In both transitions, Mozilla made sure to support the needs of both uBlock origin and NoScript, extending the webextension API (such that uBlock origin on Firefox is more capable than on current Chromium) and working with uBlock to make its interface more mobile-friendly.
They also extended the webextension API to allow for extensions such as Treestyle tabs and Panorama-reimplementations (so not remotely all XUL use-cases, but still most of the popular ones).
Hence, they've proven that they will go considerably beyond what Google/Chromium are doing, and that they won't harm "content-blockers", which is what we care about in this case.
Also how much more reliable long-term extension/browser compatibility has improved: I’ve used Firefox Nightly as my daily driver for about ten of the last twelve years, and until 2017 I’d spot at least one or two breakages each year, mostly fairly minor, but the occasional major (a couple of which accounted for maybe six months of going back to stable—and the lead-up to the killing of XUL extensions was another few months on stable because not all that I wanted was ready on WebExtensions yet). The extensions were typically patched before the change hit stable Firefox, so normal users wouldn’t notice most. But since WebExtensions, I don’t recall a single breakage. I acknowledge that the biggest breakages were in functionality that cannot be replicated any more, like Pentadactyl (and I ended up not even trying to replace it), but still, the minor and subtle breakages are just gone.
It will make it less programmable by the end user.
Chrome was definitely a wake-up call, and the Firefox 4 cycle in 2010 achieved a lot. I recall doing audio stuff with the new Audio Data API (sadly since discontinued in favour of the much-more-complex-generally-for-no-good-reason Web Audio API) with a sine waves stress test (adding random sine waves together until underrun occurs) in Nightly, and watching the number it could cope with increase, week after week, due to JIT engine improvements. It went from handling a dozen to handling a couple of hundred over the course of two or three months.
IMHO, practically speaking, the final result of WebExt isn't that bad, especially taking into consideration of the added APIs you mentioned.
It is the shear difference bwtween promise and reality that really hurts lots of power users and addon developers to this day.
Also you mentioned Treestyle as "most of the popular ones", but left out the elephant in the room, Tab Mix Plus, which even has its own Bugzilla ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546 Gesture extensions nowadays are also pretty limited compared to its heyday due to the nature of WebExt.
In hindsight, these promises were just too good to be true, but people were believing.
And the story of extension support on Firefox on Android is way too similar to the last time in the Fennec to Fenix transition. At least this time, users just didn't have much faith in it to begin with.
> In both transitions, Mozilla made sure [to keep top popular addons mostly happy and ensure adblockers are happy]
Those are all fair points, and yes, I was probably too harsh with my language overall, that post written before I was corrected that Mozilla was not developing MV3 the same as Google was.
I stand by my strikes that Mozilla did kill XPCOM, and failed to deliver their promise to release all addons to Fenix on shipping stable versions. They don't even enable about:config on stable Fenix to enable power users to workaround that limitation.
In short, I believe I was 60% fair in my opinion.
So to the extent Mozilla failed to deliver here it's on the replacement APIs. But how much is enough?
I would like lots of things to have APIs that don't. For example I'd like a way to do some basic queries on the built-in Public Suffix List for Firefox instead of needing to either bake the PSL into each plugin (and keep it up to date) or call out to a web API (ugh) or just guess that TLDs are "enough" and make everybody who needs other suffixes mad.
But in that particular case there are two reasons we don't have such APIs. #1 Nobody did the work. I didn't do the work, you didn't do the work, the work didn't get done. #2 In many cases (I think not mine but it's always arguable) the PSL is the Wrong Thing™ and so encouraging more use of the PSL makes things worse.
They used to have an official goal like "supporting top X addons' transitions", so it's not so random about which API they needed to add.
The Emacs OS is still doing well! :)
> "Mozilla did kill XPCOM" isn't a deviation from their stated intent.
The issue is that their stated intent changed over time, and their communication about their precise intentions was often pretty poor.
It didn't help that the Webextension transition came on the heels of the e10s transition (5 firefox versions separated deprecating non-e10s add-ons and disabling e10s add-ons), but with relatively little warning, which meant that:
1. Many people implicitly believed that once they adapted their addons for e10s, they'd be safe.
2. Many people put in a huge amount of work to adapt for e10s and then had to redo a large part of it to convert their add-on into a webextension.
3. Some people put in a huge amount of work to adapt for e10s and found out that their work was pointless because their add-ons couldn't be converted into webextensions.
From a technical point of view, much of Firefox's XPCOM/internals were actually sufficiently stable post-webextension (57) that old e10s extensions could have continued to work with little changes. (e.g. VimFx continued to work with minimal changes for ~30 Firefox versions, on Nightly, with very slight hacking. AFAICT it still continues to work, with slight changes, but now with major hacking to get it to actually install.)
What do you think is the future (+2 years) for people with hatred for ads? For now I am using Firefox on computer + Kiwi in Android, but I also expect those two to go awry in the mid term.
* I see that after the edit, it doesn't look as bleak for Firefox PC. But what about Android?
For now, because I don't want to be hit by security vulns in the browser itself, I'm holding my nose and doing plain old Firefox mobile, leaving some of the tracking stuff blocked on my Pi-Hole, then letting my wireguard VPN ensure that even when I'm off Wi-Fi, my signal gets routed to my home connection so the Pi-Hole can stop some of the telemetry (but not all! some gets through no doubt).
Why am I holding my nose there? Because my planned next browser, Iceraven [1], is not yet out of alpha and published to F-Droid. I check every 3 months or so, once it is, that's where I'm going, because it's as close as I can get to Firefox Desktop, but runs on Android.
Only caveat I've really found is that it gets stuck on the Guardian's website (after a few clicks).
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
It's not a clean experience and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone non-technical but I use this approach and it works fine, at least for the extensions I care about. There's also the caveat that you're running Firefox Nightly which usually is fine but has had big functionality bugs. I'd keep another browser installed as backup.
DNS-based blocking
The good edge is keeping ISPs etc. from messing with your DNS requests, but that sword cuts both ways as it also can lock your own home network out.
DNS-based blocking is as much a "future-proof" technology as "just don't look at the adverts". DNS-based blocking is old, easily workaroundable by anyone (just use the same domain name for everything, or interchangeable domain names, or just don't rely on system DNS), and significantly less featureful than even the simplest DOM/JS-based blocking (e.g. good luck collapsing ad elements from the view, getting Youtube not to play ads, etc.).
Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636412
Newer versions of iOS, Android and Windows support it already.
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[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
I harbor the (conspiracy?) theory is that Google told Mozilla based on their "No arbitrary code"-rule that they are not allowed to run arbitrary extensions anymore. And made Mozilla promise to never tell anyone.
Yep:
Unless Firefox is released from the clutches of Mozilla, Firefox will never be a serious competitor in the browser wars.
Their track record speaks against them.
XPCOM extensions? Killed, but don't worry, we will re-implement all the needed APIs as WebExtensions (didn't happen).
Fennec to Fenix mobile extensions? Killed, you get these 10 blessed ones, don't worry, we will eventually re-enable all of the webextensions on mobile, any day now, (didn't happen, you have to do hacky hacks involving nightly version to do un-blessed extensions).
This will likely be their third strike.
UPDATE: Or it's not nearly as bad as I expected. Per [1], while Firefox will be eventually deprecating MV2, the Firefox MV3 is much less 'evil' than the Chrome MV3, in that Firefox will continue to enable the WebRequest API without all the lock-down restrictions.
This makes a competitive advantage for Firefox in terms of adblocking power, if anything.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32648925