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Firefox could absolutely mantain XUL and have improved it's engine, they just chose not, or were ordered by google to do so And as you say several 1 dev forks

Firefox could absolutely mantain XUL and have improved it's engine, they just chose not, or were ordered by google to do so And as you say several 1 dev forks were able to keep both WebExtensions and XUL for free, why wouldn't the million dollar company spending millions on side quests? What Firefox did was a shoot in the foot, loose active users, and fragment the community for many years. And we can only hope the same happens to Chrome

chrismorgan 2y ago
No, the XUL/XPCOM design, by its nature, became harder and harder to maintain, and there are also plenty of very specific and highly desirable technical improvements that it made completely impracticable, and which have been made since then. https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/ https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo... is one article about this, and other information floats about the place too.
- guilhas 2y ago
  That article was wrong in many ways, even more 4 years later, and you can see it in its comments XUL is a core part of Firefox, and can still be re-enabled for addons today https://gir.st/blog/legacyfox.htm https://gir.st/blog/legacyfox.htm https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx But I guess only randos on the internet have the technical know-how
  - chrismorgan 2y ago
    > and you can see it in its comments I don’t see any comments on that article? —⁂— You’re missing the picture. All that LegacyFox looks to do is allow loading old-style extension manifests, by converting them to new-style, just with the difference that they’re given unfettered access to internals. This allows you to load the extensions, but doesn’t guarantee that they will work. By the end of 2019, XUL Templates, XUL Overlays, XBL Stylesheets, XUL Documents, and XBL had been removed <https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/24SH5R0AcC0/m/B6ScluagAQAJ https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/24SH5R0AcC0/m/B6Sc...>. Last year, XUL Layout was finally removed <https://crisal.io/words/2023/03/30/xul-layout-is-gone.html https://crisal.io/words/2023/03/30/xul-layout-is-gone.html>. I haven’t tried actually running any of this stuff, but I get the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog <https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/master/CHANGELOG...>, and yeah, regular fixes have been required, with more and more things breaking. This is a pretty good demonstration of what the problem with XPCOM extensions was, as the article pointed out: they had too much access to browser internals, which made it hard for the browser to change things without breaking extensions, and necessary changes just kept on breaking extensions again and again and again, and extension developers were tired of it. In the WebExtension era, extensions almost never break, despite major concrete improvements in the browser having been made that in the past would have broken at least every interesting extension out there. XUL (by which I mean XUL, not XPCOM) isn’t completely gone yet, because it was such a core part of the browser that it takes a long time to kill it completely, but most of what made it it is gone. XPCOM extensions made Firefox unmaintainable. Although they were a great thing, they had to die for Firefox to survive.
    - guilhas 2y ago
      All my points stand * VimFX still works in the latest release of Firefox * If random people on the internet can square it, so probably could the Firefox team, they didn't need to keep all features * They decided to handicap their addons to match Chrome, because "security" and lost users * Chrome is now doing the same > ...but I the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog... The changelog shows a fix this month for the firefox 127 this month, the current version is 126. And the readme clearly states firefox-esr 115+. You don't get more working than that > WebExtension era, extensions almost never break Any other recent extension needs way more maintenance to keep up with the constant evolving of the WebExtensions apis. And you can look at their logs. Years to partially catch up, and much more work for worse user experience https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/philc/vimium https://github.com/philc/vimium > ..they had too much access to browser internals.. All apps have to much access, that's is the same lame excuse Google is using now. All extensions are reviewed by Google/Mozilla and manually installed by the user. If they can't keep them safe hire someone who can. Especially Chrome that already has APIs for random websites to access USBs, filesystem, etc..

chrismorgan 2y ago

No, the XUL/XPCOM design, by its nature, became harder and harder to maintain, and there are also plenty of very specific and highly desirable technical improvements that it made completely impracticable, and which have been made since then. https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/ https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo... is one article about this, and other information floats about the place too.

guilhas 2y ago
That article was wrong in many ways, even more 4 years later, and you can see it in its comments XUL is a core part of Firefox, and can still be re-enabled for addons today https://gir.st/blog/legacyfox.htm https://gir.st/blog/legacyfox.htm https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx But I guess only randos on the internet have the technical know-how
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  > and you can see it in its comments I don’t see any comments on that article? —⁂— You’re missing the picture. All that LegacyFox looks to do is allow loading old-style extension manifests, by converting them to new-style, just with the difference that they’re given unfettered access to internals. This allows you to load the extensions, but doesn’t guarantee that they will work. By the end of 2019, XUL Templates, XUL Overlays, XBL Stylesheets, XUL Documents, and XBL had been removed <https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/24SH5R0AcC0/m/B6ScluagAQAJ https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/24SH5R0AcC0/m/B6Sc...>. Last year, XUL Layout was finally removed <https://crisal.io/words/2023/03/30/xul-layout-is-gone.html https://crisal.io/words/2023/03/30/xul-layout-is-gone.html>. I haven’t tried actually running any of this stuff, but I get the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog <https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/master/CHANGELOG...>, and yeah, regular fixes have been required, with more and more things breaking. This is a pretty good demonstration of what the problem with XPCOM extensions was, as the article pointed out: they had too much access to browser internals, which made it hard for the browser to change things without breaking extensions, and necessary changes just kept on breaking extensions again and again and again, and extension developers were tired of it. In the WebExtension era, extensions almost never break, despite major concrete improvements in the browser having been made that in the past would have broken at least every interesting extension out there. XUL (by which I mean XUL, not XPCOM) isn’t completely gone yet, because it was such a core part of the browser that it takes a long time to kill it completely, but most of what made it it is gone. XPCOM extensions made Firefox unmaintainable. Although they were a great thing, they had to die for Firefox to survive.
  - guilhas 2y ago
    All my points stand * VimFX still works in the latest release of Firefox * If random people on the internet can square it, so probably could the Firefox team, they didn't need to keep all features * They decided to handicap their addons to match Chrome, because "security" and lost users * Chrome is now doing the same > ...but I the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog... The changelog shows a fix this month for the firefox 127 this month, the current version is 126. And the readme clearly states firefox-esr 115+. You don't get more working than that > WebExtension era, extensions almost never break Any other recent extension needs way more maintenance to keep up with the constant evolving of the WebExtensions apis. And you can look at their logs. Years to partially catch up, and much more work for worse user experience https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/philc/vimium https://github.com/philc/vimium > ..they had too much access to browser internals.. All apps have to much access, that's is the same lame excuse Google is using now. All extensions are reviewed by Google/Mozilla and manually installed by the user. If they can't keep them safe hire someone who can. Especially Chrome that already has APIs for random websites to access USBs, filesystem, etc..