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I just read the article on changing FF extensions and the comments, and I'm completely lost. Not only did I scarily not understand what the changes were all about, but unlike most of the commenters, I have no idea why these changes are bad. Can someone please explain this to me?

IMO it boils down to these two issues:

The article wrote:

Soon, Mozilla will also require all add-ons to be reviewed and signed before they can be installed. Firefox 41, which launches on September 22, will require that all plug-ins be signed by Mozilla. Unsigned plug-ins will be disabled by default, though users will be able to work around the requirement. Mozilla says that starting with version 42, the beta and production releases of Firefox will require add-ons to be signed, with no opt-out choice available.

The article also wrote:

The company acknowledges that many add-ons built with these tools cannot be built with WebExtensions, but it hopes to extend the new API over time with developer feedback to restore some of the missing functionality.

So all add-ons must go through an official approval process (how long does that process take, and what's the criteria for getting approved?), and many existing add-ons won't port cleanly (which likely means they will simply cease to be available, as add-on developers give up on the platform).

I predict the Firefox add-on ecosystem is about to get a whole lot smaller, and Firefox's decline in overall market share will accelerate.

Perhaps, but they will also benefit from the easy cross-platform compatibility. Users that have favorite extensions on Chrome can find them on FF, and people that build these extensions will be able to more easily do so across multiple browsers. I believe it means one can now write a single extension and quickly port it across FF, Chrome, Opera, and Vivaldi without issue.

Personally I found FF's current extension mechanism to be too unstable, it had a great deal to do with why I dumped FF and haven't used it in years. This new implementation should theoretically be more stable.

While I don't necessarily like the idea of Firefox copying Chrome even more, and I don't like forcing addon signing (I could've sworn Chrome lets you install addons from anywhere if you really want), it's good that they're finally moving away from the somewhat bloated, slightly unstable extension architecture they've had for years. And as someone who uses Chrome, if this goes well, I might move back to Firefox.

Weren't they also finally moving to 64-bit multiprocess? That's a good way to make me switch back if I've ever seen one. (Gawd I'm tired of one bloated 32-bit process - seems like that's been an issue for years now. On slower machines, I remember having the entire UI lock up for a moment while chewing on pages. Chrome rarely/ever did that.)

http://www.downthemall.net/the-likely-e ... wnthemall/
http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... xtensions/

Maybe eventually this will be the solution:
https://vivaldi.com/

meerkt wrote:

Maybe eventually this will be the solution:
https://vivaldi.com/

I really wish Vivaldi wakes off, but I'm a bit worried they will ever match the speed of Opera considering Opera is native code and almost all of Vivaldi is written in Javascript.

Basically the last bastion of mainstream browser freedom has been corrupted enough by the usual marketing/advertising/whatever-you-want-to-call it ("evil" works for me) and the possibility of true end user control over what the browser is actually doing will go away in future versions.
You will be tracked, prodded and data-mined, "your" computer will run that code we shove to it, SUBMIT!

So unless one of the forks gets enough backing and support, it will slowly die. Its sad because there is not much else with enough developers behind it to stay patched and relevant.

Don't get me started on Vivaldi. It was only the last ~3 snapbuild versions that they fixed the guaranteed crash from importing Opera bookmarks. The bookmark manager is missing any kind of view/sort options and looks like I just threw all the bookmarks/folders into a scrambled pile.