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Firefox Will Run Chrome Extensions 152

Posted by Soulskill from the mi-casa-es-su-casa dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Today Mozilla announced some big changes to its extension support. Their new addon API, WebExtensions, is mostly compatible with the extension model used by Chrome and Opera. In short, this means we'll soon see cross-platform browser extensions. They say, "For some time we've heard from add-on developers that our APIs could be better documented and easier to use. In addition, we've noticed that many Firefox add-on developers also maintain a Chrome, Safari, or Opera extension with similar functionality. We would like add-on development to be more like Web development: the same code should run in multiple browsers according to behavior set by standards, with comprehensive documentation available from multiple vendors."
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Firefox Will Run Chrome Extensions More

Firefox Will Run Chrome Extensions

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  • Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @01:58PM (#50363661) Homepage Journal

    ... Firefox will be Chrome. Anyone who cared about extensive browser customization will simply abandon their addons. Why keep recoding them on Mozilla's whim?

    For anyone who still cares about this stuff, the time to jump is most certainly NOW. I don't even think SeaMonkey is good enough - Pale Moon [palemoon.org] is a totally clean break.

    • It looks like they will be supporting the old addons (using XPCOM and XUL) with firefox for at least another year

      • Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:15PM (#50363869) Homepage Journal

        Wow, a whole year. Sorry, where's the good news?

        • The good news is that if after a full year the developers haven't ported to the new API you get to stop using unmaintained and likely privacy leaking and exploit ridden plugins in favour of something being actively maintained.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            You know how AdBlock only works on Chrome by hiding the ads rather than actually preventing them from being downloaded? You know why there's no Greasemonkey for Chrome, only a crippled Tampermonkey? Because the API way of doing business prevents these extensions from doing what they do. Mozilla is trying to kill off the most popular extensions because their advertising sponsors HATE them.

            It's like every day the Mozilla team wakes up and thinks, "shit, we're not going to hell in this handbasket fast enough.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If Mozilla should learn anything, it is not to piss off your secondary developers, aka add-on devs and anyone that uses the API in general.

        They should write an interface between the old and new extensions instead of dropping support for hundreds, if not thousands of add-ons.
        Only a small subset of extensions will not work 100% with such an interface since some do come with plugins as well, but I am pretty sure even Chrome allows plugins packaged with Add-ons if I remember correct.

        Of course, as if that is goi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          If they keep compatibility, people would bitch about 'bloat'.
          If they never changed the API in the first place, people would bitch extensions were hard to write for.

          When you have anything, especially software, with as many users as Firefox it is impossible to do (or not do) something that won't anger a non-zero number of users.

        • Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @03:45PM (#50364691) Journal

          Mozilla, for the love of god, stop breaking APIs, you morons.

          That is the goal. The reason the 'API' kept breaking is because there wasn't an API at all: extensions were able to access the internal firefox code. Every time an internal function changed, it caused problems for extensions. Obviously that is bad, there needs to be a clear interface (like a wall) between the outside and the inside.

          Firefox here is finally making a good interface. Their plan is to extend the Chrome API so it contains all the functionality needed for current Firefox add-ons.

        • Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by chefmonkey ( 140671 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @04:01PM (#50364915)

          Mozilla, for the love of god, stop breaking APIs, you morons.

          That's actually the entire point of this move. The problem is that the current addon "API", such as it is, is literally every class in the entire freaking browser, which is an untenably huge and perpetually changing surface to maintain. The only way to keep the current API and stop breaking stuff constantly is to freeze all development on Firefox now and forever.

          That's not really a viable approach.

          The alternative is to come up with a more stable API surface, from the ground up, and provide a transition period for add-on developers to move from the large, unsupportable infrastructure to the stable one that won't be -- as you correctly observe -- constantly breaking.

          Rather than developing a new API, the add-ons team decided to leverage the work that Chrome has already done in this space, which has the nice side effect of making life much easier for developers who want to write cross-browser add-ons.

          One of the things that's getting lost in the noise here is that the portion of the API based on Chrome's current design is just the start. There will be additional API surface to enable some of the things that had been possible with the legacy wild-west-style Add-On approach. Since reading articles is not particularly trendy, I'll quote the relevant passage here:

          A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons cannot possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they currently exist. Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox extensions as possible.

    • Re: Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I run Firefox because I can't run add-ons on chrome on my phone and tablet, which is where I do most of my browsing.

    • Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:25PM (#50363983) Journal

      FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.

      It started as an effort to be lighter and faster than the old Mozilla suite. I actually like the mail client, occasionally use composer to put something together quickly and Chatzilla is fine IRC client as often as I still want to use IRC. I stayed on the SeaMonkey side of the house on my personal systems this entire time.

      It was funny as hell to watch FF get bigger and more bloated than SeaMonkey, and its performance plummet. SeaMonkey's UI in the mean time only got faster with fixes and improvements and the browser just got better with all the gekko and js improvements that came downstream from the Firefox project. SeaMonkey was always the better browser for my particular needs, but after perhaps FF3 and later it was the better browser over Firefox for pretty much all the reason FF was selected over it in the first place. Completely lost sight of what they'd been trying to do.

      • Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:38PM (#50364101) Journal

        FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.

        It doesn't spy on you.

        Seriously, there was a time a few years back when many people (including me) switched away from Firefox because it had memory leaks, and didn't work very well. Now, it's a fine browser, and I don't understand why anyone would use Chrome over Firefox. Forget that spyware.

        • Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by mlts ( 1038732 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @03:00PM (#50364283)

          Another nice thing about FF is that it has its own FIPS compliant data stores for passwords as well as its own separate keystore. Chrome and IE use the system's keys on Windows.

          This is important, because if someone gets a bogus root CA into the Registry, Chrome and IE will happily honor it, while Firefox will stop and point it out.

          FF also provides password protection for the keystore data. This way, if FF is left unattended (and a timeout is set), an intruder can't just walk away with a user's password stash.

          • Storing your passwords in the browser is always a bad idea.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mlts ( 1038732 )

              In some cases, stuffing them in a browser is worth it. There are a lot of websites which demand an account to do much (pinterest). With these, there is little lost if they get compromised (other than someone trying to troll from the account), so might as well toss worthless account IDs like that in someplace that is relatively convenient, and has some security.

          • That has pros and cons as well. For example, i use firefox in our company so users can change their proxy settings when the main internet connection goes down. But when i need to deploy a certificate to 250 users with no tools whatsoever, having a different certstore sucks.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Things started to go South since version 4.

          FF 3.6 was the last version I used as my main browser.
          When you think about it, it coincides with their switch to "rapid release process". Ridiculous decision imho.

        • Chrome does spy on you, but the options which instruct it to do so (telemetry, phishing protection, sentence completion, etc.) can be easily disabled from the Settings menu.

          As to your claim that Firefox is NOT spyware: it collects telemetry in the exact same form as Chrome does (default on, can be disabled). Plus it serves you ads based on your browsing history now. Plus there's those closed-source third-party binaries that only God knows what they're doing. One has to be either insane or partisan to say

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by myrdos2 ( 989497 )

          It doesn't matter what browser you use if your ISP is spying on you. I just assume that nothing I do online is private, as I have assumed for the past 15 years.

          (I didn't believe TOR was private either, until FBI agents told some prof to stop telling his students about it. So I guess it must work, at least some of the time.)

        • Really? I guess you missed the Slashdot post about offering advertising tiles customised to suit users in the Firefox home screen then.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          It doesn't spy on you.

          You mean like the new tab ads that collect data on any user clueless enough to leave them enabled? Or do you mean how they don't collect usage data and send it back to Mozilla by default? Perhaps you were thinking of how Firefox submits every site you visit to Google to check if it's "bad"?

      • I like firefox over any of the alternatives. (Score:4, Informative)

        by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:58PM (#50364261)

        FF is a perfect example of a project going completely off the rails. I don't hear anyone saying good things about it anymore.

        I use firefox as my primary browser and it continues to serve my needs better than any of the alternatives. It's available on linux unlike IE or Safari and for my needs at least it is less buggy than Chrome. Google can't seem to stop breaking things in Chrome and while they usually fix them it's annoying in the meantime. I see no meaningful speed or performance differences between the major browsers. Firefox seldom has site compatibility issues. While I won't argue that FF is without warts, it is to my mind the best available option at this time. That may change of course but I don't see anything better out there for my needs at present.

        It started as an effort to be lighter and faster than the old Mozilla suite. I actually like the mail client...

        At one time I did too. However it stagnated and I move on to other things. 12 years have passed since the project was started and the web has evolved substantially since then. Things have gotten more complex and so has the software to deal with them. This isn't 2002 and expecting the software to be the same is kind of silly.

        Completely lost sight of what they'd been trying to do.

        What they originally were trying to do is not as relevant today. Perhaps you want a stripped down browser with minimal frills. That's fine but most of the rest of us are concerned with other things. So long as it let's me view the bits of the web I want and gives me options to configure to my particular quirks without crashing or causing problems, I don't really care if it takes up extra space or has a few features I don't use.

        • Firefox was not about being stripped down. The Mozilla Manifesto had many points to address, among them was the ability for individuals to shape their experience, adherence to open source, and community / participation based programming.

          Yet we now have a browser that actively limits customisation, forcing changes on users, ignoring user requests, and at one stage even including proprietary closed source APIs natively in the browser.

          Not being lighting fast is not the reason I think Mozilla has lost its way,

      • Re:Never mind run Chrome extensions... (Score:4)

        by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @04:33PM (#50365295)

        But Chrome is just as bizarre though. Both have utterly insane rapid fire update schedules designed to put features that benefit developers or developers' whims and not that of the customers. If I ditch Firefox it most definitely will never be for Chrome.

      • It's not been my main browser for years, but I use linux and Mozilla said they were primarily targeting Windows with Firefox... so that maybe explains why it's always been kind of slow on my Ubuntu anyway.

        But I do welcome this news. I've only ever really "played" with extension development, but Firefox was always much harder to work with than Chrome, not least because a lot of the documentation seemed to be out of date. I seem to recall the Firefox extension tutorial/example thing used the status bar... t
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • For now.

        Consider that in the past Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer and many other browsers all used to support the same plugins (which were made according to the Netscape Plugin API). Quite a long time ago IE changed to its own plugin API (ActiveX *shudder*), and Chrome now uses the Pepper Plugin API. There's no reason all the other browsers couldn't eventually move over to PPAPI (or some other one, but PPAPI looks like the best at the moment) and it would be like the old days when plugins didn't n

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by roca ( 43122 )

          PPAPI is dying.

          PPAPI has two main use-cases: supporting Flash and other browser plugins, and being the API for (P)NaCl applications --- C/C++ applications compiled to run on the Web, which have no more privileges than Web content.

          "Browser plugins", i.e. native code that you can download and install in the browser, that runs content from the Web and has access to the same OS APIs at the same privilege level as the browser itself, are going away and not coming back. Flash is the last significant hold-out, but

    • There's a project to rewrite the major parts of Firefox in Rust [github.com].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JanneM ( 7445 )

      I use both Firefox and Chrome. And Firefox is faster and lower on resources than Chrome today. If I were to jump anywhere, it would be away from Chrome and to Firefox only.

  • to FF a few weeks ago from Chrome. Chrome just kept eating resources, getting slower and slower. How about this, turn on the "it's own resources" by default, but allow those of us that want the SPEED to turn it off.
    • Don't worry, the new extension API is a good thing.

    • I switched as well but somehow FF is even worse performance than Chrome. Often idling with 10% CPU use and spiking up to 90% when visiting certain sites like Amazon.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by roca ( 43122 )

        Amazon recently started doing something pathological where they restyle and relayout their search results page every 100ms. The particular restyling and relayout scenarios happened to be very well optimized in Chrome, but not Firefox, so less noticeable in Chrome (though still waking up and doing unnecessary work every 100ms). The optimizations are mostly implemented in Firefox nightly, and will be completely implemented very soon, but obviously it takes a little while for them all to reach the release chan

  • Commendable (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    That's very commendable. But, the fact that they are choosing to follow someone else's standard(Chrome), rather than the other way around when they were the first to implement the add-on capability speaks volumes about their future.

    I'm not so much saddened by Mozilla's decline. I'm devastated that the only viable replacement is Google Chrome.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      Pale Moon is a viable replacement.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dracos ( 107777 )

      Mozilla has been copying everything Chrome does for years.

      I've come to rue every time I upgrade FF because every time I do, some extension I've used for years no longer works or I can no longer trick FF into letting it work. I'm writing this in FF33 right now; my laptop is still on FF29.

      The last good complete theme died with FF 3.5. Almost everything on the addons site is abandoned, and only the few most popular addons keep up with the relentless release cycle.

      Mozilla has been damaging itself and its enti

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by roca ( 43122 )

        You are confused.

        The problem of extensions breaking due to Firefox updates requires the solution of having a stable supported API for extensions to use. That is exactly what this announcement is about!

        Mitchell Baker was never the CEO.

        XUL was never great and almost everything good in XUL has been incorporated into Web standards supported across browsers (e.g. CSS flexbox).

  • Noooooooooooo...

  • a reason? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    There's got to be a good reason for this. Obviously, Firefox extensions are superior to Chrome's. They can modify the browser far more than Chrome extensions. Maybe it has to do with performance?

    • There's got to be a good reason for this.

      Because the extension API was kind of lousy.
      Because the extension API was going to need big changes to deal with the new multi-process browser capability [mozilla.org] that Mozilla is implementing.
      Because the extension API was never very stable to begin with.
      Because the extension API wasn't really an API, it was basically allowed full access to whatever was in Firefox (which explains why it wasn't stable).

      You are right that the Chrome API lacks functionality. The Mozilla plan is to extend the API, so that everythin

  • Old extensions (Score:4, Funny)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:16PM (#50363879) Homepage Journal

    How about they upgrade it so it can run Firefox extensions?

  • So what's the point of Firefox anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LichtSpektren ( 4201985 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:20PM (#50363917)
    Interoperability means everybody will start developing extensions solely for Chrome, since it's less work to make one build for every browser. So what's the point of Firefox after that happens?

    I advocate for Pale Moon and Chromium. They're both FLOSS. Firefox no longer is, because it has integrated third-party binaries (Netflix DRM, Pocket). Consequently, Firefox is now less secure (see http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... [slashdot.org] ). This is also to say nothing about the build-in advertisements that read your browsing history, and the awful performance chokes it suffers from.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

      Interoperability means everybody will start developing extensions solely for Chrome, since it's less work to make one build for every browser. So what's the point of Firefox after that happens?

      Pretty sure interoperability means the extensions made won't be solely for Chrome

    • Re:So what's the point of Firefox anymore? (Score:4, Informative)

      by roca ( 43122 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @05:09PM (#50365715) Homepage

      The Pocket issues had no effect on Firefox users not actually using Pocket, i.e. you (I assume). Furthermore the Pocket integration code in Firefox is open source.

      The Adobe DRM module is closed source but integrated in the best way possible given the DRM requirements. You can delete the module without breaking anything except DRM. If you don't, the module is very tightly sandboxed so it can do nothing but decode video and audio. It is thus much more privacy and security friendly than, say, Flash. (You have already removed Flash, right?) I'm glad you don't want to watch Netflix, but it turns out a lot of people do, and "can't watch Netflix!" is not a great feature.

      The new Firefox extensions model will support extensions like Tree Style Tabs and better ad blocking than Chrome's API provides. We're not limiting ourselves to Chrome's API.

  • So this kills AdBlock and NoScript, right? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I have only one question about this move:

    Will AdBlock Plus and NoScript still work? Chrome's extension model simply doesn't give extensions the control necessary to implement something like NoScript, which is literally the only reason I still use Firefox. Otherwise, there's no point: Firefox is the slowest, least memory efficient browser out there. It regularly breaks several GB of memory after only a day's use. In fact, Firefox is already up to nearly 3GB of memory use, which is somewhat worrying for a 32-

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      From TFA:
      We plan to add our own APIs based on the needs of existing Firefox add-ons.
      * NoScript-type functionality. This would come in the form of extensions to webRequest and possibly contentSettings. ...

    • Adblock Plus is a huge hog, with ublock and privacy badger I'm now at only 880MB use with a bunch of shit open (though usually it's more 1.1GB to 1.5GB)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by robsku ( 1381635 )

      Firefox is the slowest, least memory efficient browser out there. It regularly breaks several GB of memory after only a day's use. In fact, Firefox is already up to nearly 3GB of memory use, which is somewhat worrying for a 32-bit process. Looks like I'm going to have to quit and restart after this comment.

      I've actually never witnessed this, but I hear it so often I'm beginning to believe the issue exists - but perhaps only for the Windows version. The few times I've had to use windows in the past few years has given me the experience that all browsers tend to be rather sluggish on it... oh well, that's what you get for using subOS. Oh, and I keep Firefox running for days, even weeks, and have generally around 100 tabs open at any time. There was a time when my average was closer to or even over 200 tabs, and

    • If you're still using Adblock plus, you are doing it wrong. Have a look at uBlock origin.

  • Fucking morons (Score:4, Insightful)

    by damicatz ( 711271 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @02:32PM (#50364045)

    The sole advantage of Firefox over Chrome these days is the fact that it's add-on SDK allows addons to modify just about any part of the browser. Chrome extensions are extremely limited in what they do. How will things like FileZilla work with this new API?

    I'm convinced that either the Mozilla Foundation is run by complete mental midgets or plants by Google who are determined to sabotage the browser until the whole foundation shuts down.

    • I'm convinced that either the Mozilla Foundation is run by complete mental midgets or plants by Google who are determined to sabotage the browser until the whole foundation shuts down.

      Nah, it's not Google holding the reins. The default search for Firefox used to be Google, but it was switched to Yahoo, which is a front for Bing. So if anybody's hiding under a Trojan horse at Mozilla, it's Microsoft.

      But that's unlikely. No, I think what happened is that around the time Brendan Eich was forced to resign due to some manufactured outrage, the board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction. Three weeks later they imp

      • Or maybe this is what Google want you to think ;)

      • [T]he board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction.

        The IRS has some pretty rigorously enforced guidelines about executive and employee compensation at 501(c)(3) nonprofits, like Mozilla. It's a complicated topic, but this gives a good introduction to the overall idea: https://www.councilofnonprofit... [councilofnonprofits.org]

        The executive summary is that there's nothing anyone can do to make a nontrival personal profit off of anything Mozilla does. So you can sling mud all you want, but accusations that decisions at Mozilla are driven by some kind of profit motive are borne of plai

        • [T]he board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction.

          The IRS has some pretty rigorously enforced guidelines about executive and employee compensation at 501(c)(3) nonprofits, like Mozilla. It's a complicated topic, but this gives a good introduction to the overall idea: https://www.councilofnonprofit... [councilofnonprofits.org]

          The executive summary is that there's nothing anyone can do to make a nontrival personal profit off of anything Mozilla does. So you can sling mud all you want, but accusations that decisions at Mozilla are driven by some kind of profit motive are borne of plain ignorance.

          You're technically right that it's born of "ignorance" since I lack any inside information about the matter and I'm speculating. That being said, how naive does one have to be to believe that Mozilla integrated Pocket directly into Firefox (as opposed to ABP, NoScript, Force HTTPS, Privacy Badger, etc.) out of the goodness in the directors' hearts, and not to make a buck?

          • You're technically right that it's born of "ignorance" since I lack any inside information about the matter and I'm speculating.

            Sure, but even a lay understanding of the word "profit" and the negating prefix "non" should give you some hint about how non-profit organizations are legally required to operate.

            • Um, ok? So you think that Mozilla being a registered nonprofit means it cannot be the case that their board of directors are getting under-the-table money?

              IANAL, but skimming over the link you provided, I can find some loopholes in any case. For instance, in the three-step process to determine appropriate compensation, #2 is: "[an] independent body should take a look at "comparable" salary and benefits data, such as data available from salary and benefit surveys, to learn what employers of a SIMILAR BUDG

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by roca ( 43122 )

            So basically you're making stuff up and posting it to the Internet. Thanks.

        • And rules can be made to go away when you have enough money to hire lawyers and accountants that know all the loopholes and people to bribe.

    • Concerning your last sentence, since Firefox moved to Yahoo as the default search engine, I'd go with complete mental midgets.
    • If this has Google hands this looks far worse than Microsofts policy of Embrace...Extend...Extinguish.
      The direction browser is taking is simply in-explainable for any open source project on its own.
      The King is dead...Long live the King.

    • Re:Fucking morons (Score:5, Informative)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday August 21, 2015 @03:39PM (#50364611) Journal

      The sole advantage of Firefox over Chrome these days is the fact that it's add-on SDK allows addons to modify just about any part of the browser. Chrome extensions are extremely limited in what they do.

      They are planning on extending the add-on API so it still has most of the functionality of the current add-ons. It will be much more sophisticated than what Chrome allows now.

      • So based on the recent experiences with Firefox the new API will look like Chrome's, run like Chrome's, and include several 3rd party closed source "features" that users actively campaigned against?

        Mozilla has a lot of trust to regain before I will believe anything they say about their development goals. Oh I'm sure they'll try and do what they say, and I'm sure they'll screw it up along the way while their users shout "no" at them louder and longer than Darth Vader in the upcoming 4K remix of StarWars.

  • When I launch a new incognito/private window, I want to let some plug-ins, especially Flashcontrol or Flashblock, run by default. There's nothing like launching a new window to get around someone's X-story paywall and getting blasted with their auto-play video.

  • Rants (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Yeah, rants rants rants. No need to read, no need to understand or at least ask.

    From TFA:

    We plan to add our own APIs based on the needs of existing Firefox add-ons.

    NoScript-type functionality. This would come in the form of extensions to webRequest and possibly contentSettings.
    Sidebars. Opera already supports sidebar functionality; Chrome may soon. We would like to be able to implement Tree Style Tabs or Vertical Tabs by hiding the tab strip and show

  • So we can expect NoScript in chrome? Will it run in Android Chrome too? How do you block the really annoying pop-ups in android? The screen real estate is tiny, it does not go away, it prompts back why are you deleting this popup etc.

  • This is great news. Firefox is my browser of choice, but having written extensions for both Firefox and Chrome I must say that Chrome is far easier to develop for.

    I wasn't expecting this, but it makes sense - with Mozilla focusing on Electrolysis (their project to make Firefox multi-process) the existing API wouldn't work well because it wasn't designed with a multi-process browser in mind. I was expecting them to design a whole new API and then have to go through extensions breaking every few updates as th

  • ... not screw up when executing JavaScript. Probably not possible given the sheer number of JavaScript programmers out there and the bloated web sites that employ them add just one more "nifty" piece of eye candy to the site. But a guy can dream, can't he?
  • ... and along with Opera, I can have three versions of Chrome running!
  • If this is going to be such a radical shift in the way that the browser functions why not create a new project? The Phoenix/Firebird project (its name before Firefox) was born out of the need for a lightweight browser that focused on one thing. They rewrote the browser from the Mozilla suite and made it fast. The model they brought along is still close to what we have today. Now they want to overhaul and break the system radically. Just like then.

    At this point why dont they create a Firefox2 or a Firefox

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