1351478 - Do not remove XUL extensions, they are the main reason for using firefox for many

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[u590800]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.21 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Used firefox for its wealth of extensions.


Actual results:

Mozilla unilaterally decided to kill the reason why I and many others choose to use firefox and will lose some of its long time and dedicated user base along with many extension developers.

Refer to this HN discussion for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13503107


Expected results:

Firefox ought to have retained compatibility with the existing extensions, or at least provided feature parity between current extension API and the new one.

Mozilla should provide a way for users to give feedback and listen to what they have to say.

Comment 1

[u590800]

Additional references to what extensions seem to matter most, **** off extensions developer and discussion on the possible future of said extension when it's not already announced as dead:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3m0lis/data_from_the_what_webextensions_are_musthaves/
http://www.downthemall.net/re-downthemall-and-webextensions-or-why-why-i-am-done-with-mozilla/
http://fasezero.com/lastnotice.html
http://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=19282
http://getfirebug.com/

Comment 2

[u590800]

Also this mozillazine thread: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3025513

Comment 3

[Robert Longson [:longsonr]]

bugs are not for discussions, we have groups for that e.g. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.platform

Comment 4

[u590800]

The disabled user voice api ideas vote:
https://webextensions.uservoice.com/forums/315663-webextension-api-ideas

Comment 5

[u590800]

This is not a discussion, this is a feature request or even more a do not remove the feature many people rely on request.
Quite a valid request when you follow the discussions.

Sorry I care about privacy, both mine and others, and internet, so I won't register a google account or support anything supporting google (or any other giant working at killing internet see the death of transit at apnic for details).

Comment 6

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

(In reply to u590800 from comment #5)
> Sorry I care about privacy, both mine and others, and internet, so I won't
> register a google account or support anything supporting google (or any
> other giant working at killing internet see the death of transit at apnic
> for details).

FYI:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661#c126
> Since several people have emailed me about this, I'd like to clarify:
> participating in our mailing lists like dev-platform does *not* require a
> Google account.
> 
> You can subscribe with any email address here:
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
> You can post to the list as instructed on that page.
> You can view the list archives (without being logged into a Google account)
> here: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform

In addition, you don't even have to access google.com domains to view the archives:
https://lists.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-platform/

Comment 7

[u592732]

I fill a bug, it gets invalidated because this is not a place for discussion and right away someone else jump in and initiate a discussion, what madness is that ?

I had rage disabled (deletion is not possible) my account after it was made clear to me that trying to communicate and being constructive fall on deaf ears and whatever happens that does go along the mozilla agenda there's always a whatever reason for dismissing it. Our own code for alsa support is ****, let's make an expected to be controversial move of dropping it based on ignorance and assumptions we know are wrong and ignore early warnings instead of fixing it and see what happens. When the **** hit the fan, someone volunteer to fix and maintain *our* mess but let's just go forward with the controversial decision anyways because "it's too late now" and "netflix users need 5.1 support", who cares if 1% is actually 100k or millions of people.

  “There is no worse blind man than the one who doesn’t want to see. 
   There is no worse deaf man than the one who doesn’t want to hear. 
   And there is no worse madman than the one who doesn’t want to understand.”

Anyways this FYI I was given as a reply is so dumb and missing the point that I had to recreate an account to reply to this nonsense.

I invite you to follow the link I've been directed to[1] and:

1. Find a way to participate in the discussion without a google account. (*hint* I spent over 6 hours trying to find one)
2. Show me how this is not relying on google provided resources (*hint* there google.com in the middle of the URL)
3. Explain me how this is not weakening my privacy from the ever more invasive google ?
4. Enlighten me to the benefits of an internet centralized around google, facebook, microsoft apple,...
5. Now install the "mandatory since mozilla canned the option to disable script from firefox" noscript extension and try using your non google account to take part in any discussion on google groups (*hint* unsurprisingly it does not work)

Google groups is obviously a walled garden designed to make people register google account, the same way many other things are designed to make people install google chrome. There's no way to miss that as it is literally everywhere.

You could have taken the hint from the fact that several people emailed to raise the issue.

As an added bonus please enlighten me to how reading archives will help me draw attention to the large number of users who are gonna be affected by the dropping of what give firefox an edge over the other browsers, or don't as I am going to disable this account too once this comment is posted as there's no point with the worst blind/deaf/mad that could be. Now you've made me join the bandwagon of those who hope that mozilla will soon die a quick death for having made firefox irrelevant for those who made it relevant. Hopefully once mozilla decision process is removed, firefox can start becoming great again and listen to users instead of market.

I followed the links you provided and read what was there about the pulseaudio absence of actual discussion which despite being a hot topic everywhere else received almost no attention on google groups which comfort me in thinking no discussion actually happens there and invalidating this bug and suggestion to go to google groups was a way to say "this is not open to discussion, you have no say in what we decide, go waste your time where nobody will ever listen or care about it".

I did gathered that even the only person that seems to actually try to improve the situation does not understand that firefox "telemetry" is considered unwanted surveillance and so is disabled by distros and users, that disabling this surveillance is a selling point for firefox-based browser such as waterfox or icecat. Lastly that telling excluded "you disabled telemetry so it's your fault if we make bad decisions and you got excluded" is clearly not helping and missing the point, it is safe to assume that apart from debian popularity contest any form of remote surveillance will be disabled or removed from people who care about freedom, same people who left windows and apple for free software based OS such as linux or BSD.

As a parting point: consider treating people with respect once you've put off those who actually try to bridge things and open communication you will be imprisoned in the resonating silence of your own vacuum.

[1]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.platform

Comment 8

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

Hi, everyone. I'm restricting this bug to editbugs-only, for a number of reasons.

The decision to end support for XUL was made with great care by people invested in the success of Firefox and the Web, people with a deep understanding of the challenges and hard tradeoffs involved.

Those tradeoffs have been real,  often difficult; we knew going from the beginning that this would be the case. Still: we are confident that it is the right decision, both for Firefox, the addon developer community, and ultimately the Web.  A lot of engineering has gone into making it happen. Even if it were not far too late to start unwinding all the work that has gone into this transition effort, we would still stand by this decision.

Thank you.