this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Let me give you another analogy: You see an article about a Firefox extension, click in but it is also not supported.
Now lets say you are already annoyed your adblocker also doesn't work because Mozilla breaks extensions every few months.
Then someone commented:
I don't use adblock. (Or even the extension advertised) Most people use Chrome anyway. Not sure why that bothers you so much.
That's not a good analogy.
A more apt analogy would be:
Firefox breaks extensions every other release in a way that's trivial to fix, but a bit annoying.
In an upcoming release, Mozilla warns that they're standardising the way extensions are done so that not only are they easier to make, but breakage in the future is uncommon, though extensions as they currently stand won't work.
They give you a port guide and time in advance to get everything sorted.
A beta build of Firefox comes out, 95% of extensions are already ported, but there are still a few (mainly ones that aren't actively maintained) haven't yet been ported.
Is it annoying if you're the kind of person who likes to be on the bleeding edge? Sure. But part of being on the bleeding edge is accepting that sometimes things are borked. If you can't live with a changed workflow, don't use beta software.
The thing is, Firefox has an extension API. It's a proper thing that they maintain, and make guarantees about. GNOME intentionally doesn't have an API, because if they did, the things extensions could do would be limited to what those APIs expose. Instead, they let extensions do whatever they want, patching the code of the shell directly. This comes at the cost of extensions needing to be updated for new shell versions, but it lets extensions be extremely powerful.
In fact, Firefox had this issue a few years back. They switched from a GNOME like system to the WebExtensions API, which is more limited and broke basically every extension if they didn't update. There are still some add-ons that can't be replicated because they need functionality the API doesn't expose.