Firefox Legacy Add-ons

» see addons.mozilla.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Firefox arrived on my machines around 2005, the same way it arrived on everyone's, as the thing you installed the day you finally gave up on Internet Explorer 6. In Turkey that meant downloading it over a TTNet connection that was only just getting fast enough to make the download painless, then spending an evening on addons.mozilla.org instead of using the browser. That evening was the point. Firefox shipped as a starting position and expected you to finish it.

What made it possible was XUL, the interface language Firefox was built in. Firefox's own front end was described in XUL and wired together with JavaScript, and an extension was allowed to load its own XUL and overlay it on top. There was no permission list and no boundary. An add-on could move the tab bar, rewrite the address bar's behavior, add a sidebar, replace the download manager or delete a menu it did not like. It had the same access to the browser as the people who wrote the browser.

Mozilla started counting downloads on addons.mozilla.org in 2005 and hit a billion on 19 November 2008, then two billion by the middle of 2010. Most of that traffic went to a small number of famous names, but the long stretch underneath was thousands of extensions written by one person each for a problem only that person had.

All of it stopped on 14 November 2017, the day Firefox 57 shipped under the marketing name Quantum. Anything not written as a WebExtension no longer loaded, with no compatibility flag and no override.

~ the dossier ~

~ what xul let you do ~

The genre is hard to describe to anyone who came to browsers after 2017, because nothing in the modern extension model comes close. Tab Mix Plus rebuilt tab handling into something with more options than most applications have in total, and Classic Theme Restorer existed only to put the interface back the way it had been two versions earlier, which hundreds of thousands of people wanted badly enough to install. Vimperator removed the entire interface and gave you a browser you drove with Vim keys.

DownThemAll had its own download engine. Firebug was a full developer toolchain years before browsers shipped one, and it was good enough that Chrome's built-in tools were measured against it. None of these were plugins in the modern sense. They were modifications, in the way that people who mod games mean the word.

~ the quantum trade ~

Mozilla's reasons were real and they were mostly about the future of the codebase. Multiprocess Firefox, the Electrolysis project, could not work while any extension was free to reach synchronously into any part of the browser from anywhere. Neither could sandboxing, or the wider project of making Firefox competitive with Chrome again on speed and memory. XUL extensions were the reason Firefox could not be modernized, and Mozilla was losing users every quarter it stayed slow.

So the roadmap was published early and it was honest. April 2017 stopped AMO accepting new legacy submissions. Firefox 52 ESR carried the old system until September 2018 for anyone who needed the runway. New legacy uploads were closed on 6 September 2018 and everything still listed was disabled in early October, which took the whole back catalog off the site in one pass.

~ what never came back ~

WebExtensions gave Firefox a stable API and code that mostly also runs on Chrome. It also fixed the ceiling in place. An extension today can do what the API allows and nothing beyond it, so the ideas that required going under the hood no longer have anywhere to be built.

Some things did make the crossing. Vimium and Tridactyl carry a version of what Vimperator was. uBlock Origin was a WebExtension from early on. Firebug's people went to work on Firefox DevTools. But the long tail of single-author oddities never rebuilt, because their authors had written them in 2009 for themselves and were not going to spend a month of 2018 porting them for anybody. The browser got faster. The thing you could do to it got smaller.

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