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> I don't know that that's fair. The discussions I've seen and participated in have revolved around equivalency, not identity. I've developed a couple of Firef

> I don't know that that's fair. The discussions I've seen and participated in have revolved around equivalency, not identity. I've developed a couple of Firefox extensions. One of those was an e10s-compatible replacement for Vimperator, because Vimperator relied on XUL[0]. (Vimperator broke long before Firefox 57, because e10s broke backwards compatibility with some extensions long before Firefox 57 did). The old extensions "API" was essentially a way to plug into arbitrary parts of the Firefox codebase. A Firefox developer has previously said that "[previously] the entire codebase was our extensions API". That's not scalable or maintainable in the long-run, and I would assume that any software developer who's worked on a moderately-large project would appreciate that allowing arbitrary entrypoints and coupling makes it impossible to do literally anything without breaking some part of that extremely ill-defined API. It's really, really unfortunate that moving towards a modern approach to browser extensions meant breaking work that people had put in over the last fifteen years, but... there's literally no other way to do it. Firefox was the first non-experimental browser to allow browser extensions, and there are both benefits and costs to being first-to-market. In this case, the downside is that they ended up accruing this technical (maintenance) debt. As someone who's written Firefox extensions that are no longer available due to the switch, I'm disappointed that this had to happen. But as a Firefox user, I'm much happier having Quantum and Electrolysis (e10s), and if the tradeoff is between those two directly, I'd choose Quantum + Electrolysis over those extensions. Or, to put in XKCD form: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ [0] https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/electrovim https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/electrovim

iterati 9y ago
electrovim is in no way a replacement for Vimperator. It's a couple of keyboard shortcuts. None of the current vim-like plugins for FF57 match what vimperator/pentadactyl can do. The problem I have isn't that they broke legacy things, it's that they broke legacy things without offering a path to rebuild them.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > electrovim is in no way a replacement for Vimperator. It's a couple of keyboard shortcuts. None of the current vim-like plugins for FF57 match what vimperator/pentadactyl can do. Uh, yes, I'm the author of Electrovim, so I'm quite aware of the functionality that I was literally unable to implement because no equivalent API existed. > The problem I have isn't that they broke legacy things, it's that they broke legacy things without offering a path to rebuild them. Did you not read the rest of the comment, where I explain why there is no feasible way that they could have offered any path to rebuild them?
  - iterati 9y ago
    > I've developed a couple of Firefox extensions. One of those was an e10s-compatible replacement for Vimperator, because Vimperator relied on XUL[0]. Replacement for Vimperator implies it's, well, a replacement for Vimperator. > Did you not read the rest of the comment, where I explain why there is no feasible way that they could have offered any path to rebuild them? I don't see how your addressed that. Yes, existing extensions that used XUL would have to be rewritten using new APIs. My issue is that those APIs don't even exist. That there are good reasons the old APIs aren't available anymore doesn't address the lack of new APIs that offer anything near equivalent functionality.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Is it impossible to support window or otherwise chrome-level event listeners and also e10s? As I said in a prior comment, there seems no a priori reason that should be the case.
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > Is it impossible to support window or otherwise chrome-level event listeners and also e10s? Yes, because those things are now running in different processes, which means it requires IPC, and allowing extensions to communicate over IPC with the chome throws all the benefits of e10s out the window.
      - 9y ago
pmoriarty 9y ago
"As someone who's written Firefox extensions that are no longer available due to the switch, I'm disappointed that this had to happen. But as a Firefox user, I'm much happier having Quantum and Electrolysis (e10s), and if the tradeoff is between those two directly, I'd choose Quantum + Electrolysis over those extensions." Well, I'm a Firefox user, not an extension developer, and Pentadactyl happened to be one of the extensions that made using Firefox bearable. Now that it's permanently broken, I'll be moving to another browser which can offer a similar experience: Qutebrowser.[1] [1] - https://www.qutebrowser.org/ https://www.qutebrowser.org/
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Well, I'm a Firefox user, not an extension developer, and Pentadactyl happened to be one of the extensions that made using Firefox bearable. Now that it's permanently broken, Pentadactyl was all-but-abandoned for years before Vimperator was broken. It's been almost four years since it saw a release - which was for Firefox 24.0-30[0]. Its website still links at least three links to code.google.com on the front page! (I'm actually shocked if Pentadactyl has even been working for you until now, given that it was supposed to break a few release cycles ago - when e10s shipped - but maybe you just haven't updated Firefox in a while, or you manually disabled e10s.) Vimperator - which is also incompatible with Firefox 55+ for the same reasons Pentadactyl is - at least has been receiving maintenance attention in the meantime[1], and also provides alternatives for use with Firefox 55+ (and 57+). If you'd rather switch browsers entirely than use something like Vimium[2] on Firefox, go ahead, but it's hard to justify holding an entire browser back just to maintain compatibility with an extension that has been abandoned by its own maintainers. As I mentioned, I can't even reasonably expect them to hold Firefox back to maintain compatibility with the extensions I wrote and actively maintained. As a Firefox developer, I'm disappointed, but as a Firefox user, I'm more than happy enough with the changes to make up for it. [0] http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/ http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/ [1] https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/?src=userprofile https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/?sr...
  - 9y ago
throwanem 9y ago
By "equivalency" I mean having access to equivalent APIs for specific functionality, as for example the inability to listen for window events that's breaking Vimperator and friends. (And electrovim! Have you noticed that it stops working on chrome pages that don't run scripts? Has the CSP bug been fixed? I didn't think it had been.) Maybe it's not possible to support window event listeners without breaking e10s. But I see no a priori reason why it should be. I haven't seen anyone in a serious discussion demanding 100% XUL API compatibility or feature coverage. (For the purposes of this comment, most discussion of the issue on HN is unserious.)
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  The inability to listen to window events also screws over gesture extensions, which is my main sticking point right now.

iterati 9y ago

electrovim is in no way a replacement for Vimperator. It's a couple of keyboard shortcuts. None of the current vim-like plugins for FF57 match what vimperator/pentadactyl can do. The problem I have isn't that they broke legacy things, it's that they broke legacy things without offering a path to rebuild them.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> electrovim is in no way a replacement for Vimperator. It's a couple of keyboard shortcuts. None of the current vim-like plugins for FF57 match what vimperator/pentadactyl can do. Uh, yes, I'm the author of Electrovim, so I'm quite aware of the functionality that I was literally unable to implement because no equivalent API existed. > The problem I have isn't that they broke legacy things, it's that they broke legacy things without offering a path to rebuild them. Did you not read the rest of the comment, where I explain why there is no feasible way that they could have offered any path to rebuild them?
- iterati 9y ago
  > I've developed a couple of Firefox extensions. One of those was an e10s-compatible replacement for Vimperator, because Vimperator relied on XUL[0]. Replacement for Vimperator implies it's, well, a replacement for Vimperator. > Did you not read the rest of the comment, where I explain why there is no feasible way that they could have offered any path to rebuild them? I don't see how your addressed that. Yes, existing extensions that used XUL would have to be rewritten using new APIs. My issue is that those APIs don't even exist. That there are good reasons the old APIs aren't available anymore doesn't address the lack of new APIs that offer anything near equivalent functionality.
- throwanem 9y ago
  Is it impossible to support window or otherwise chrome-level event listeners and also e10s? As I said in a prior comment, there seems no a priori reason that should be the case.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > Is it impossible to support window or otherwise chrome-level event listeners and also e10s? Yes, because those things are now running in different processes, which means it requires IPC, and allowing extensions to communicate over IPC with the chome throws all the benefits of e10s out the window.
    - 9y ago

pmoriarty 9y ago

"As someone who's written Firefox extensions that are no longer available due to the switch, I'm disappointed that this had to happen. But as a Firefox user, I'm much happier having Quantum and Electrolysis (e10s), and if the tradeoff is between those two directly, I'd choose Quantum + Electrolysis over those extensions." Well, I'm a Firefox user, not an extension developer, and Pentadactyl happened to be one of the extensions that made using Firefox bearable. Now that it's permanently broken, I'll be moving to another browser which can offer a similar experience: Qutebrowser.[1] [1] - https://www.qutebrowser.org/ https://www.qutebrowser.org/

chimeracoder 9y ago
> Well, I'm a Firefox user, not an extension developer, and Pentadactyl happened to be one of the extensions that made using Firefox bearable. Now that it's permanently broken, Pentadactyl was all-but-abandoned for years before Vimperator was broken. It's been almost four years since it saw a release - which was for Firefox 24.0-30[0]. Its website still links at least three links to code.google.com on the front page! (I'm actually shocked if Pentadactyl has even been working for you until now, given that it was supposed to break a few release cycles ago - when e10s shipped - but maybe you just haven't updated Firefox in a while, or you manually disabled e10s.) Vimperator - which is also incompatible with Firefox 55+ for the same reasons Pentadactyl is - at least has been receiving maintenance attention in the meantime[1], and also provides alternatives for use with Firefox 55+ (and 57+). If you'd rather switch browsers entirely than use something like Vimium[2] on Firefox, go ahead, but it's hard to justify holding an entire browser back just to maintain compatibility with an extension that has been abandoned by its own maintainers. As I mentioned, I can't even reasonably expect them to hold Firefox back to maintain compatibility with the extensions I wrote and actively maintained. As a Firefox developer, I'm disappointed, but as a Firefox user, I'm more than happy enough with the changes to make up for it. [0] http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/ http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/ [1] https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/?src=userprofile https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/?sr...
- 9y ago

throwanem 9y ago

By "equivalency" I mean having access to equivalent APIs for specific functionality, as for example the inability to listen for window events that's breaking Vimperator and friends. (And electrovim! Have you noticed that it stops working on chrome pages that don't run scripts? Has the CSP bug been fixed? I didn't think it had been.) Maybe it's not possible to support window event listeners without breaking e10s. But I see no a priori reason why it should be. I haven't seen anyone in a serious discussion demanding 100% XUL API compatibility or feature coverage. (For the purposes of this comment, most discussion of the issue on HN is unserious.)

Dylan16807 9y ago
The inability to listen to window events also screws over gesture extensions, which is my main sticking point right now.