[causi]

The really galling thing is they lied right to our damn faces about how "the new faster systems breaks the old add-on system" while they were still using XUL behind the scenes. In fact an HN reader compiled versions of Firefox 57 and above with user-installed XUL enabled and they work perfectly well.

[yoasif_]

Nothing is really stopping people from keeping those extensions compatible. Unsupported doesn't mean impossible - it just means you need to do some tweaks: https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io

[causi]

I'm not understanding how that relates to the fact that the only thing stopping users from installing their XUL extensions on FF57 was a software switch they weren't allowed to touch without editing and compiling from source.

[yoasif_]

No editing or compilation needed. You just needed to disable signature checks (xpinstall.signatures.required) and enable extension experiments (extensions.experiments.enabled) in a developer edition version (or nightly) version of the browser.

[doix]

I feel like if it was that simple, someone would have written instructions somewhere at the time. I remember having to set xpinstall.signatures.required before FF 57. I am not sure about extensions.expirements.enabled.

Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I can't be bothered constantly fucking around with my setup and have resigned myself to just accepting whatever Mozilla wants to shove down my throat.

From what I can tell, the community has forked pentadactyl[0] and are using it on Palemoon[1]. I'm guessing if it could still run on Firefox today, they would do that instead of using Palemoon (but I could be wrong). Anyway, I still hate that they killed what made Firefox unique. Trying to beat Chrome at it's own game seems like a pointless battle.

[0] https://github.com/pentadactyl/pentadactyl

[1] https://www.palemoon.org/