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Comment by johnbrodie | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand Mozilla's position regarding extensions. First, they released a new desktop version with way less extension support, gimping the largest reason I use FF for - vimperator and it's successors.

Now they are going to kill extensions in Android FF, which will kill the only non-ideological reason my family is using it - for the adblocking extensions.

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> First, they released a new desktop version with way less extension support,

Switching the webextensions was necessary to continue improving browser performance. It's my perception that they tried to accommodate extension authors with new apis to allow as many extensions as possible to be ported.

Mozilla is not "going to kill extensions in Android FF".

> Now they are going to kill extensions in Android FF, which will kill the only non-ideological reason my family is using it - for the adblocking extensions.

I'm guess enough ad-based companies with deep pockets finally bullied Mozilla hard enough.

Looking at Mozilla IRC at the time, the reason wasn't bribery, but something way more basic.

Did you ever support an old SOAP server made in '90, that had a lot of bugs, that was slow as hell made of molasses, and was vulnerable to several security exploits?

Now imagine you have millions of users demanding, speed, security and those XML add-ons , I mean servers.

Basically Mozilla decided to ditching the old system in favor of the newer one, was the best choice at the time.

> Looking at Mozilla IRC at the time, the reason wasn't bribery, but something way more basic.

I wasn't saying bribery. I'm talking about bullying through other means.

Either way, the results were linked to Firefox overall performance, rather than caused by outside agent.

To me the writing has been on the wall ever since the community said "Hey these webextensions can't do nearly as many things as the old ones" and Mozilla's response to that was "Go fuck yourselves."

So now I have to do what I do on my desktop: Chromium for casual browsing and an old non-crippled version of Firefox for getting things done. Thankfully I only buy phones I can root and block ads system-wide.

From Firefox's dropping extension support to Windows' removal of granular update controls the tech industry's inexorable slide away from user control makes me want to cry tears of impotent rage.

> Mozilla's response to that was "Go fuck yourselves."

Do you have a source for that or are you just making things up?

My observation was that Mozilla consistently responded to complaints from extension authors by implemented new apis for their webextension implementation to allow extensions to be ported. That's pretty far away from "Go Fuck Yourselves."

> Mozilla introduced many new WebExtensions APIs in Firefox 57 [Quantum], such as the openerTabId property for tabs. The opener information is highly relevant for Tree Style Tab. [0]

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/12/webextension-tree-style-ta...

Then why can extensions still not customize the UI, even for something as simple as putting the tabs below the address and bookmarks bar?

That's what UserChrome.css is for.

I don't know why this guy was downvoted, he's correct.

I even have a pretty decent UserChrome.css to better integrate Tree Style Tab, https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/ao3ydl/configur...

Which is handy but not relevant to my question of "why can't an extension do this" with the implied "so I don't have to fiddle with copy-pasting text off the internet into configuration files I'm not entirely familiar with using." Not to mention that by default Firefox 69 disables loading of userchrome.css and you can bet your britches they're doing that in future anticipation of removing the feature entirely just like they did with everything else they've stripped out.

Because it's trash UX to ask users to find and modify their userchrome.css when they should be able to simply install the extension and have it work.

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