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If someone wonders why old Firefox users, while still preferring new Firefox to anything else, is still annoyed then this might be a perfect example to explain
by eitland 5y ago
If someone wonders why old Firefox users, while still preferring new Firefox to anything else, is still annoyed then this might be a perfect example to explain it:
There used to be a number of extensions of this type on old Firefox. I cannot remember exactly this one, but here are a couple to prove what was possible [1]:
- the original Firebug which became developer tools and was cloned to every other browser was just another Firefox extension(!)
- an extension I used a lot was Scrapbook, which let me crawl and store websites (I used it for symfony docs back in 2007-2009 before mobile broadband was available or at least not within reach for me. It would download pages recursively according to simple, useful rules like maxrecursion, only subdirectories and only a certain domain and then rewrite every url on the page to be relative instead of absolute. You could also edit the pages locally.)
- Alerts (or something similar) would check web pages according to simple rules I set up and notify me if it saw significant changes.
[1]: somebody will probably tell that it existed too and was even better, I just didn't know of it.
- medstrom 5y agoBut it's interesting that Nyxt is planning to to have WebExtensions in addition to their own extension system. Feels like the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that maybe didn't occur to Mozilla back then (but I don't know the history). The unspoken presumption that it had to be just one system.
- eitland 5y agoAgree. The Orion browser that I like very much takes a similar approach: they let you install both Firefox and Chrome extensions. Hopefully they and/or Librewolf will start providing APIs that will let us create even better "native" extensions for those browsers.