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by Seb-C 945 days ago
Funny, I was under the impression that Mozilla didn't need any help sabotaging Firefox by themselves.

Or maybe it's also the fault of Google if they suddenly broke all the old extensions and never honored their promise to bring their capabilities back. Or when they disabled the extensions on mobile and did not bring it back despite their promise. Or when they break the user's habits by doing a useless UI revamp every 6 month and ignore the community's feedback.
2 comments
nneonneo 945 days ago
In regards to extensions: it is my understanding that WebExtensions were never sold as being capable of as much as XUL addons, because XUL addons could rewrite just about anything in the browser and cause just about unlimited breakage. The XUL API could not be flexibly improved, and critically held back some real security improvements like multi-process rendering. It was ultimately _necessary_ to redesign the API in order to make it feasible to evolve the browser without constantly breaking addons. Please read https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo... for a more in-depth explanation.
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Seb-C 944 days ago
I remember reading some ticket pages at the release, where they actually made promises about bringing the capabilities back in the future. But TBH I could not retrieve any link.

I know this story already, but as much as I can empathize with this since I am a developer myself, from a user point of view they destroyed the ecosystem that was their strength. When I said "bring back", I do not mean XUL as a technology, I mean the functionalities that the extensions could use.

I was on Firefox because it brought me something more, and because I appreciated it as it was. But now that they dumbed it down and made it like Google Chrome rather than focusing on their strengths, I do not have any good reason to use it. Because the many Chromium-based alternatives are better, more innovative, more reliable, and their UIs are stable and does not change every 6 months.

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dralley 945 days ago
>never honored their promise to bring their capabilities back

They did. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831094/firefox-android-...

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Seb-C 944 days ago
This specific sentence was about the extensions of Firefox Desktop actually.

But still, it's good to know that they finally brought back the extensions on Android. I gave up after waiting one year and a half, and TBH I don't know if I should trust them again to go back to it.

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