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by abeyer 2835 days ago
> killed XUL Extensions and Mozilla moved Firefox entirely to WebExtensions without the APIs to fully support existing popular add-ons

this. I was never a tree view tab convert, but definitely miss noscript and vim bindings, plus things like the selenium UI.

XUL sucked in many ways, I tried writing extensions with it and I have no illusions there. But coming up with a reasonable upgrade strategy for a huge swath of popular extensions was something that should have been done before deprecating it. Rather mozilla basically told people that if webextensions didn't do what they need now, then just hope for the best sometime in the future, and in the meantime too bad, your extensions are gone.

But honestly this wasn't the only thing, just the most recent. It's the general attitude of willingness to ignore the actual use cases of their actual users for some theoretical appeal to a mass market of "average users" that they've yet to convert. I felt much the same way after the Aurelius release broke a bunch of ui, and any number of other breaking changes over the last few years.

1 comments

> I . . . definitely miss noscript and vim bindings, plus things like the selenium UI.

And by "the selenium IU" I assume you mean Selenium IDE, i.e., https://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/selenium-ide.png

Is that what you mean?