Which reputable chromium fork will support v2 extensions?
That more or less makes it a good standard chromium browser.
Might have changed now though
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...
Brave's close association with cryptocurrency and Web 3 is also concerning. Most fraud occurs at the endpoints, not in the middle. While the centralized banking system has mechanisms like chargebacks to address fraud, the crypto space lacks such safeguards. Cryptocurrency has limited real-life utility and is largely sustained by con artists looking to scam people. Once people recognize one scheme as a scam, new crypto concepts, like NFT games, are quickly invented to keep the deception going.
As an example of this sort of thing, consider when Firefox removed XUL extensions (Firefox 57, November 2017). This upset lots of people, and did kill many extensions that just couldn’t exist in the WebExtensions world, and hobble others. But it was done for a reason, and if you compare pre-Quantum and current Firefox you’ll find one of two is faster, more secure and more reliable: and it ain’t the old one. XUL extensions imposed a serious burden and prevented concrete technical improvements. Of course, other changes may have been made that you may or may not like so much (e.g. UI changes), but the removal of XUL/XPCOM has been a good thing for the browser in general.
A number of forks retained XUL extensions, but most died fairly quickly because of code base improvements predicated on their removal. There are still a couple around, I think most notably Pale Moon; they’re all now necessarily hard forks. I don’t know what Pale Moon’s more recent web tech feature support is like—I don’t imagine it’s very good, because it can’t take advantage of Firefox’s efforts. https://www.palemoon.org/history.shtml paints a fairly bleak picture for the future: things have gone badly wrong already, and they admit that the project is in the long term basically untenable as a general web browser. (That entire article is also highly biased in its presentation of the entire thing, fairly heavily anti-Mozilla and anti-browser-vendors-in-general-though-they-frame-it-as-Google.)
Such forks also rapidly decay in usefulness in another way: no one makes XUL extensions any more, and probably no one will be making Manifest v2 extensions any more. For a while, the likes of Pale Moon may have allowed you to keep using more extensions, but by now, using Pale Moon means that you get fewer extensions than Firefox, and so they lose their appeal.
There are cases where forks succeed in becoming the primary version of the thing; for example, OpenOffice.org has over time essentially died, and its fork LibreOffice has succeeded. MySQL versus MariaDB is mildly similar, though MySQL’s failure is much less stark.
There are also cases where forks have succeeded, with divergence of both. There’s even a good one in the web browser world: when Google forked WebKit into Blink. In that case, both engines were improved by the fork, because WebKit had been supporting two different directions to a degree, and now they could pursue their own individual goals with better focus (both were able to remove lots of code), and both had enough investment to survive. Over time, their code bases have become more and more incompatible.
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So… in a few years’ time, probably no reputable Chromium fork will support v2 extensions, and you probably won’t have any reason to want one that does anyway.
And as you say several 1 dev forks were able to keep both WebExtensions and XUL for free, why wouldn't the million dollar company spending millions on side quests?
What Firefox did was a shoot in the foot, loose active users, and fragment the community for many years. And we can only hope the same happens to Chrome
https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo... is one article about this, and other information floats about the place too.
XUL is a core part of Firefox, and can still be re-enabled for addons today
https://gir.st/blog/legacyfox.htm https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx
But I guess only randos on the internet have the technical know-how
I don’t see any comments on that article?
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You’re missing the picture.
All that LegacyFox looks to do is allow loading old-style extension manifests, by converting them to new-style, just with the difference that they’re given unfettered access to internals. This allows you to load the extensions, but doesn’t guarantee that they will work.
By the end of 2019, XUL Templates, XUL Overlays, XBL Stylesheets, XUL Documents, and XBL had been removed <https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/24SH5R0AcC0/m/B6Sc...>.
Last year, XUL Layout was finally removed <https://crisal.io/words/2023/03/30/xul-layout-is-gone.html>.
I haven’t tried actually running any of this stuff, but I get the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog <https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/master/CHANGELOG...>, and yeah, regular fixes have been required, with more and more things breaking. This is a pretty good demonstration of what the problem with XPCOM extensions was, as the article pointed out: they had too much access to browser internals, which made it hard for the browser to change things without breaking extensions, and necessary changes just kept on breaking extensions again and again and again, and extension developers were tired of it. In the WebExtension era, extensions almost never break, despite major concrete improvements in the browser having been made that in the past would have broken at least every interesting extension out there.
XUL (by which I mean XUL, not XPCOM) isn’t completely gone yet, because it was such a core part of the browser that it takes a long time to kill it completely, but most of what made it it is gone.
XPCOM extensions made Firefox unmaintainable. Although they were a great thing, they had to die for Firefox to survive.
* VimFX still works in the latest release of Firefox
* If random people on the internet can square it, so probably could the Firefox team, they didn't need to keep all features
* They decided to handicap their addons to match Chrome, because "security" and lost users
* Chrome is now doing the same
> ...but I the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog...
The changelog shows a fix this month for the firefox 127 this month, the current version is 126. And the readme clearly states firefox-esr 115+. You don't get more working than that
> WebExtension era, extensions almost never break
Any other recent extension needs way more maintenance to keep up with the constant evolving of the WebExtensions apis. And you can look at their logs. Years to partially catch up, and much more work for worse user experience
https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/philc/vimium
> ..they had too much access to browser internals..
All apps have to much access, that's is the same lame excuse Google is using now. All extensions are reviewed by Google/Mozilla and manually installed by the user. If they can't keep them safe hire someone who can. Especially Chrome that already has APIs for random websites to access USBs, filesystem, etc..
And a lot less relevant.
It's easy to achieve technical excellence: a typical "hello, world" runs fast, is very secure and reliable.
I don't disagree with the first part here (I've heard numerous complaints about chromium forkers about how absolutely awful a chromium fork is to maintain and how the chrome team likes to deliberately break internal patterns), but I think you underestimate the importance of reputable adblockers to both tech people and downstream tech users.
Because when family calls about Chromes adblockers not working right, what the family techie is going to do is install Firefox, not Chrome or its forks.
Remember also that, in the short term, the regressions for content blockers from moving to v3 are comparatively minor. That tends to be a knell: there’s not enough to get outraged about straight away, probably only if you could compare the situation a few years later.