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I also was and still am disappointed about both changes, but I don't think you're being at all fair to Mozilla.

In both transitions, Mozilla made sure to support the needs of both uBlock origin and NoScript, extending the webextension API (such that uBlock origin on Firefox is more capable than on current Chromium) and working with uBlock to make its interface more mobile-friendly.

They also extended the webextension API to allow for extensions such as Treestyle tabs and Panorama-reimplementations (so not remotely all XUL use-cases, but still most of the popular ones).

Hence, they've proven that they will go considerably beyond what Google/Chromium are doing, and that they won't harm "content-blockers", which is what we care about in this case.

> I don't think you're being at all fair to Mozilla

> In both transitions, Mozilla made sure [to keep top popular addons mostly happy and ensure adblockers are happy]

Those are all fair points, and yes, I was probably too harsh with my language overall, that post written before I was corrected that Mozilla was not developing MV3 the same as Google was.

I stand by my strikes that Mozilla did kill XPCOM, and failed to deliver their promise to release all addons to Fenix on shipping stable versions. They don't even enable about:config on stable Fenix to enable power users to workaround that limitation.

In short, I believe I was 60% fair in my opinion.

"Mozilla did kill XPCOM" isn't a deviation from their stated intent. XPCOM was a magnet for Hyrum's Law problems, because obviously XPCOM plugins are going to depend on the inner workings of the browser, that's just how XPCOM is designed - so now if you touch these internals it breaks third party stuff. There were operating systems which took the approach XPCOM has to extensibility, they're not doing so great: Classic Mac OS, the Amiga Workbench, MS DOS... That's just not a sustainable situation, Mozilla had to kill XPCOM.

So to the extent Mozilla failed to deliver here it's on the replacement APIs. But how much is enough?

I would like lots of things to have APIs that don't. For example I'd like a way to do some basic queries on the built-in Public Suffix List for Firefox instead of needing to either bake the PSL into each plugin (and keep it up to date) or call out to a web API (ugh) or just guess that TLDs are "enough" and make everybody who needs other suffixes mad.

But in that particular case there are two reasons we don't have such APIs. #1 Nobody did the work. I didn't do the work, you didn't do the work, the work didn't get done. #2 In many cases (I think not mine but it's always arguable) the PSL is the Wrong Thing™ and so encouraging more use of the PSL makes things worse.

>how much is enough

They used to have an official goal like "supporting top X addons' transitions", so it's not so random about which API they needed to add.

> There were operating systems which took the approach XPCOM has to extensibility, they're not doing so great

The Emacs OS is still doing well! :)

> "Mozilla did kill XPCOM" isn't a deviation from their stated intent.

The issue is that their stated intent changed over time, and their communication about their precise intentions was often pretty poor.

It didn't help that the Webextension transition came on the heels of the e10s transition (5 firefox versions separated deprecating non-e10s add-ons and disabling e10s add-ons), but with relatively little warning, which meant that:

1. Many people implicitly believed that once they adapted their addons for e10s, they'd be safe.

2. Many people put in a huge amount of work to adapt for e10s and then had to redo a large part of it to convert their add-on into a webextension.

3. Some people put in a huge amount of work to adapt for e10s and found out that their work was pointless because their add-ons couldn't be converted into webextensions.

From a technical point of view, much of Firefox's XPCOM/internals were actually sufficiently stable post-webextension (57) that old e10s extensions could have continued to work with little changes. (e.g. VimFx continued to work with minimal changes for ~30 Firefox versions, on Nightly, with very slight hacking. AFAICT it still continues to work, with slight changes, but now with major hacking to get it to actually install.)

I’d say fairness also requires mentioning how the browser has been able to improve because of killing off XUL extensions; technologically, they were holding things back. Firefox is considerably faster than would have been possible without breaking a great many XUL extensions anyway. And more secure, if you care about that kind of thing, which normal people probably do or should, but frankly it’s the performance I care more about. So this is a “yeah, it’s a pity, but there were good reasons and you have benefited from it, even as you suffered” kind of thing.

Also how much more reliable long-term extension/browser compatibility has improved: I’ve used Firefox Nightly as my daily driver for about ten of the last twelve years, and until 2017 I’d spot at least one or two breakages each year, mostly fairly minor, but the occasional major (a couple of which accounted for maybe six months of going back to stable—and the lead-up to the killing of XUL extensions was another few months on stable because not all that I wanted was ready on WebExtensions yet). The extensions were typically patched before the change hit stable Firefox, so normal users wouldn’t notice most. But since WebExtensions, I don’t recall a single breakage. I acknowledge that the biggest breakages were in functionality that cannot be replicated any more, like Pentadactyl (and I ended up not even trying to replace it), but still, the minor and subtle breakages are just gone.

Regarding pentadactyl, I'm using tridactyl on Firefox and essentially for all my use cases it behaves the same as pentadactyl. I realise that some of the advanced functionality of pentadactyl is not available (IIRC pentadactyl allowed you to essentially reprogram the browser), but I have to say I'm not really missing much.

For what it's worth, manifest V3 could effect Tridactyl as it could block code that is evaluated at runtime from accessing the browser APIs.

It will make it less programmable by the end user.

There's also Vimium for Firefox called vimium-ff. I don't know which one's better, I just use vimium-ff.

I think people forget how slow and buggy Firefox used to be. There is a reason that Chrome took off like a rocket in the early '10s.

In most areas (though certainly not all), the difference was generally ironed out well before the advent of WebExtensions—what’s come since then has been as often surpassing as catching up.

Chrome was definitely a wake-up call, and the Firefox 4 cycle in 2010 achieved a lot. I recall doing audio stuff with the new Audio Data API (sadly since discontinued in favour of the much-more-complex-generally-for-no-good-reason Web Audio API) with a sine waves stress test (adding random sine waves together until underrun occurs) in Nightly, and watching the number it could cope with increase, week after week, due to JIT engine improvements. It went from handling a dozen to handling a couple of hundred over the course of two or three months.

When the transition from XPCOM to WebExt started, Mozilla made some big promises about the functionality parity about the two but failed to deliver most of them (and silently removed such promises from their official pages, and left relevant Bugzilla tickets rot (e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427928 )).

IMHO, practically speaking, the final result of WebExt isn't that bad, especially taking into consideration of the added APIs you mentioned.

It is the shear difference bwtween promise and reality that really hurts lots of power users and addon developers to this day.

Also you mentioned Treestyle as "most of the popular ones", but left out the elephant in the room, Tab Mix Plus, which even has its own Bugzilla ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546 Gesture extensions nowadays are also pretty limited compared to its heyday due to the nature of WebExt.

In hindsight, these promises were just too good to be true, but people were believing.

And the story of extension support on Firefox on Android is way too similar to the last time in the Fennec to Fenix transition. At least this time, users just didn't have much faith in it to begin with.

Thanks for the summary. I had perceived the betrayal but I had never organized the thoughts nor verified the claims.

What do you think is the future (+2 years) for people with hatred for ads? For now I am using Firefox on computer + Kiwi in Android, but I also expect those two to go awry in the mid term.

* I see that after the edit, it doesn't look as bleak for Firefox PC. But what about Android?

For Android, I don't have a great answer for you. In theory you can install Fennec on F-Droid, version 57, the last version the last version of Firefox built by F-Droid that was based on the Fennec browser engine, but that has security vuln potential, increasingly so since its been a few years since Fennec -> Fenix switch.

For now, because I don't want to be hit by security vulns in the browser itself, I'm holding my nose and doing plain old Firefox mobile, leaving some of the tracking stuff blocked on my Pi-Hole, then letting my wireguard VPN ensure that even when I'm off Wi-Fi, my signal gets routed to my home connection so the Pi-Hole can stop some of the telemetry (but not all! some gets through no doubt).

Why am I holding my nose there? Because my planned next browser, Iceraven [1], is not yet out of alpha and published to F-Droid. I check every 3 months or so, once it is, that's where I'm going, because it's as close as I can get to Firefox Desktop, but runs on Android.

[1] https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

The latest Firefox for Android (104.1.0) has a limited set of add-ons available. One of those is uBlock Origin. Works out of the box.

fennec is up to date on f-droid, currently version 104.something

Firefox Nightly for Android supports most desktop extensions. It is clunky to enable them (you have to create a collection and then subscribe to it) and being a nightly build it does have some instability, but it works out pretty well.

Only caveat I've really found is that it gets stuck on the Guardian's website (after a few clicks).

> What do you think is the future (+2 years) for people with hatred for ads?

DNS-based blocking

I don't know. I'm using it now in the form of pihole, but DoT/DoH with ESNI are coming, and we don't have a good way to ID and block them by their very nature, which is the bad edge of the double-edged sword that they enable.

The good edge is keeping ISPs etc. from messing with your DNS requests, but that sword cuts both ways as it also can lock your own home network out.

I think a hosted browser might be key to solving this. Something like Mighty (https://mightyapp.com) if it were self-hosted or somehow run by an org you could trust (or be run in some verifiably zero-trust way).

> DNS-based blocking

Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636412

DNS based ad blocking is slightly different than VPN based blocking. VPN is there for people running environments where DoH is not yet supported.

Newer versions of iOS, Android and Windows support it already.

Until DoH becomes standard/required?

I don't understand what is it with DNS-based blocking people that they seem to be some of the most annoying proselytizers. Anyone remembers the "HOSTS file guy" from Slashdot ?

DNS-based blocking is as much a "future-proof" technology as "just don't look at the adverts". DNS-based blocking is old, easily workaroundable by anyone (just use the same domain name for everything, or interchangeable domain names, or just don't rely on system DNS), and significantly less featureful than even the simplest DOM/JS-based blocking (e.g. good luck collapsing ad elements from the view, getting Youtube not to play ads, etc.).

Which add-ons are you missing from Firefox for Android?

SingleFile

Old Reddit Redirect

User Agent Switcher

Click to find out what HN says (heh)

Fakespot

Absolute Enable Force Right Click and copy

Page Screenshot

SponsorBlock

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32649895

Don't these run on Firefox nightly on android? You need to change some advanced settings, but according to [1] they should work.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Parent asked about Firefox for Android. This functionality you mention is only available in Firefox Nightly, and even then it requires setting up a curated list on Mozilla's service to use it.

What's wrong with running Firefox nightly on android? I've been running it as my main browser for quite a while and have hardly experienced any breakage (maybe 2 or 3 times in the last 3 years).

The one I am missing the most is the multicontainer addon

Hi, try Iceraven on android with a custom extension repo. They'll all install but are not guaranteed to work. I have most of those extensions working on Iceraven myself.

Firefox will not go awry, read the actual facts in this thread.

You can install more extensions if you use Firefox Nightly:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

It's not a clean experience and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone non-technical but I use this approach and it works fine, at least for the extensions I care about. There's also the caveat that you're running Firefox Nightly which usually is fine but has had big functionality bugs. I'd keep another browser installed as backup.

Just install any adblocker that supports v3.

> Fennec to Fenix mobile extensions? Killed, you get these 10 blessed ones, don't worry, we will eventually re-enable all of the webextensions on mobile, any day now

I harbor the (conspiracy?) theory is that Google told Mozilla based on their "No arbitrary code"-rule that they are not allowed to run arbitrary extensions anymore. And made Mozilla promise to never tell anyone.

If Firefox even deprecates WebRequest, LibreWolf will probably announce their intention to patch it back in and people will switch en masse.

Now that uMatrix development is inactive, this third strike could be their last for me.

UMatrix is not only out of development, it is also broken on current Firefox. Sometimes you randomly lose session cookies, which is not acceptable.

> Fennec to Fenix mobile extensions? Killed, you get these 10 blessed ones, don't worry, we will eventually re-enable all of the webextensions on mobile, any day now, (didn't happen, you have to do hacky hacks involving nightly version to do un-blessed extensions).

Yep:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647

The only thing keeping Firefox alive and relevant is uBlock Origin and its ad-blocking features. If Mozilla cripples it in any manner, Firefox will die. But I don't have high hopes and lost all trust in them when they built a backdoor in their browser to run any code through it on their users browser, as they please, and have even used it to violate their users privacy and trust - Mozilla ships Cliqz experiment in Germany for ~1% of new installs, collects surf data, including URLs - https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74n0b2/mozilla_shi... ...

Unless Firefox is released from the clutches of Mozilla, Firefox will never be a serious competitor in the browser wars.