Mozilla to Remove Legacy Firefox Add-Ons From Add-On Portal in Early October (bleepingcomputer.com) 110
Mozilla announced today plans to remove all Firefox legacy add-ons from the official Mozilla add-ons portal in early October. From a report: The move comes after Mozilla updated the Firefox core to use a new add-ons system based on the Chrome-compatible WebExtensions API. This new add-ons API replaced Firefox's old XUL-based add-ons API in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57. All Firefox legacy add-ons stopped working in Firefox 57, but Mozilla continued to support them in the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) 52 branch. Support for Firefox ESR 52 will end on September 5, in two weeks, meaning there won't be any official Firefox version that supports legacy add-ons anymore.
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Those, plus:
Classic Theme Restorer
LiveHTTPHeaders
Session Manager
Tab Mix Plus
Plus versions of NoScript, AdBlock+, Greasemonkey and Stylus (Stylish) with functionality and UI that's not hamstrung by WebExtensions limitations.
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They get to define what is "clear need".
And there is no "clear need" for anything that is missing in the new implementation.
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As long as no one in mozilla has a clear need for it, they don't have a to care.
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Well some of these can be reimplemented in WebExtensions, but it requires a lot of work. A lot of the original plugin developers just don't have the time; or they may have started on them and are still actively working on replacements; but it could be several more months or a year till they're done.
Re:Pressing F. (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect 99% of developers are sick of Mozilla breaking their extensions ans simply won't bother.
Only the really famous ones will be updated. Anything new will simply be coin-miners disguised as youtube downloaders.
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Re:Pressing F. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?
There seems to be little evidence that they made any serious attempt at this at all, beyond the top N very high visibility extensions.
The main advantage of using Firefox, other than not using Google's browser with its questionable privacy implications, was how customisable it was. There have been five major releases with WebExtensions now, and after the first two, not a single thing I missed from before has been fixed. Being able to save files directly to places outside the downloads directory, customising parts of the UI like the bookmark dropdown so they're bigger than postage stamps, disabling things like JS or animated GIFs without reloading the whole page... I'm still waiting for a tab tree extension that actually works properly.
To add insult to injury, my previously 100% stable for years Firefox probably crashes out on startup every third or fourth time I load it, then does some half-baked restore of the tabs from the previous session that apparently closed down properly, then needs restarting again. Either Firefox itself is quite badly broken for the past couple of versions, or one of the much more limited number of extensions I now have installed is destabilising it, but wasn't the point of the new architecture that crippled all those extensions that at least they would be fast and reliable now?
Firefox is no longer my default browser for everyday use as a direct result of this farce, but since I still have to use all the major browsers professionally, it would be nice if they could at least undo some of the damage.
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WebExtension (Score:2)
Can someone please specify what limitations exactly (preferably with a link to an unsolved Firefox bug if available)? The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?
Depends on the extension.
In the case of NoScript : all the necessary functionality has been successfully replicated (though, it took a few days, it wasn't available from day 1 of the XUL-less firefox). The web extension has the exact same capability as the XUL extension.
The thing is, its author took the opportunity to also overhaul the interface and rewrite everything in the new style used by most web-extensions (HTML kind of side bars) instead of OS-like dialog boxes and windows.
Most of the complains nowad
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Stylish
There's an active fork, it supports all the forked XUL browsers.
https://addons.palemoon.org/ad... [palemoon.org]
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Stylish
There's an active fork, it supports all the forked XUL browsers.
https://addons.palemoon.org/ad... [palemoon.org]
B O Y C O T T P A L E M O O N !! They actively block NoScript.
Check the Palemoon forums. By the admissions of Palemoon's own developers they admit to actively blocking NoScript because they whine about getting too many complaints that Palemoon+NoScript does not render webpages correctly and the Palemoon developers don't want to deal with the issues.
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When I left Firefox, I tried Palemoon. Ran into issues.
Escaped to Waterfox. Works wonderfully.
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.... Works fine for me
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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/http-header-live/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/onemen/ (tab mix option)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-resurrection
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabboo-session-manager
None are perfect, but it is a start
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Is it possible for Mozilla to remotely disable the add-ons in Firefox ESR 52 after they have been removed from the add-on website ?
For example, can Mozilla disable them by adding them to a blacklist which causes Firefox to disable them ?
Yes, to some extent [mozilla.org], but as far as I know it is only a soft-block and you can always choose to re-enable the addon. This functionality is controlled by the extensions.blocklist configuration entries, including extensions.blocklist.enabled which can be used to disable the feature altogether.
For Firefox 56 at least, you can see the list at https://blocked.cdn.mozilla.net [mozilla.net]. Not sure about newer versions.
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http://kb.mozillazine.org/Bloc... [mozillazine.org]
Yes but this is rarely updated, and only for the really awful addons that coinmine or scrape user data in the background without permission or are virus-like.
Used to be the best browser (Score:1)
I still use version 56, because no one has a substitute for DownThemAll. Now Mozilla won't even give anybody DownThemAll anymore.
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deduplicate-tabs, "New Tab in Tab Context Menu", "Amazon Smile Redirect" and "Sort Tabs" are what keep me on FF56.
Re:Used to be the best browser (Score:4, Interesting)
Two things keep me on Firefox 52:
1. Debian's preference for the oldest supported ESR version
2. The fact that Mozilla still hasn't fixed bug 1325692 [mozilla.org] that blocks WebExtension-based successors to Keybinder [github.com] from being able to effectively unbind the Ctrl+Q=quit shortcut on Linux
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Accidentally pressing Ctrl+Q while reaching for Ctrl+Tab (or Ctrl+Shift+Q while reaching for Ctrl+Shift+Tab on platforms where the Exit command is Ctrl+Shift+Q) wouldn't be quite so much of a problem if "Restore Previous Session" in Firefox were capable of restoring the data in Slashdot comment composition forms. It is not. After the user reopens Firefox and restores the previous session, any open comment composition forms will no longer exist, and clicking "Reply to This" will open an empty form instead of
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Form History Control, https://formhistory.blogspot.c... [blogspot.com] is one way to preserve comment composition forms when FF crashes or is accidentally closed.
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Whoever thought ctrl+Q was ever a good idea needs punched in the throat.
Function keys exist for a reason. Use them.
Ctrl+Q is an imitation of Command-Q on the Macintosh and Apple IIGS. The keyboard shipped with the original Macintosh lacked function keys, and even after ADB became standard, the "extended keyboard" with function keys was an extra cost add-on.
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For me the two big ones are:
Torrent Status -- Can monitor and control a torrent client on the local LAN or remote network. Will upload clicked torrent and magnet links automatically to the client (no need to go visit the web interface), and gives a persistent readout of current download/upload usage stats as a toolbar item. I get the impression the monitoring stats is something that cannot be duplicated with Web Extensions from comments by the developer.
Private Tab -- add a private browsing tab to a window
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Has nobody seriously made anything even remotely similar to DTA?
Surely the WebExtensions APIs expose the file API for mass downloads?
Browsers natively support segmented downloads (download resume) and multi-part downloads. At least I think so, for the latter part. I am sure you can specify an offset for downloads. Yep it does. [mozilla.org]
I'd be surprised if nothing out there replicated it by now.
I haven't bothered looking myself since I don't download loads of files like I used to.
One I do wonder about is file strea
Nails in the coffin (Score:4, Insightful)
Who uses FF anymore ? (Score:1)
That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Joking aside, is it REALLY that much a of a problem to keep Legacy extensions, sorry, "Add-Ons" on a different "space" of the website??? Are they afraid people will get "confused" and try to install them on the new version? Mozilla is losing out on the ability to see WHAT is popular and WHY it is popular. If they were smart they would provide alternative URLs for extensions that work in the new version. Too bad this "telemetry" data doesn't have any value for them.
I get it that they want to push everyone onto the latest shiny. Unfortunately, the harder they push, the more backlash there will be and people just go "Fuck it. I'll just use Pale Moon, etc." where their extensions continue to work.
Guess it is just another sign of Mozilla continuing to jump the shark / nuke the fridge / etc. on slowly becoming irrelevant and losing touch with what people want in a browser.
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Google still hasn't figured out Chrome yet.
But since Firefox extensions are broken to about the same degree anyway now, you might as well use the browser that is better in most other respects.
As sad as it is, we are rapidly heading back to a time when pages are written primarily for one specific browser, with perhaps a token nod to a couple of the smaller ones. That's where all the users are, and so that's what developers are targetting, and so the cycle continues.
I haven't worked on a single professional project in a while where Firefox has enough
Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the harder they push, the more backlash there will be and people just go "Fuck it. I'll just use Pale Moon, etc." where their extensions continue to work.
Guess it is just another sign of Mozilla continuing to jump the shark / nuke the fridge / etc. on slowly becoming irrelevant and losing touch with what people want in a browser.
The people running Mozilla completely lost their minds a few years ago and it's been nothing but a constant stream of "Fuck You" to users. Somehow, Firefox dropping to single digit market share hasn't been enough to convince them that butchering Firefox is a bad idea.
Instead, they seem to suffer from some sort of bizarre mental illness where the more people reject Firefox the more determined they become to fuck it up and make it useless and irrelevant.
So glad I switched to Palemoon a couple of years ago.
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!pulseaudio ? (Score:3)
Does Waterfox support ALSA without pulseaudio? I cannot seem to find an answer to that on the Waterfox site. Pale Moon works perfectly with ALSA on the lennart-freed Devuan and Heads systems I support.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/water... [reddit.com]
This seems to be the best answer sadly: maybe, but apulse would work most likely
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Also on Arch Linux: not required for me, but I have it installed, but it's not a dependency for Firefox or Waterfox: https://i.imgur.com/2kZb1MI.pn... [imgur.com]
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Does Waterfox support ALSA without pulseaudio? I cannot seem to find an answer to that on the Waterfox site. Pale Moon works perfectly with ALSA on the lennart-freed Devuan and Heads systems I support.
Yes it does. See here [waterfoxproject.org]:
What's new in Waterfox 52.0.2? ...
Disabled PulseAudio and enabled ALSA for Linux builds
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Does Waterfox support ALSA without pulseaudio? I cannot seem to find an answer to that on the Waterfox site. Pale Moon works perfectly with ALSA on the lennart-freed Devuan and Heads systems I support.
Yes it does. See here [waterfoxproject.org]:
What's new in Waterfox 52.0.2? ...
Disabled PulseAudio and enabled ALSA for Linux builds
Thank you! I DL'ed Waterfox and it properly supports ALSA without PulseAudio, so I'm in the process of installing it on other machines. I think they should tout that on their main page. Cheers!
Re:That's OK; techies to remove new Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
On the contrary, I'm actually going back to Firefox after being on PaleMoon for years. The new add-on system, improved security/performance and especially the built in privacy enhancements make it worth using again.
PaleMoon is okay but a couple of things piss me off about it. Firstly their update system is broken. Sometimes when you update it forgets your settings and uninstalls your add-ons. Whatever the add-on update mechanism is seems to be broken too. A while back an update deleted a lot of people's bookmarks too.
The other issue is performance. The most recent update fixed a problem with images not loading (!) but it still has problems.
PaleMoon always had poor compatibility with extensions and now that Firefox is ditching the old ones it will only get worse. For example you need a modified version of GreaseMonkey and it's old, and now basically unmaintained as the upstream project drops support for the codebase. uBlock is the same, all the work is on the new Firefox/Chrome extension API.
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It's obviously a move to force people off pre-Quantum Firefox. They must have seen that a large population of users wasn't falling for the WebExtension meme.
Alternatives (Score:4, Informative)
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WaterFox bills itself as a "free-range, ethical browser". LOL no.
Re:Alternatives (Score:5, Informative)
Yep. I symlinked ~/.mozilla/firefox as ~/.waterfox and the Waterfox-browser started right up. Things "just work" — the add-ons, which Firefox has earlier declared "obsolete", started to work again, etc.
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Waterfox (Score:2)
Tobin treats Tor [torproject.org] users like garbage, no thanks.
Waterfox [waterfoxproject.org] it is.
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SeaMonkey (User agent Example: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4) too! https://www.seamonkey-project.... [seamonkey-project.org]
Has anyone noticed extensions aren't updated anymore in them like uBlock Origins (v1.13.8 from 7/21/2017)? :(
many backups will now popup. who do you trust? (Score:3)
Thank you Mozilla.
The gold rush is now on to create clones of the Add-on website.
Who will we trust now that Mozilla is abandoning the legacy users?
PaleMoon?
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Most of these legacy add-ons are not being developed anymore because they are not compatible with the currently-shipping mainstream Firefox and their authors knew this day would come.
It would make more sense to download the XPI files for the extensions you use and you can manually reinstall them as needed, rather than wait for a "grey-market" extension site to appear and have to worry about malware,
Waterfox (Score:3)
Waterfox [waterfoxproject.org] the developer mentioned somewhere that he made a backup of the addons.
Waterfox Legacy Extensions Database - Issue #303 (Score:1)
People seem to be developing a comprehensive archive of Mozilla legacy extensions for continued use in Waterfox. Preserving comments and ratings is still important. Will people at Internet Archive [archive.org] and Software Heritage [softwareheritage.org] give their part of the larger task appropriate effort?
Waterfox, Its Legacy and Looking to the Future [waterfoxproject.org]
Legacy Extensions Database #303 [github.com]
Waterfox [waterfoxproject.org] the developer mentioned somewhere that he made a backup of the addons.
That's odd. (Score:2)
That's odd that they'd even want to do that.
Is there any other place those will remain available?
I don't plan on ever using any version of Firefox after the 52 ESR, largely because of the lost functionality of the newer add-ons.
What's the point of Firefox if you can't properly customize it?
Seem really odd to me.
Ryan Fenton
Firefox is done (Score:1)
Better on Desktop (Score:5, Informative)
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Perhaps the claim is that Firefox is irrelevant precisely because it "does not have a presence on phones or tablets."
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Perhaps the claim is that Firefox is irrelevant precisely because it "does not have a presence on phones or tablets."
It does have a mobile browser, however it is horribly crippled by Android. Grab FF mobile, head over to Google, Google's website actively switches you to a pretty crappy site if using anything other than Chrome on Android. Google image search is literally a pain for no good reason on FF mobile. Changing the user agent fixes everything wrong with Google, but then you're just reporting that you're Chrome on Android. It's not just a little, Android goes out of its way to be hostile to other web browsers.
Ch
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Well, it's search revenue Mozilla is not getting. And if Chrome/Safari wants to change the web standards they're quite real. With 5"-6" slabs being the new smartphone norm people do a lot of real browsing on them, I know I do. Okay so maybe there are other reasons Firefox has no presence there if we're assigning blame, but the double whammy is quite real - their only platform is losing relevance and they're losing relevance within that platform too. I mean if the story was that they were steady/growing on t
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Don't be evil (Score:2)
Could it be, the switch [slashdot.org] is one of Google's condition for financing Mozilla [mozilla.org]? To make it easier for users to switch to Chrome?
The demotion of Thunderbird [mozilla.org] may be similarly explained by Google's influence, because the application competes with GMail's web-interface.
But, at least, they no longer have a homophobe running the show [slashdot.org] so they have that going for them, which is nice.
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Though it has an offline mode too, you don't have to use it that way — and I don't, for example. The rest of your post is invalidated by this.
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What do you do, use something like Thunderbrowse to load gmail.com in a tab?
In this case I believe by online, the poster means using a web interface rather then downloading mail like I do with pop. With the mail downloaded, it is available even without a network connection.
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"Online" and "using web-interface" are very different things. Indeed, the concept of being "online" [princeton.edu] predates that of "web" by quite some years. For example, your Netflix client is, most certainly, operating "online" — but not inside a web-browser.
IMAP4 has largely replaced POP — but even the old POP-only mail programs usually allowed interactive manipulation of e-mail. If you wish to discus
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Yes, I use Thunderbird, and up till less a year ago, over dial up. Looking, it appears I've been using it for about 10 years.
To quote the AC poster,
That makes no sense. Thunderbird is an offline email client. No one who uses it is going to switch to a web-based client if Thunderbird dies. Instead they will find a new offline client.
Which sure looks to me that the AC has the definition of offline where the client continues to work when not connected to a network, unlike gmail.com or other web based email interfaces.
Don't be stupid (Score:2)
Yes, that is the applicable definition of "offline". And, yes, Thunderbird has offline mode. Which makes it superior to any "webmail" interface for anyone with an intermittent network connectivity. And it offers a compelling set of features even for those with a steady connection.
Which makes it a solid competitor to even the best of webmail offerings, including GMail.
"Phasing it
They need to do more even (Score:2)
They need to purge all the forum, help, blog, bug, etc. posts related to pre-v.57 as well. Can't count how many times I searched for some info only to find it was about the pre v.57 version so it was completely irrelevant. Out-of-date/inaccurate information is worse than no information at all.
If they kill of Live Bookmarks I will die.
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Well, what do you know. That is literally the last thing that kept me sticking to ESR while looking for alternatives to Firefox.
That makes it really easy to just leave for Chromium derivatives when ESR support for 52 ends. Thanks for sharing this.
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If they kill of Live Bookmarks I will die.
They are killing that off too. The code hasn't been maintained in almost a decade and is a super great way to crash your browser for feeds that are using mixed media DTD models. No one stepped up in the last round to want to fix it, so it's getting chopped. Also, it's horrible code, my only guess is that the group that had wrote it, do so in a single night of Red Bull fueled rage.
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What do you recommend to do without Live Bookmarks? I'm so used to having all my Live Bookmarks in my bookmarks bar and checking all the feeds when I want to read the news. It's so efficient and convenient. I've tried other RSS readers and honestly they don't come close in terms of efficiency and convenience.
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We need to take action against Moziilla (Score:2)
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I understood every word in that summary (Score:2)
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Replaced XUL? (Score:2)
Yay for me! I was too lazy to learn what the hell XUL was and how to program in it. Now it's dead. I saved myself from wasting time on a transient technology.
Firefox Smites Its Supporters, Again, and Again. (Score:2)