The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons

Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by shock on Friday August 21, 2015 @12:30PM (#10098593)

The thing is, I'm not a web developer and I don't think I should be forced to use the Developer Edition just so I can remain in charge of what I install in my browser. Now that I'm writing this it occurs to me that after this change it's not really my browser anymore, is it?

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by hew on Friday August 21, 2015 @12:39PM (#10098655)

I hear you on the control thing. You mention you are a power user above so my two cents is that likely puts you outside of the user base Mozilla covets. In the last couple years, the words "Firefox" and "power user" went hand-and-hand but I'd wager Mozilla would trade customer bases with Google in a heartbeat.

FWIW, the Developer Edition feels pretty lean and mean. I haven't tried since I am a web developer, but it looks like you can remove most or all of the parts that make it web developer-y if you are so inclined.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by Animats on Friday August 21, 2015 @06:06PM (#10100530)

"You mention you are a power user above so my two cents is that likely puts you outside of the user base Mozilla covets."

Mozilla's business model needs users who can't figure out how to turn off Yahoo search. That pays for their new Firefox offices on the waterfront in San Francisco.[1]

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895991,-122.3883498,3a,36y,...

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by shock on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:33PM (#10099396)

I've ran Nightly and Aurora (which is now Developer Edition) for a while but extensions/themes broke more often than I'd have liked because there was too little time for extension devs to update their extensions in case incompatible changes were introduced.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by catern on Friday August 21, 2015 @12:36PM (#10098635)

Use Iceweasel or GNU Icecat?

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by shock on Friday August 21, 2015 @12:55PM (#10098759)

Thanks for the suggestion! That's what I'll prolly end up doing although neither of them are in the Ubuntu repos.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by johnny22 on Friday August 21, 2015 @05:09PM (#10100283)

you don't need the developer edition, you can use the unbranded version which is the same as the regular version except without the branding.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by azakai on Friday August 21, 2015 @12:51PM (#10098734)

There will also be special builds of Beta and Release without this limitation - you won't need to use Developer or Nightly.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by ptx on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:24PM (#10099324)

Does this mean that the FTP server will now offer a choice of:

1) Firefox without DRM, without lockdown

2) Firefox without DRM, with lockdown

3) Firefox with DRM, without lockdown

4) Firefox with DRM, with lockdown

...for every language?

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by azakai on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:28PM (#10099360)

I don't know if they'll offer each permutation of all those possibilities. I don't see why not though, it's just a little more build time.

In any case, if the specific combination of features you want is missing, the option to build from source is always there. (At least on Linux, building Firefox is also pretty easy.)

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by MacsHeadroom on Friday August 21, 2015 @04:26PM (#10100007)

AFAIK, yes, that is the plan.

However, "without lockdown" is going to be an "unbranded browser."

So likely you will see two folders, something like this:

/browser/release/

1) Browser with DRM (no lockdown)

2) Browser without DRM (no lockdown)

/firefox/release/

1) Firefox without DRM

2) Firefox with DRM

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by ptx on Friday August 21, 2015 @05:26PM (#10100363)

That doesn't sound like an option that will fork for my use-case - I manage a bunch of Windows machines; if we upgrade Firefox to "Noname Browser" with a different icon, the users will be confused and unable to find it.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by scottjad on Friday August 21, 2015 @10:11PM (#10101212)

They said previously the unbranded non-lockdown beta/stable releases would be enUS only.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by outworlder on Friday August 21, 2015 @12:38PM (#10098651)

Are you sure you are a 'power user', then?

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by shock on Friday August 21, 2015 @12:49PM (#10098721)

I'm not sure what you mean, but are you suggesting that if I'm a savvy driver I should just drive prototype cars?

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by nightski on Friday August 21, 2015 @01:05PM (#10098832)

Are you suggesting that the developer edition is merely a prototype and not a production browser?

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by czinck on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:03PM (#10099193)

According to a comment lower down, Developer Edition is on the alpha branch, so yes, it is a prototype.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by nightski on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:44PM (#10099471)

I don't think prototype is fair. A prototype is a proof of concept. Just because something is in beta or even alpha shape doesn't make it that.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by fernandotakai on Friday August 21, 2015 @03:51PM (#10099822)

i tried running firefox developer for a while and since it's based on the alpha code, it broke all my extensions on each update. so yeah, i'm a power user (i run 3 custom extensions that i wrote, pentadactyl and dotjs) but it's not feasible for me to keep running developer.

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Re:The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons by shock on Friday August 21, 2015 @01:27PM (#10098965)

Indeed, I am :)

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