The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons

[Brink]

Today we are announcing some major upcoming changes to Firefox add-ons. Our add-on ecosystem has evolved through incremental, organic growth over the years, but there are some modernizations to Firefox that require some foundational changes to support:

• Taking advantage of new technologies like Electrolysis and Servo
• Protecting users from spyware and adware
• Shortening the time it takes to review add-ons

To help the add-on development community understand how we will enable these improvements, we are making four related announcements today:

• We are implementing a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers.
• A safer, faster, multi-process version of Firefox is coming soon with Electrolysis; we need developers to ensure their Firefox add-ons will be compatible with it.
• To ensure third-party extensions provide customization without sacrificing security, performance or exposing users to malware, we will require all extensions to be validated and signed by Mozilla starting in Firefox 41, which will be released on September 22nd 2015.
• We have decided on an approximate timeline for the deprecation of XPCOM- and XUL-based add-ons.

For our add-on development community, these changes will bring benefits, like greater cross-browser add-on compatibility, but will also require redevelopment of a number of existing add-ons. We’re making a big investment by expanding the team of engineers, add-on reviewers, and evangelists who work on add-ons and support the community that develops them. They will work with the community to improve and finalize the WebExtensions API, and will help developers of unsupported add-ons make the transition to newer APIs and multi-process support.

We’re announcing all of the changes today to make developers aware of our plans and to give everyone an opportunity to offer feedback. We are committed to doing what we can to make this transition as easy as possible. Together with our Mozilla community, we will create the future of Firefox add-ons...

Read more: The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Add-ons Blog

 

[FerchogtX]

It seems Mozilla is making bets for a new browsing engine! Let's hope this time they can get rid of all nuisances that appeared when they went for Hardware Acceleration... And probaby it seems they could, a new engine that probably handles the DirectX / OpenGL APIs better than the current is huge step.

 

[jamis]

As much as I like FF and update it quickly, I think I'll wait on v41 for a month or so. I have absolutely no issues with v40.0.2. I think what they are doing is good, but since it sounds like a total re-engineer of the browser, I'm willing to wait a bit

 

[groze]

They are suppose to offer a non-branded version without the add-on signage required and without the firefox branding. I am curious to what the unbranded version will look like.

 

[carwiz]

They are suppose to offer a non-branded version without the add-on signage required and without the firefox branding. I am curious to what the unbranded version will look like.

Probably like W10-Edge.

 

[spencer1]

They are suppose to offer a non-branded version without the add-on signage required and without the firefox branding. I am curious to what the unbranded version will look like.

I've read that Firefox ESR will keep the config setting (xpinstall.signatures.required in about:config) to disable signing requirements. However this may change in the future. Anyhow, at least there's hope.

 

[groze]

They are suppose to offer a non-branded version without the add-on signage required and without the firefox branding. I am curious to what the unbranded version will look like.

I've read that Firefox ESR will keep the config setting (xpinstall.signatures.required in about:config) to disable signing requirements. However this may change in the future. Anyhow, at least there's hope.

Here is some info.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/05/27/update-signing-new-developer-agreement/

The main person keeps saying there is going to be an unbranded version for the U.S. They haven't decided if ESR 45 will or will not be able to use unsigned add-ons.

 

[spencer1]

They are suppose to offer a non-branded version without the add-on signage required and without the firefox branding. I am curious to what the unbranded version will look like.

I've read that Firefox ESR will keep the config setting (xpinstall.signatures.required in about:config) to disable signing requirements. However this may change in the future. Anyhow, at least there's hope.

Here is some info.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/05/27/update-signing-new-developer-agreement/

The main person keeps saying there is going to be an unbranded version for the U.S. They haven't decided if ESR 45 will or will not be able to use unsigned add-ons.

I'm curious about this unbranded thing too.