webpages. Hardware acceleration is not quite Chromium-tier yet, but it’s getting there, too…

But what’s the point of breaking every single extension for the second time? The first time was a necessity as they didn’t support multiprocess, but what’s wrong now? Are Mozilla unhappy that the extensions have too much functionality? Is it absolutely necessary to remove everything just because Chrome doesn’t have that? The functionality of Firefox extensions has become an everyday need of many Firefox users, else they wouldn’t be creating and installing those extensions in the first place. WebExtensions are a joke, even now WebExtension developers are asking Mozilla to implement functions that the “legacy” extentions always had. And I bet they won’t even get the functionality they ask for, Mozilla aren’t physically capable to satisfy the (ever-changing) needs of every single add-on developer. Unless, of course, most of the add-on developers leave - as some already did.

At this point, I can’t even update from 54.0a2 because something is broken in e10s (again). Nightly won’t let me use some of the extensions because they’re “incompatible with 56.0a1”. Stable and Beta won’t let me use unsigned extensions (and I wish to have the choice not to sign them, but hey, who’s gonna let me, it’s not like I’m using a free and customizable browser or anything).

If mouse gestures are going to be broken I don’t even know where to go. SeaMonkey? Stick to 54.0a2? Might as well get used to Chrome’s “implementation” of mouse gestures.

I know over 50% of Firefox users don’t even have any extensions installed, but that certainly doesn’t make extensions useless, and there is no reason to throw thousands of hours worth of their development away like it’s nothing. In fact, the highest demand extensions such as Firebug would never exist if Firefox didn’t allow their implementation.

So… is Firefox going to stay “the most customizable web browser available”, or is it going to degenerate into a bad clone of Chrome?

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If you want to sign an extension just zip it and upload it here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/submit/upload-unlisted

e10s support is not enough for streamlining and future, like maintains / removes antiquated SDK, jsms and XUL, Servo supports, etc.

Also, FYI https://browserext.github.io/browserext/, it is developing.

There’s an extensive explanation in this blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/

Bottom line: there are lots of big changes coming to Firefox, and only a well-defined API can survive those kinds of changes. Lots of add-ons will break, but new opportunities are opened, and we think this will be an improvement in the long term.