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I'll be doing the same, staying on 56 for quite awhile. This transition has been very poorly managed by Mozilla. I understand the advantages to Quantum but th
by 51Cards 9y ago
I'll be doing the same, staying on 56 for quite awhile. This transition has been very poorly managed by Mozilla. I understand the advantages to Quantum but they have left a very large percentage of their extension developers hanging. Web Extensions is not mature enough for many of the large extensions to be ported but despite that they are proceeding with this transition anyhow.
If I was an affected extension developer I would be walking away now. My user base is about to crumble and the best I can do is maybe offer a pale version of my extension in the new system along with a bunch of excuses out of my control. If perhaps WE does get the features I need, why go to the work to re-write? My users will be long gone.
Quantum is great, don't get me wrong. But the new APIs are too immature to be shutting down a huge number of mature extensions and the users that rely on them. It really makes me question the leadership decisions happening at Mozilla in general.
- damnyou 9y agoThe good of the many outweighs the good of the few.
- 51Cards 9y agoIMO Gutting your developer base is seldom good.
- digi_owl 9y agoIndeed. Just look at PocketPC vs Mobile/Phone/whatever. Of all companies one would have thought Microsoft understood the value of backwards compatibility...
- damnyou 9y agoThe web developer base is far more interesting and relevant to Mozilla's mission than the extension developer base, and Quantum is the only shot Mozilla has at regaining mindshare there. Looks like it's working, though.
- 51Cards 9y agoHere's the thing though. Developers understand the technical differences between Chrome and Firefox. To 95% of general users they don't see why they are different. They look about the same and hey, I get Chrome offered to me every time I visit Google so why not use that? The average user doesn't see the difference that gives them any reason to want Firefox. Now the extensions base will be essentially the same, stripping away those that were truly unique. The extensive UI control is disappearing. Firefox (IMO) is slowly stripping away the things that make it unique to 90% of its user base who just see the UI.
- damnyou 9y agoTgis is not true The extension base is not the same. Firefox 57 will have tree style tabs, for example.
- MikusR 9y agoWhat developer base? 99% of new addons are Chrome first/only (like uBlock, uMatrix). And most of the legacy addons were abandoned long ago.
- 51Cards 9y agoI use several legacy addons and most of those haven't been abandoned? They are about to be though.
- digi_owl 9y agoSpeaking of pale, i guess there is always Pale Moon...
- opencl 9y agoNot sure if you're aware of the Extended Support Release of FF but it seems better than staying on 56: Firefox 52 ESR will continue getting security patches up through June 2018.
- beezle 9y agoI suspect I'll be on 56 for a very long time as well. I ran on nightlies for many, many years but that ended at 57. At a bare minimum, noScript must be shown to be fully and consistently functional. But I have quite a few other extensions that appear to have been dead ended - self-destructing cookies and session manager are just two. I think mozilla failed to understand that extensions were the prime differentiator and that a faster Chrome is far down the list of requirements.