Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> electrovim is in no way a replacement for Vimperator. It's a couple of keyboard shortcuts. None of the current vim-like plugins for FF57 match what vimperator/pentadactyl can do.

Uh, yes, I'm the author of Electrovim, so I'm quite aware of the functionality that I was literally unable to implement because no equivalent API existed.

> The problem I have isn't that they broke legacy things, it's that they broke legacy things without offering a path to rebuild them.

Did you not read the rest of the comment, where I explain why there is no feasible way that they could have offered any path to rebuild them?

View on HN

> I've developed a couple of Firefox extensions. One of those was an e10s-compatible replacement for Vimperator, because Vimperator relied on XUL[0].

Replacement for Vimperator implies it's, well, a replacement for Vimperator.

> Did you not read the rest of the comment, where I explain why there is no feasible way that they could have offered any path to rebuild them?

I don't see how your addressed that. Yes, existing extensions that used XUL would have to be rewritten using new APIs. My issue is that those APIs don't even exist. That there are good reasons the old APIs aren't available anymore doesn't address the lack of new APIs that offer anything near equivalent functionality.

Is it impossible to support window or otherwise chrome-level event listeners and also e10s? As I said in a prior comment, there seems no a priori reason that should be the case.

> Is it impossible to support window or otherwise chrome-level event listeners and also e10s?

Yes, because those things are now running in different processes, which means it requires IPC, and allowing extensions to communicate over IPC with the chome throws all the benefits of e10s out the window.

The Mozilla triage meeting in September, which covered this issue, suggests that the requested feature may land in Firefox 58: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pw5y-GHwDLPV9bYK4HWCiZts...

It looks like it's been broken down into a number of separate issues since then, and there's some discovery yet to be done on how exactly the implementation will need to proceed - I feel like Firefox 58 is very optimistic, but I also feel like saying "this is never going to happen" is pretty premature at this point. At the very least, the Firefox devs don't seem to agree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com