Re:Firefox 57.0 Released
by throwanem on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @10:12AM
(#15695661)
There's only so much an extension author can do if WebExtensions doesn't expose an API corresponding to one which was critical in the XUL extension.
I'm in that position myself right now, having volunteered to take over Firemacs development before I found that there is no way to listen for keypress events in browser chrome. You can only do that in injected content scripts, which don't work except in web content and are also affected by CSP. Until that changes, there's nothing that I, or the Vimperator developers for example, can do to provide an acceptable user experience.
It's super frustrating, and I don't blame users of such extensions for being angry about the indefinite lack of a future for them. But I also don't really blame Mozilla for prioritizing the implementation of the necessary APIs below other tasks which are important to a larger fraction of the Firefox user base.
I'm in that position myself right now, having volunteered to take over Firemacs development before I found that there is no way to listen for keypress events in browser chrome. You can only do that in injected content scripts, which don't work except in web content and are also affected by CSP. Until that changes, there's nothing that I, or the Vimperator developers for example, can do to provide an acceptable user experience.
It's super frustrating, and I don't blame users of such extensions for being angry about the indefinite lack of a future for them. But I also don't really blame Mozilla for prioritizing the implementation of the necessary APIs below other tasks which are important to a larger fraction of the Firefox user base.