Where are the specs for what replaces it supposed to come from? And when they asked for those specs and got little answers, what were they supposed to do? Run around screaming "No we're serious this time, we really are going to drop this, and we really need you guys to work on getting requirements voiced? And also it'd be great if you took us seriously about e10s too!"
One of my favorite extensions is vimperator. There are comments going back over a YEAR that there would be problems with e10s and XUL, and they were always just pushed off and ignored because it wasn't a current situation. I've got two or three other extensions whose github issues section mirrors the same situation. Some of them thought Mozilla would put in a "allow me to run dangerous addons" button and leave the code in play, but if add on developers can do that, then malicious add on developers can too.
1. There's no guarantee that Mozilla will actually implement such APIs, and no guarantee that they will actually support them in the future. If past behavior indicates future behavior, they will support them for 12-18 months and then say, "It's not worth the effort anymore. But here's a new bundled Facebook plugin that we're totally not being paid to put in. Have fun!"
2. More importantly, many of these extensions would never have come to exist if their authors had had to beg Mozilla to implement an API first. If XUL had never existed, would ad-blocking extensions have ever been created? I can imagine the Bugzilla pages now: "This is not a priority for our limited manpower. Restricting this issue due to advocacy. You can discuss it further on the mailing list."
Firefox - XUL != Firefox
Or I'll fork, merge all upstream patches down, and work with that.
Currently I have to rely on the AutoHiDPI addon because firefox is otherwise unusable on my system (linux with two screens with very different DPIs).
I also asked for a way to get tab thumbnails done, and to replace the entire bookmark and omnibar system.
But no. Now I'll have to fork Firefox to get a usable browser.
I don't get why addon/plugin developers not communicating upstream is the problem of upstream.
On every announcement regarding this for the past months.
I’ve not gotten any answer, nor has any solution been implemented or suggested.
> didn't require deep access to Firefox's internals
Quite contrary, it needs to handle new URI schema, override URL origin policy, scan pages, do DNS queries and so on.
Yet we still don't have a replacement for even a tenth of what it could do today!
Once Firefox 57 is released, I'll lose the ability to use Firefox at all, and won't be able to regain it for several years. Just because no one though to consider what APIs one might have to provide before deprecating the old ones.