I don’t see any comments on that article?

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You’re missing the picture.

All that LegacyFox looks to do is allow loading old-style extension manifests, by converting them to new-style, just with the difference that they’re given unfettered access to internals. This allows you to load the extensions, but doesn’t guarantee that they will work.

By the end of 2019, XUL Templates, XUL Overlays, XBL Stylesheets, XUL Documents, and XBL had been removed <https://groups.google.com/g/firefox-dev/c/24SH5R0AcC0/m/B6Sc...>.

Last year, XUL Layout was finally removed <https://crisal.io/words/2023/03/30/xul-layout-is-gone.html>.

I haven’t tried actually running any of this stuff, but I get the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog <https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/blob/master/CHANGELOG...>, and yeah, regular fixes have been required, with more and more things breaking. This is a pretty good demonstration of what the problem with XPCOM extensions was, as the article pointed out: they had too much access to browser internals, which made it hard for the browser to change things without breaking extensions, and necessary changes just kept on breaking extensions again and again and again, and extension developers were tired of it. In the WebExtension era, extensions almost never break, despite major concrete improvements in the browser having been made that in the past would have broken at least every interesting extension out there.

XUL (by which I mean XUL, not XPCOM) isn’t completely gone yet, because it was such a core part of the browser that it takes a long time to kill it completely, but most of what made it it is gone.

XPCOM extensions made Firefox unmaintainable. Although they were a great thing, they had to die for Firefox to survive.

* VimFX still works in the latest release of Firefox

* If random people on the internet can square it, so probably could the Firefox team, they didn't need to keep all features

* They decided to handicap their addons to match Chrome, because "security" and lost users

* Chrome is now doing the same

> ...but I the impression that this means that pretty much no extensions from the 56 era will work any more. Look at VimFx’s changelog...

The changelog shows a fix this month for the firefox 127 this month, the current version is 126. And the readme clearly states firefox-esr 115+. You don't get more working than that

> WebExtension era, extensions almost never break

Any other recent extension needs way more maintenance to keep up with the constant evolving of the WebExtensions apis. And you can look at their logs. Years to partially catch up, and much more work for worse user experience

https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/philc/vimium

> ..they had too much access to browser internals..

All apps have to much access, that's is the same lame excuse Google is using now. All extensions are reviewed by Google/Mozilla and manually installed by the user. If they can't keep them safe hire someone who can. Especially Chrome that already has APIs for random websites to access USBs, filesystem, etc..