Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The respected Firefox add-on developer Quicksaver announced yesterday that he won't update any of his extensions anymore because of Mozilla's decision to move to WebExtensions exclusively. Quicksaver, responsible for add-ons such as Tab Groups, OmniSidebar, FindBar Tweak, Beyond Australis and Puzzle Bars, had four of his five add-ons for Firefox featured by Mozilla in the past.
If you open any of the author's add-on pages on the Mozilla Add-ons repository, you will notice an important announcement on the page. It reads:
IMPORTANT: The add-on will not receive any more updates and will stop working by next November with Firefox 57.[...] Quicksaver posted an explanation on his website that reveals why he made the decision to stop add-on development. There are several reasons, but the core reason given is that at least four of his five add-ons rely heavily on functionality that will either not be provided by WebExtensions, or would require him to rewrite the extension almost completely.
[...] Quicksaver is not the only author who announced that he will stop working on add-ons for Firefox. Add-ons like New Tab Tools, Classic Theme Restorer, Tree Style Tabs, Open With, DownThem All, KeeFox and many others are likely also not going to make the cut.
Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/28/firefox-add-on-quicksaver-quits/
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @08:51AM
Yet they wil slide into oblivion, even more. They don't realize they are losing to Chrome not due to features or speed ** , but because Google pushes Chrome in every page, and via every third party they can.
In the first place they are losing to Chrome because they decided to compete on having the biggest advertising budget rather than maintaining the niche they had carved out for themselves.
Any products that look and behave the same are competing on advertising budget. The alternative is being different, and every Firefox update for years now has been removing the things that make Firefox different.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30 2017, @02:05PM
They're loosing because they keep trying to be Chrome, not realizing that the people who prefer Chrome are going to just use Chrome anyway and meanwhile the people who liked Firefox the way it was but don't like Chrome are getting increasingly fed up and leaving for other browsers. The Pale Moon fork exists because of people who wanted the Firefox UI to just stay as it was and understood that there was no reason why the security updates couldn't be done without screwing up the UI every couple months.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 30 2017, @05:38PM
sudo mod me up