TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make Firefox secure, fast or to try new things. On the other side, this growing cost progressively killed the community of add-on developers. Eventually, after spending years trying to protect this old add-on mechanism, Mozilla made the hard choice of removing this extension mechanism and replacing this with the less powerful but much more maintainable WebExtensions API. Thanks to this choice, Firefox developers can once again make the necessary changes to improve security, stability or speed. During the past few days, I’ve been chatting with Firefox users, trying to separate fact from rumor regarding the consequences of the August 2020 Mozilla layoffs. One of the topics that came back a few times was the removal of XUL-based add-ons during the move to Firefox Quantum. I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by this choice. And then, as someone pointed out on reddit, I realized that we still haven’t taken the time to explain in-depth why we had no choice but to remove XUL-based add-ons. So, if you’re ready for a dive into some of the internals of add-ons and Gecko, I’d like to take this opportunity to try and give you a bit more detail.

An old article but provides a detailed view on the choice of removing the old XUL addons

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
    16•6 hours ago

    XUL was HORRIBLE to write, implement, and debug. Been there, done that. It was also 0% portable.

    WebExtensions (even if there are some technical limitations and some browser manufacturers decided to intentionally cripple some of the APIs) are in general so much better. You have proper toolchains for development, translations, testing, and publishing. And it is pretty much portable to all browsers. You don’t even have to port anything 99% of the time because it’s just compatible.

  • @jimmydoreisalefty
    22•10 hours ago

    TIL.

    Thanks for sharing!

    Edit: added quote below

    By design, WebExtensions is more limited than the promiscuous extension mechanism. By design, it also works better. Most of the Firefox development tax has disappeared, as only the WebExtensions API needs to be protected, rather than the entire code of Firefox. Most of the maintenance tax has disappeared, as the WebExtensions API are stable (there have unfortunately been a few exceptions). It is also much simpler to use, lets add-on developers share code between Firefox and Chromium add-ons and should eventually make it easier to write extensions that work flawlessly on Desktop and Mobile.

    • Chewy
      8•8 hours ago

      With uBlock Origin and many other extensions working (almost) flawlessly on mobile, I’d say they were spot on. Almost, because some aren’t comfortable to use because they aren’t made with touch and small a screen in mind.