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Comment by piyush_soni | Hacker News Reader

(Not a tree style tabs user, but ... ) Yes, because

1) Someone here might know more (updated) about when's the support going to be added for the same,

2) The Extension Author might comment on when he's going to add the support for it if possible,

3) Some of the geeks here might know a good replacement of it (because Firefox's "Find a Replacement" is not as good as it's supposed to be).

4) When people say "me too", some other Hackers around here might be inspired to write one from scratch, or Firefox people might see how important it is (I know about Bugzilla's voting system, trust me, that doesn't work)

Firefox has just broken people's workflows that were set in place for years, and they are naturally concerned. Let it be.

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> Firefox has just broken people's workflows that were set in place for years

I don't think that is highlighted enough - the majority of the discussion is focussed on cosmetics, but it takes a lot of effort to break habits and muscle memory that have developed with daily use over many, many years (since Phoenix [1] in my case.)

It's also going to take a huge amount of time and effort to research, learn and configure replacement extensions. I really don't need that stress for something as important as a browser, so I'll stick with ESR as my daily tools as long as possible and build a new profile e.g. using Nightly as time allows. It's far from a trivial exercise.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/05/13/milestone-phoe...

>Firefox has just broken people's workflows that were set in place for years

The XUL deprecation in FF57 has been public knowledge for years. The extension authors are to blame here.

How do you port a XUL extension that relies for critical functionality on calls whose equivalents the web extensions API doesn't provide?

How do you achieve 1:1 compatibility between extension APIs when the architecture that enabled XUL to expose the entire codebase for extensions' use no longer exists, and no longer exists because replacing it was the only way to resolve showstopping performance issues?

How do you keep using a browser that no longer supports extensions without which you can't satisfy the use cases for which you chose and adapted that browser in the first place?

No one is to blame here.

The extension developers could have worked more closely with the Firefox team to find possible solutions.

In the end, XUL was a major performance and security issue. Good riddance.

> The extension developers could have worked more closely with the Firefox team to find possible solutions.

Really? What opportunities have you observed in the recent close collaboration between Mozilla and the developers or maintainers of many high-profile, and not a few niche, legacy extensions? I'm sure I am not the only one here who would be interested in gaining the benefit of knowledgeable and thoughtful feedback on how that process has played out.

I only loosely followed it but AFAICT the author of Tree Style Tabs had a feature request for the APIs needed shortly after WebExtensions was announced. It was considered a "won't fix" for most of that time, the sidebar API was only added in the last few months. He didn't have years to port things, and the team initially rejected his attempts to find possible solutions.

The Firefox team has a solution: Break everything to make it faster, and not care about the freaks who like extensions, who rely on extensions. Cooperation is a two-way street, and the Firefox devs blocked it off entirely.

That's not been my experience at all. But I'm relatively new to extension maintainership, having only picked up the Firemacs baton earlier this year. No doubt your own experience equips you much better to comment on Mozilla's interaction with extension devs than mine.

Look, I get it, okay? It's a pisser. But throwing this kind of shit around helps nothing and nobody. It just makes life a little worse for everyone in the blast radius. Maybe you're fine with that. More likely you're just mad. I get that. But it's not an excuse.

There are still thousands of actively developed extensions.

I get that you're mad about some of your favorite niche extensions being unavailable due to relying on XUL functionality that shouldn't have been there in the first place, but you'll just have to find alternatives.

And the dismissive attitude of the Firefox team just makes the whole thing worse.

The alternative a lot of people will find is a different browser.

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