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> This is the opportunity that the Chrome engineers foresaw. We saw it too, but we had a bumpier path to get there. Since we had an existing code base we needed

> This is the opportunity that the Chrome engineers foresaw. We saw it too, but we had a bumpier path to get there. Since we had an existing code base we needed to plan for how to split up that code base to take advantage of multiple cores The "bumpier path" is that they removed XUL-based/legacy addons, only chrome-like addons (aka WebExtensions) are now supported on FF57. Personally i still have some extensions that are marked as Legacy, mainly for web development so m going be slightly affected with this release, i hope the performance gains are worth it.

ripdog 9y ago
They're talking about Electrolysis there, which happened several versions ago. XUL addons did indeed work with Electrolysis, but required some modifications to work well. Most unmodified addons continues to work through some magic cross-process API wrappers. They didn't implement everything, had some bugs, and were quite slow, but the fact that mozilla managed to keep most legacy addons functional through the biggest architectural shakeup in Firefox history shows their dedication and skill. It also illustrates how much engineering effort went into keeping XUL addons functional as firefox was re-architected, and thus why the decision was made to abandon them and move to webextensions. What addons are you missing for webdev?
- cesnja 9y ago
  All that work only to drop the addons anyway with the migration to WebExtensions. Personally, the extension I miss the most is vimperator. Mainly the fact it worked everywhere. Now you land on new tab page (or about:*) and the extension just won't load. The highlight features would be macros (automating some signin and signup workflows) and quickmarks - opens a predefined page in precisely 3 keypresses. With the way WebExtensions are right now in Firefox, a quickmarks feature just won't work sometimes, which is very irritating.
sp332 9y ago
And before that, they added a ton of shims so that most old extensions still worked with the new multiprocess model. A huge amount of work.

ripdog 9y ago

They're talking about Electrolysis there, which happened several versions ago. XUL addons did indeed work with Electrolysis, but required some modifications to work well. Most unmodified addons continues to work through some magic cross-process API wrappers. They didn't implement everything, had some bugs, and were quite slow, but the fact that mozilla managed to keep most legacy addons functional through the biggest architectural shakeup in Firefox history shows their dedication and skill. It also illustrates how much engineering effort went into keeping XUL addons functional as firefox was re-architected, and thus why the decision was made to abandon them and move to webextensions. What addons are you missing for webdev?

cesnja 9y ago
All that work only to drop the addons anyway with the migration to WebExtensions. Personally, the extension I miss the most is vimperator. Mainly the fact it worked everywhere. Now you land on new tab page (or about:*) and the extension just won't load. The highlight features would be macros (automating some signin and signup workflows) and quickmarks - opens a predefined page in precisely 3 keypresses. With the way WebExtensions are right now in Firefox, a quickmarks feature just won't work sometimes, which is very irritating.

sp332 9y ago

And before that, they added a ton of shims so that most old extensions still worked with the new multiprocess model. A huge amount of work.