1276731 - Support for Firefox-only features in WebExtensions chrome.bookmarks

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Jerry Krinock]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/601.7.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.1.2 Safari/601.7.1

Steps to reproduce:

I read the API documentation for WebExtensions > chrome.bookmarks [1].

1.  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/bookmarks


Actual results:

I did not find any support for Firefox bookmarks features which are not present in Chromium, such as Tags, so-called "annotations" Keyword and Description, and Smart bookmarks or Live bookmarks (livemarks).



Expected results:

Because WebExtensions are slated to replace the Add-Ons SDK, and because bookmarks extensions which sync bookmarks require access to all attributes and all bookmark item types, either

(1) The chrome.bookmarks API implemented by WebExtensions for Firefox should contain additional functions to support all Firefox-only bookmarks features, or

(2) There should be a link to some Mozilla policy statement indicating that Firefox-only bookmarks features are obsolete and will be removed from a future version of Firefox.

Note: There is some discussion of the future of Tags in Bug 1225916 [1].

1.  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916

Comment 1

[Kris Maglione [:kmag]]

Please file separate bugs for individual features that you want support for. There's already a bug for tags. I don't think we're likely to continue supporting livemarks in Firefox at all, so that's not likely a good candidate either. Keywords and descriptions seem reasonable enough.

Comment 2

[Jerry Krinock]

Thank you, Kris.  I shall enter four separate bugs.  I am going to enter one for Tags too because I think you are referring to Bug 1225916 as "tags".  But Bug 1225916 only asks for the ability to *search* in tags, which is tangential to what I'm discussing here.

Regarding what I "want", let me clarify here that, as an extension developer, I would be OK with a publicly announced decision to simply *remove* some or all of these features from Firefox.  On the other hand, if these features are to remain as distinguishing features of Firefox, then they should be fully supported in WebExtensions.

Comment 3

[Jerry Krinock]

This bug is now superceded by my four new bugs:

Bug 1276816, Bug 1276817, Bug 1276819, Bug 1276821

Comment 4

[Kris Maglione [:kmag]]

(In reply to Jerry Krinock from comment #2)
> Regarding what I "want", let me clarify here that, as an extension
> developer, I would be OK with a publicly announced decision to simply
> *remove* some or all of these features from Firefox.  On the other hand, if
> these features are to remain as distinguishing features of Firefox, then
> they should be fully supported in WebExtensions.

The problem is that we have limited resources, and we don't want to waste them adding support for features we're likely to remove. Especially given that supporting them in the extension API would make the deprecation path that much harder.

Removing features from Firefox is no simple matter either. Every feature we remove requires a usage analysis, a deprecation plan, and often a data migration plan, not to mention the non-trivial work of removing it.

Comment 5

[Jerry Krinock]

Well, you've certainly stated the fundamental Human Condition of Software Management, Kris.  I shall hope then that the old Add-Ons API continue to be supported until a decision is made on these features.

I know that you guys wouldn't want to get yourselves into a situation like this:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2913426/web-browsers/chrome-users-roast-google-on-spit-of-hate-over-revamped-bookmarks-manager.html

which ultimately resulted in this:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/mhIX5LB23As

:)