Posted on 10/23/2017 3:03:26 PM PDT by CedarDave
On November 14 Mozilla will take the biggest gamble in its long history when the organization will ship Firefox 57, the first version of its browser that will stop supporting legacy Firefox add-ons.
This means that starting with Firefox 57 the browser will support only new add-ons written on top of the newer WebExtensions SDK.
All legacy Firefox add-ons written on the old XUL-based Add-Ons SDK will stop working.
In a blog post last week, Mozilla said it will continue to allow developers to upload and list legacy Firefox add-ons on its add-ons portal (AMO), but they'll only show up for users with older browsers and buried in search results under newer WebExtensions-compatible add-ons.
Changes are already being rolled out to AMO and Firefox 57 (currently Firefox's Nightly edition).
The release of Firefox 57 is the end of a two-year-long project that started in August 2015 when Mozilla announced the new WebExtensions API that would eventually replace the older Add-Ons SDK.
The new WebExtensions SDK is also compatible with the universal WebExtensions SDK implemented in Chromium and related browsers such as Brave, Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi.
Firefox's large collection of legacy add-ons has always been one of Firefox's strongest points and one of the primary reasons the browser has been popular so many years.
When Mozilla announced the new WebExtensions SDK and the death of the old legacy add-ons system, many feared most add-on developers wouldn't bother to migrate their add-ons for the newer WebExtensions API and Firefox would lose most of its add-ons, and its strongest attraction point.
In April 2017, the Mozilla Add-ons Portal listed 18,814 add-ons, but only 2,273 add-ons were WebExtensions-compatible. Currently, this number is at 3,633, which is about 19.3% of all Firefox add-ons.
Unfortunately, Brave has its own set of issues. (I had no choice but to use Brave after FF stopped working properly for me, this past week.)
Is there any possibility that Brave is cross-decking info to Google?
I don’t anything about Brave. Just asking a question.
Frankly, Brave sucks hairy moose balls.
I tried it on my win10 laptop and went back to firefox. The inability to navigate with the back button is truly irritating. There are other issues that made it unworkable for me.
this sounds like one of the most stupid business decisions ever
I like Brave a lot.
I like to keep all the extensions, Flash, etc. at a minimum. If I need some of that for a particular website, I’ll use Epic Privacy Browser.
I uninstalled FF when they booted their CEO for daring to think for himself.
I don’t know what the numbers are but I think there is some difference between the inventory of legacy addons for Firefox and how many of them have a wide and active current following. I currently use only a fraction of the addons I have had over the years, but I know many I no longer use are still out there.
We really can’t complain. Mozilla is not a profit making company but a non-profit “open-source-software” foundation publishing browsers and other software products (like Thunderbird for Email).
Knowing I contribute nothing to their work myself, though I use their products, I do not complain about something I neither contribute to nor pay for.
Theres also palemoon palemoon.org which is a fork of Firefox from about 2 years ago. Its still being maintained and still supports many of the old plugins like no script and a version of Adblock (but not all as its undergone some revisions which break some functionality or didnt go along with other Firefox api changes that the plugins used) but there ar meant workarounds for existing plugins.
I’m using the latest version of Waterfox which is based on Mpzilla’s Firefox but is a fork for 64 bit OS. Reading this is the first I’ve heard about add-ons being labeled Legacy, I just checked and none of mine are. I received a message from Waterfox about converting .mht and .maff files to a new archive format by sometime in November because they will no longer be supported, other than that I’ve heard nothing about add-ons going away.
If Waterfox is going to have the same issues then are there any other browsers that will be able to use existing Fire-WaterFox add-ons ?
Now I have to find another browser, crap!......
I have Windows 8.1 with firefox so I went to Mac. No wonder this PC was loading pages twice and the speed went way down.
Progress: Bigger and better mistakes.
Back button works fine. You probably had option to create new tab for child web pages on.
I moved to Pale Moon several years back when Firefox got political. It was great for the first few years - other than their constant nags to upgrade (I finally turned the notifications off because I upgrade on MY schedule, not theirs, LOL).
I tried Brave but it’s 135meg (and over 30 seconds) just to launch. None of my extensions were transferable, the bookmark sync process was arduous, and I just didn’t care for the look and feel.
I’ll never allow Gargoyle of any sort onto any of my computers so chrome is out of the question. Edge is garbage so I’d rather do a IE session that bother with it. I noticed that live video feeds suddenly stopped playing with PM so I (reluctantly) loaded FireFox back up (ver 27).
I guess I’ll just have to live with the fact that it’s a vast wasteland out there - at least as browsers go.
Just did a little digging and found out that Waterfox will still continue to support it’s legacy add-ons, which, at this point in time are the same as those running on Firerfox.
Firefox is crap. Never did work right for me.
I do not use a Google account with Brave. Brave may be passing a sync request through another app—is this a mobile device?
“Firefox’s large collection of legacy add-ons has always been one of Firefox’s strongest points and one of the primary reasons the browser has been popular so many years.”
The large collection of addons is Firefox’s ONLY strong point and the ONLY reason I use Firefox and promote it to my clients!
Mozilla is determined to relegate Firefox to the trash heap of history.
“Pale Moon is one alternative”
i gave up on PM years ago: it’s a one man band and they repeatedly, deliberately broke almost all addons.
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