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posted by
CoolHand
on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:47AM
from the who-is-this-company-named-mozilla dept.
from the who-is-this-company-named-mozilla dept.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody who's been paying attention the past few years, Mozilla has announced that it will be deprecating all current extensions and have all future extensions be compatible with Chrome and Opera via the new WebExtensions API.
- We are implementing a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers.
- A safer, faster, multi-process version of Firefox is coming soon with Electrolysis; we need developers to ensure their Firefox add-ons will be compatible with it.
- To ensure third-party extensions provide customization without sacrificing security, performance or exposing users to malware, we will require all extensions to be validated and signed by Mozilla starting in Firefox 41, which will be released on September 22nd 2015.
- We have decided on an approximate timeline for the deprecation of XPCOM- and XUL-based add-ons.
Maybe now we can get a sustainable fork going?
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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:07PM
The self-destruction of Firefox over the past few years has been amazing to watch. What is going on? Why are they slowly destroying their browser? Why don't they listen to anyone? Someone is on a mission to destroy the one browser that can actually be used to give users some control over the Internet, via extensions, to stop the spying, tracking, scripts, and so on. They made the UI so messed up that no one could use the browser, but extensions let people put it back the way it was, so now they're attacking extensions themselves.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @04:50PM
They decided that they were done making a browser and needed instead to provide a comprehensive user experience that accorded with a set of philosophic goals grounded in sheer hipsterdom. The new FF experience will strive to anticipate all your decisions, for the set of decisions of which your privilege is still capable without further oppressing yourself and others. Hence no more of the old extensions, no reading list without third party spyware, no more control over your UI, lots of prefetching and predictive behavior. Because you deserve it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:57AM
The same people who made netscape work on FF. Thats why.
Netscape did the same thing.
I agree it is maybe a bit 'premature' to say which way this will go. But given past history it is not looking good.
A standard API is a good idea. But just 'too bad how sad' for all the existing plugins? Really? How to implode your identity in under a year.
Now what is the diff between FF or Chrome? Not much.
I will probably keep on using FF but thats just because the 2 plugins I use will probably be supported. There will be no reason to switch as there will be no difference. What reason do I have to switch or stay... Not much either way. Speed wise Chrome and FF are on par with each other. Memory is slightly better on FF.
There is no reason to switch or stay... You are litterally making me not excited to recommend you. When people ask? I will tell them 'doesnt mater'.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Sunday August 23 2015, @04:50AM
What is going on?
They've been taken over by SJWs. Remember when the CEO was forced out for having wrongthink? Over a few years prior to that I started to notice things going this way. The FF team has been compromised, or have we all forgotten that around the CEO scandal time was when they also tried to integrate non-removable Twitter and Facebook plugins? Giving soulless systems that market in user data a foothold in every install doesn't sound much like the Firefox you first downloaded to "take back the web"? It's been down hill ever since. Now I've implemented my meta language's VM in ASM.js so it's 100% compatible with my stand alone native client that provides the browser features my web deployments use (without needing JS). The stand alone system runs about 1000 times faster than on Firefox or Chrome (even though compilation to ASM.js lets most of my browser code compile to machine code), and this "desktop app" engine is what my web based customers will be using if/when "browsers" are dead. Chrome had a similar way of doing this for its plugins, but who wants the bloated attack surface if you can just include the code you need in a native applicaiton -- "Kitchen Sink Syndrome" killed Java Applets for the same reasons it will kill browsers too.
All the browsers are becoming application platforms. There's even a Firefox OS -- Glad I didn't dev too much for that shite since this change has ramifications for FFOS. All the sites (even this one) are web applications (which the "web" was never designed to accommodate). What the hell is the point of integrating plugin architectures for browsers? I could just install the Internet enabled app to my system directly and cut out the browser middle man. What's the point of LocalStorage and client side IndexDB Objects, etc? It's so your web site can be functional when "offline" -- Gee, just like stand alone applications already are. What are websockets and CORS (Cross Origin Request) for? So that your website can be more like an ordinary desktop application that connects to the web -- except without any of the nifty application firewalls users can deploy on an application by application basis -- nope, better to let the advertisers decide who the site ("web app") connects back to.
Anyone with a bit of snap can see the writing on the wall. The big signal for me was when HTML4.01 took half the age of the Internet to get to HTM5. Over 12 years... At 3 years of 4.01 I was thinking, "Well, the web is over, better hedge my bets for the drawn out struggle." That's when I turned my hobby meta-language compiler into the main development platform, and was able to leverage all of my existing code during the mobile "app" explosion. Nowadays I could give a fuck less about what language or platform is born or dies, all my code will run on it without change (takes about 2-3 weeks to build the VM/Runtime library/platform abstraction layer).
IMO, this is a great move for Firefox. That way, if they croak or go down in a flamewar over Social Justice issues then your new plugins can run painlessly in the app engines made by advertising MegaCorps like the new Microsoft (windows -- as a service!) and Alphabet (formerly Google). [abc.xyz]
TL;DR: What's happening? Unfortunately, everything is going exactly as planned.