5 ms·

Those old XUL/XPCOM extensions weren't really safe, and the only big loss was UI manipulation, which was kind of stupid anyway, and not at all portable. When I

• kevincox 4y ago
  Hence the "scary warnings". I don't think UI manipulation is stupid, I don't believe that Mozilla makes the best UI and extensions can definitely improve on it for many more specific use cases. Portability is also nice but not everything needs to be widely portable, I would rather have a nice feature in Firefox than not having it because it wasn't portable across browsers. To be clear I am hugely in favour of WebExtensions. I am glad that they were implemented and I think that they should be the recommended API. But I would love to still have the full-power backdoor for the extensions that are no loner possible. For example I maintained VimFx for about a year after they stopped officially supporting these extensions and it was fine. The biggest pain wasn't actually keeping up with the internal API changes, it was the fact that it wasn't allowed in addons.mozilla.org anymore and there is no good way to distribute self-signed or third-part signed extensions.
• iggldiggl 4y ago
  > the only big loss was UI manipulation Well, for a start e.g. mass downloaders have become relatively useless because they can't download to outside of the OS downloads directory without resorting to weird hacks, can no longer intelligently handle already existing files, etc. Then user scripts no longer being able to live normally on the file system (and therefore being editable outside of whatever limited UI the extension can provide, being easily searchable) are another victim of webextensions.