Instead of crying about it, WE can add suggested APIs to be included in the WebExtensions extension Firefox is using. They recently added the Sidebar API which allows a form for vertical tabs but nobody has implemented trees yet.

Perhaps before doing such a major change, Mozilla, who hosts and awful lot of the extensions, could have done some code analysis on said extensions to determine what APIs were needed to make a smooth transition. Saying WE can add suggestions is a foolish thing to ask users when they had a community of developers and the actual code to do an analysis on. Blaming users is poor form.

They've shown themselves to be quite reluctant to accommodate the needs of vim extension authors (such as Vimperator). They can get bent.

Theres also been quite heated discussions (and hostility from Mozilla devs, to be frank) around the Zotero plugin, see e.g. Dan Stillman's 2015 blog post and email-list-threads linked there.

https://danstillman.com/2015/11/23/firefox-extension-scannin...

Edit: for those who don't want to dig, a random quote:

"Shortly before we left AMO [Firefox's integrated addon channel], an AMO editor publicly told someone asking a technical question about Zotero that Zotero was “evil”, adding, “They submit a new version every week, with thousands of lines of changes, nearly always additions. Every time I review it I hope they’ll go bankrupt”"

It seems (from many signals) very much like Mozilla would prefer it if most Firefox addons were tiny 200 line hobby projects that got updated once a blue moon.

Many AMO Editors are volunteers, and all are human. We've significantly adjusted the AMO review guidelines and processes to avoid that sort of mishap in the future, as acknowledged at the end of that post.

We're working hard on further changes to the process to reduce the stress and delays associated with manual review, including moving the review process to a post-publication check, instead of a pre-publication requirement. The heavy-handed review process was necessary with the old model of add-ons which had unrestricted access to the browser and to the host system. The new, permissions-based WebExtension model is dramatically easier to audit.

Well, maybe this failure should be taken as a signal that you're doing something wrong.

Google will always beat you at this, always. They can afford to pay far more people than you have volunteering for you, ever.

There is no justification for Mozilla's extension policy. Mozilla is just LARPing as Google. They are superficially copying some features of Google's platform, in the hopes that they will magically inherit Google's success.

Microsoft still sells their software in boxes in retails stores. Perhaps Mozilla should spend money pressing discs, but instead of selling it, they should give away Firefox discs in stores. That's a good analogue to what Mozilla is doing.

This is a colossal waste of time that nobody asked for and nobody wants.

well, thousands of lines of changes nearly always additions sounds like it should be a code smell / integration smell.

that's not the topic though.

As someone who hasn't followed the actual specifics here, do you happen to have any links to those discussions/issues or other places these things happened? I'd really like to see their reasoning.

Only to the few people who use those extensions. Most user's don't use any extensions at all.

What are you basing that on?

A quick google suggests that at one point 85% of users used extensions.. and as of last year it was still 60%

https://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/06/surprise-40-of-firefox-use...

And how many of those 60% just use ublock or something similar, which will continue working, and no other extensions?

That really wasn't the point of my post. The claim made by the parent post was that "Most user's don't use any extensions at all."

My apologies, I didn't mean to come across as disagreeing with what you said, but just to put it in better context for the larger discussion of how noticeable disabling non-web extensions will be to the average user.

You're moving the goalposts.