[Xamayon]

I felt the same way about how they killed off the old extensions. It took a lot of work to rewrite my (much smaller) Image Search Options extension, and lots of once key features had to be removed... I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast. The new extension works, but it's a shadow of its former self. Although I did also port it to chrome (why not, right?) I wound up not publishing the full version. For better or worse, I still feel Firefox is the best browser. Its a small measure, but if my extension has helped keep even a few users, I count that as a win.

[m4rtink]

The mobile Firefox situation is even bigger mess - there used to be a mozikka maintained Firefox build based on older Firefox cidebase that supported quite many Firefox extensions. Then last summer Mozilla decided to update the codebase and rewrite the GUI on Android. End result ? A hand picked list of essential extensions (Ublock Origin basically and little else) that are available that hardly gets ever extended.

You can add arbitrary exebsions to the android Firefix nightly build, but it involves a lot of unnecessary steps, such as custom extension list creation, id passing and other bullshit.

End result is that the best bet for using extensions on Android is actually Chrome extensions & the Yandex browser of all things, which will just install anything from the Chrome web store (and it often will even work).

Oh how low we have gone...

[tn123]

>I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast.

Yeah, unless you actually write the code, there is no way. And writing code for the mozilla code base can be quite intimidating with their mix of C++ and js and XPCOM and not-XPCOM and webidl, etc. I once submitted a patch (unrelated to my extensions) that bounced from the who-is-who of mozilla rockstar devs at the time, and nobody wanted to really even look it because it was changing something so deep within the XPCOM-Javascript bridge and nobody really remembered how it even worked. I finally got my r+ from some brave soul who just said "I don't really know the code it touches either, but somebody has to do the review".

Even if you do the work, it can be an uphill battle to get code in, especially if you're trying to add new features and not just fix existing bugs.

I spoke to people within mozilla back in the day - I was part of the community after all and knew a lot of folks - and they weren't exactly happy, but weren't in a position to make things better, either.

DownThemAll! was big enough that they eventually "officially" reached out and ask me what I need, and then essentially said they couldn't really do any of it, "sorry" and they know "that sucks" (refreshingly honest, at least, but I wasn't talking to upper management but a developer-turned-developer-relations). The person who contacted me, one could tell, was given a mission to appease developers by showing mozilla cared, but wasn't actually provided any resources to really help or support people. All that person could do was to apologize and suggest to read the docs and read the docs on how to propose and implement new APIs - but at the time I had already proposed some new APIs that in my opinion would not just have benefited DownThemAll! but all kinds of add-ons dealing with downloads, and was struck down as "not generally useful to a lot of add-ons, sorry, we do not want to maintain such an API" already.

What I said almost 5 years ago still is true in that regard: they tried to a certain degree to accommodate some of the really popular add-ons, and with some success too, and the smaller add-ons were left in the dust. Not because of ill-will of mozilla, but simply because they lacked the resources to do anything more.