Lucifox

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

~ the eulogy ~

On 14 November 2017 Firefox 57 shipped, and every extension built on XUL stopped loading. Mozilla had announced it well in advance and the reasoning was sound, but the effect on the day was that a decade of small, strange, single-purpose add-ons became files that no longer did anything. Most of them had one author. Lucifox had one author.

What it did: it turned a browser tab into an e-book reader. You opened a book and it rendered inside the main window, one book per tab, remembering where you had stopped reading. It handled EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 as long as there was no DRM on the file, and it kept an offline bookshelf folder for the ones you wanted to keep. It could also browse online catalogs over OPDS, the open standard that let small publishers and public libraries serve a book list to any reader that understood it. The first version, 0.8.1, came out on 7 February 2011 as a continuation of Lucidor, a standalone XUL reader by the same developer.

It was one of four pieces of a quietly ambitious little suite. Lucidor was the application and Lucifox was the browser extension. Two more, Luciwik and Lucimoo, put e-books into MediaWiki and Moodle. Development picked up through the second half of 2012. Version 0.9.5 broke compatibility with its own earlier bookshelves because Firefox had changed underneath it, and 0.9.7 moved the license to GPL version 3. The last release was 0.9.14, on 31 January 2017.

I did not use it. Reading books inside a browser tab was never my habit, and a Swedish developer's free EPUB extension was not something that reached me in Ankara through any channel I was paying attention to. What did reach me, and reached everyone, was the morning in late 2017 when Firefox updated itself and the add-on list came back shorter.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

Lucifox was built on exactly the thing Mozilla spent 2016 and 2017 deciding to get rid of. XUL extensions could reach into the browser's own interface and rearrange it, which is what let a reader open books in the main window rather than in some sandboxed panel, and it is also why Firefox could not be made fast or multi-process while they existed. The replacement API gave extensions a defined surface and took away the rest.

You can see the project reacting in its own version history. The 0.9.5 compatibility break in 2012 was Firefox moving underneath it. The final release in January 2017 landed ten months before the deadline, and the add-ons listing for it was dead by the following October.

~ the afterlife ~

The author did not delete anything. Five weeks after Firefox 57, the home page had been edited to describe Lucifox as an e-book reader extension for Pale Moon, the browser fork that kept the old extension model alive specifically so that software like this would keep running. The page then sat there, a 1.3 kilobyte single page with four product names on it, through 2018 and 2020 and 2023, still correct, still linking to downloads.

The e-book suite outlived its platform by eight years in that form. The last archived capture of the real page is 18 August 2025. By 30 December 2025 the domain was answering with a redirect, and lucidor.org today serves a Swedish casino affiliate page.

~ the poet ~

The name is the best thing about it. Lars Johanson was a seventeenth century Swedish poet who went by Lucidor, and the home page carried eight lines of his verse from around 1670, in the original spelling, above the four product links. The passage is about a man who can see the shore and cannot reach it, comparing himself to a storm-driven boat that has to sink while watching dry land. A free e-book reader for a browser nobody uses anymore is not a bad place for that to have ended up.

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