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I wish Firefox would have left the old extension abilities. They could have easily added the WebExtensions standard to allow for cross-browser compatibility and not removed the old functionality.

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They basically did, until the underlying browser became incompatible. That was the point: to have a stable API instead of extensions relying on implementation details, which includes multiple processes.

They didn't just broke them by necessity of rewriting the browser, though – they then actively blocked them on regular browser versions (non-Nightly/Developer Edition/etc.).

Case in point: With some limited maintenance and a compatibility shim for loading them, a number of old add-ons are still working on current Firefox versions: https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...

Once multi-process was adopted, old extensions couldn't work anymore. The design simply didn't work.

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