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from the replacing-working-stuff-with-unfinished-technologies dept.
Martin Brinkmann reports via gHacks:
Mozilla announced a couple of days ago that it plans to make Firefox support only WebExtensions add-ons by the end of 2017.
While that seems far far away right now, it is almost certain that things won't be ready by then. What I mean by that is that WebExtensions capabilities won't match those of Firefox's current system. While popular add-ons like NoScript will likely be ported over thanks to Mozilla working with developers actively on implementing missing API features, the same cannot be said for other add-ons.
[...] A recent post by Aris, developer of Classic Theme Restorer (CTR) and several other popular add-ons such as Classic Toolbar Buttons, NewScrollbars, or GlassMyFox, suggests that Classic Theme Restorer may be dead by the end of 2017. While Aris seems to have interest in porting over his extensions to WebExtensions, he notes that this is not possible right now.
Now [it's] real. CTR as we know it (and all my other Firefox add-ons), will be discontinued by the end of 2017. We still have no way to change [the] Firefox UI using WebExtensions and all my add-ons are about UI modifications. Seems like [it's] almost time to get used to another browser.
The end of the popular browser extension would bring the Australis design of Firefox to all users who relied on Classic Theme Restorer up until that point.
This highlights one of the main concerns that the move to WebExtensions exclusivity raises: The APIs are not there yet. In fact, a whole category of add-ons--all that modify the browser UI--cannot be ported over because of missing APIs and the situation may be similar in other areas. What makes this even more problematic than it is is that [...] no one seems to know whether the capabilities that WebExtensions APIs will deliver, once they are made available, will be sufficient to port add-ons over.
[...] Mozilla could have waited with the move until APIs are ready for the most part, but the organization decided not to do so.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 28 2016, @11:35PM
The (minor) news is that they stay with the plan, the one started a year or so ago (talking about webextensions, not the copycat path that has been going for longer) and they don't know if they will ever recover parity with previous state, which is what is causing more and more concerns ("growing news") and should give a clue to Mozilla. You should read the replies in that page. To sum up: they are ditching what makes FF what it is, a extensible browser, and thus the reason for people to use it vanishes.
Well, not exactly, there is other reason for some. So far it seems to allow disabling reports to mothership, so there is still something they don't do as bad as other browser. Maybe that is the next step, forcing the spyware harder.