15 ms·

Mozilla abandoning their much more powerful XUL-based extension system for Chrome's inferior WebExtensions wasn't already an indicator towards that?

Ygg2 7y ago
> more powerful XUL-based At the time of conception, it was pretty great. However, that much customizability came at two expenses. 1) Web devs can't use XUL, because it's its own little cosmos, you as Web dev couldn't mod Firefox UI 2) The XUL was legacy software and super hard to optimize.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  Repeal and replace would have been fine, but instead we got repeal and here's a mobile OS. And new extensions can't mess with our look and feel.
sp332 7y ago
Firefox is faster and more secure now that they don't have to maintain compatibility with a bunch of old extensions that touch a bunch of internal stuff. Firefox's WebExtension API goes well beyond Chrome's at this point and is still adding features.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  Firefox is a clone of Chrome now, that google makes a little bit janky when you browse google sites.
cptskippy 7y ago
Stop conflating unrelated matters. Mozilla's decision to remove XUL Extension support was directly a result of their decision to replace XUL in favor of HTML5 as the UI design language of choice.
jcranmer 7y ago
It's been known since around 2010 or 2011 that the full extension system was too powerful for effective maintenance of Gecko. Going through XPCOM for everything prevents effective optimization within the codebase, and generally ensures that the APIs have to become less ergonomic compared to modern C++ (or JS, for that matter). Furthermore, multiprocess content tabs was heavily delayed because turning it on would break practically every extension (since you could no longer have synchronous access to content). Moving away from that was definitely the right approach for Mozilla, but the timetable and effort into bringing up a non-XUL/XPCOM-based extension mechanism definitely left something to be desired.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Moving away from that was definitely the right approach for Mozilla Perhaps, but it also made Firefox into a browser that can no longer meet my needs.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    What are your "needs"? Perhaps it's your needs, not Firefox, that are incorrect.
    - CamJN 7y ago
      Not the parent, but a short list of mine: link location bar extension: this cannot be replaced with a webextension as mozilla refused to add the necessary API websocket monitor extension: this is being built into the dev tools, after 2 years and counting tab groups / panorama: every single extension that tries to replace this is terribly broken, because the provided extension APIs don't really support this use case or are super racey like the link location bar extension it's impossible to write an extension to replicate the old refresh/stop/go button in the url bar. You can have 3 buttons, but that's stupid. All that and mac (nightly & dev-edition) users only recently got back to the level of performance from pre 57 Firefox due to work described here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522#c26 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522#c26 (ongoing). And before I get crucified: there aren't any better browsers, so I'll be sticking with Firefox, but it sure isn't anywhere near as useful as it used to be.

Ygg2 7y ago

> more powerful XUL-based At the time of conception, it was pretty great. However, that much customizability came at two expenses. 1) Web devs can't use XUL, because it's its own little cosmos, you as Web dev couldn't mod Firefox UI 2) The XUL was legacy software and super hard to optimize.

pessimizer 7y ago
Repeal and replace would have been fine, but instead we got repeal and here's a mobile OS. And new extensions can't mess with our look and feel.

sp332 7y ago

Firefox is faster and more secure now that they don't have to maintain compatibility with a bunch of old extensions that touch a bunch of internal stuff. Firefox's WebExtension API goes well beyond Chrome's at this point and is still adding features.

pessimizer 7y ago
Firefox is a clone of Chrome now, that google makes a little bit janky when you browse google sites.

cptskippy 7y ago

Stop conflating unrelated matters. Mozilla's decision to remove XUL Extension support was directly a result of their decision to replace XUL in favor of HTML5 as the UI design language of choice.

jcranmer 7y ago

It's been known since around 2010 or 2011 that the full extension system was too powerful for effective maintenance of Gecko. Going through XPCOM for everything prevents effective optimization within the codebase, and generally ensures that the APIs have to become less ergonomic compared to modern C++ (or JS, for that matter). Furthermore, multiprocess content tabs was heavily delayed because turning it on would break practically every extension (since you could no longer have synchronous access to content). Moving away from that was definitely the right approach for Mozilla, but the timetable and effort into bringing up a non-XUL/XPCOM-based extension mechanism definitely left something to be desired.

JohnFen 7y ago
> Moving away from that was definitely the right approach for Mozilla Perhaps, but it also made Firefox into a browser that can no longer meet my needs.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  What are your "needs"? Perhaps it's your needs, not Firefox, that are incorrect.
  - CamJN 7y ago
    Not the parent, but a short list of mine: link location bar extension: this cannot be replaced with a webextension as mozilla refused to add the necessary API websocket monitor extension: this is being built into the dev tools, after 2 years and counting tab groups / panorama: every single extension that tries to replace this is terribly broken, because the provided extension APIs don't really support this use case or are super racey like the link location bar extension it's impossible to write an extension to replicate the old refresh/stop/go button in the url bar. You can have 3 buttons, but that's stupid. All that and mac (nightly & dev-edition) users only recently got back to the level of performance from pre 57 Firefox due to work described here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522#c26 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522#c26 (ongoing). And before I get crucified: there aren't any better browsers, so I'll be sticking with Firefox, but it sure isn't anywhere near as useful as it used to be.