Firefox breaking many add-ons soon

[cellio]

I found out today, via a notice provided by one of my add-ons (Stylish), that the next version of Firefox (57) is going to break most add-ons, which they are now designating "legacy". Firefox, like Chrome, automatically updates itself (I'm not sure that can be turned off any more), and these changes are coming "in November". I found this blog post from Mozilla from August, but I never received any sort of notification as a user and I don't make a habit of seeking out blog posts from vendors of software I use.

Why the hell didn't I get some sort of notification from Firefox? Is this news to you, too?

So now, the hunt for replacements commences. Gee thanks, guys.

Here's what I've found so far, untested unless otherwise noted:

• Stylish replacement (notice pushed by Stylish, apparently): Stylus. Listed as beta. I don't know whether styles will just work (after being manually imported, it appears) or if changes will be needed. ETA: I needed to rework one style, which had several blocks applying to different sets of (related) sites. I had to break that up. The style I was using to make tooltips bigger doesn't work (not supported by Mozilla's new API), but I found a workaround. The day after I got all this migrated to Stylus, I got a Stylish update -- but it couldn't read my existing scripts either, so I would have had to migrate to it in exactly the same way I'd just migrated to Stylus. (The UI was even the same.) So I punted that; I've already got Stylus working.

• Greasemonkey: Google led me to ViolentMonkey. Ditto about not knowing if things just work or require adjustments. ETA: ViolentMonkey is slow and times out about a third of the time for me, but TamperMonkey (which I already know from Chrome) exists and works fine. I had to manually add each of my scripts (to either), but I didn't need to modify them.

• NoScript: it looks like they're migrating, but I don't know if I'll have to do anything. ETA:* Seems to be broken in 57; supposedly they're working on it.

• Session Manager: is this built into Firefox now? It's very important that when I restart Firefox, I get the tabs and windows I had before. Can anybody who doesn't use an add-on for that confirm whether that works out of the box now?

• AdBlock Plus: this is my one extension not listed as legacy, so I assume it will keep working.

• Classic Theme Restorer: um, I found this github repository; haven't waded too far into the readme yet. ETA: this page explains how to move the tabs below the URL/extensions bar where they belong. The other look&feel stuff it did isn't as critical. (One could make a good argument that the URL bar belongs below the tabs, but all the other stuff the browser puts in that horizontal slice is more global, and having those reversed confuses me.)

Comments

[conuly]

Firefox, like Chrome, automatically updates itself (I'm not sure that can be turned off any more),

You can.

Menu, options, advanced, update. Done.

Weirdly, looking at my add-ons, the one I thought would not be updated (compassmenu) was, but the one I thought was sure to update (colorfultabs) wasn't. And if close tabs to the left isn't updated, I'm not updating either.

[conuly]

Session Manager: is this built into Firefox now? It's very important that when I restart Firefox, I get the tabs and windows I had before. Can anybody who doesn't use an add-on for that confirm whether that works out of the box now?

Also, this seems to work for me without an add-on, but I can only do the exact session I had before (not an earlier one) and it fails if I have to hard restart the computer for some reason. It'll open up some much-earlier set of tabs, even if I've closed and opened Firefox between then and now. Weird, weird, so weird.

[cahwyguy]

They've already broken Xmarks, and the Lastpass update is beta. This extension problem is so bad that I've switched over to Chrome until it settles. Take a look at https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/11/06/2026257/popular-firefox-bookmark-syncing-add-on-starts-losing-bookmarks?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed for an idea of the problem. Bad move on Mozilla's part.

[madfilkentist]

I ran into this a while ago, while trying to figure out why NoScript seemed to have broken. That problem has been resolved, but things could get messy. As far as I can tell, Firefox on the Mac still has the manual update option, and I'll wait till the smoke clears.

[metahacker]

I did hear about this a while back; it pissed off most of the plug-in creator ecosystem. :-/ Firefox PR folks seem to have a huge blind spot with regards to it; when pressed the best I heard was "Well the new thing is better so people will just change" or "We have to do this because security", neither of which is really true or especially relevant...

Meanwhile, it forced me to switch to Safari and Chrome, depending on who I am that day.

[dsrtao]

There are bubbles.

I know this, because I've been angry at Mozilla about this for nearly a year now.

On the other hand:

57 is much, much faster and much, much less RAM-hogging.

You'll want to replace Adblock Plus with uBlock Origin. Faster, more powerful. It can also replace NoScript, though the UI isn't as well tuned.

If you stay with NoScript, you won't have to do anything to get the new version.

All old themes will be dead; there will be a bunch of new themes.

A basic session manager is built in, Tab Session Manager might be more useful for you.

is there a CSS person in the house?

[cellio]

In Stylish I had this global style to make tooltips more readable (mainly bigger), which I downloaded, err, somewhere, way back when. Most of my Stylish styles seem to work fine in Stylus, the will-still-work-with-Firefox replacement for Stylish. But one of them doesn't. Stylus says the style is active, but it's not taking effect. I've tried commenting out everything except the size setting and then changing that around; no effect. So that makes me think the problem is in the set of stuff to match on, which is the part of this I know least about. (That list of classes and IDs came with the style. I don't know from tooltips and CSS.)

If anybody reading this can spot the problem in the following CSS and suggest a fix, I'd be grateful!

#btTooltip,
#un-toolbar-tooltip,
#tooltip,
.tooltip,
#aHTMLTooltip,
#urlTooltip,
tooltip
{
  font-size: 16px !important; 
  background-color: #FFFFE0 !important;
  color: #000000 !important;
  -moz-appearance: none !important;
  border-color: #000000 !important ;
  background-position: center center !important;
  background-repeat: no-repeat !important;
  background-attachment: scroll !important;
}

[mdlbear]

The one I'm really having trouble finding a replacement for is make-link. If I can't find one I'll go to Chrome full time. (I'm pretty close to that now, and have been for months.)

[marahmarie]

(see ETA at end: 57+ nightlys and "unbranded" betas will run legacy add-ons; "branded" betas and release candidates won't, unless "Signed by Mozilla internally")

---

I haven't tracked down when or why this change was made, if it was ever formally announced, and so on, but according to an older blog post I found tonight, legacy add-ons will still work in 57+ (if I'm reading things right; hopefully I am). To keep this comment brief, I quote the Mozilla post in question here: https://marahmarie.dreamwidth.org/358969.html

It's very confusing to find out when/why the decision was made when the blog post I'm quoting just says Update at the top, twice, but doesn't give a precise date/dates. Talk about not wanting you to know.

Also/also, there is supposed to be some sort of functionality in the add-on manager to sort of IFTTT the legacy add-ons (a recommendation engine Mozilla created to help those of us whose fave add-ons are sunsetting entirely, at least for now).

But for one, I can't find it and for another, I think it's kind of a slap in the face to private add-on devs who can't update fast enough owing to Mozilla's lacking the APIs for them to refer those add-on users to other (mostly lesser) add-ons, so I don't know....I just think they're going about many parts of this all wrong.

ETA: just did another search and came up with this: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Firefox57 which indicates - weirdly enough - that once 57's released, legacy add-ons won't be compatible in the "branded" betas or release versions (unless "Signed by Mozilla internally"), but will be compatible in nightlys and "unbranded" betas going forward, which is sort of the exact opposite behavior I would expect, but OK then, very well *sigh*.

Will add an ETA to my own post soon to reflect this added...

[kyleri]

Yeah, this process broke ForecastFox for me in unrecoverable ways a month or so back, & I am REALLY angry about that. Chromium hangs my laptop, & I have moral issues with Chrome anyway...

...in other words, urgh.