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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday August 13 2017, @12:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the firefox-loses-yet-more-users dept.

Firefox 57, which is slated for release on November 14, will "only run WebExtensions", according to Mozilla.

This is expected to break compatibility with many existing Firefox extensions, and in many cases there aren't WebExtensions-compatible alternatives available for these extensions.

During some recent discussion at Slashdot, it became clear that some users have nearly all of their extensions classified as "legacy", and susceptible to breakage.

Members of the SoylentNews community, if you use Firefox, how many of your extensions are set to no longer work with Firefox in the near future?

If Firefox 57 breaks compatibility with your existing extensions, will this finally be enough for you to discard Firefox and find an alternative browser to use?

Will this extension breakage, and subsequent loss of users, effectively end the viability of Firefox as a modern web browser?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:10PM (2 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:10PM (#553332) Journal
    "FF has pretty good security, and Debian took it so much farther by issuing patches faster than FF could mainline them. (This is why FF was called "iceweasel" on Debian before they changed their trademark policy.)"

    That's actually based on a real story, but with the details changed, presumably as the result of fuzzy memory.

    It wasn't the speed with which Debian was patching, it was that Mozilla did not want these patches produced at all, and tried to use their trademark to prevent it. Patches in question being back-ported security fixes for older Firefox versions. Mozilla wanted them to simply accept the new version whole, and that was back when Debian was worth something so they took the time to strip out the copyrighted images and maintained old versions with backported security patches.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @07:40PM (#553340)

    That isn't borne out in the exchanges I've read between Mozilla and Debian, so I'm pretty sure you're making it up. The gist of those exchanges were:

    M: you can't use our trademark on builds we don't provide
    D: we need security patches tho
    M: upstream them plz
    D: we tried, yo' ass slo. ain't nobody got time fo' dat

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @08:15PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2017, @08:15PM (#553350)

      Actually I believe that Mozilla was fine with Debian producing patched versions, and was perfectly willing to grant Debian a special dispensation to use the Mozilla trademarks for the patched versions.

      BUT it's against the Debian rules to accept a special dispensation that can't be passed along downstream.