The future of extensions on Pale Moon and other UXP browsers.
Posted: 2019-01-10, 11:41
This information is outdated and only kept for historical purposes
With the recent communication I've had with several Firefox extension authors, and the kind of responses I tend to get when asking normal questions, it seems clear to me now more than ever that we have to rely on our community members, and our community members alone, to keep the XUL extension ecosystem alive.
This post is sort of a guideline to follow when you are looking for extensions to the browsers, that you've seen previously on Firefox.
Contacting extension developers to ask for XUL based versions of their extensions seems to be folly and leads to a lot of drama and unnecessary argumentation, as I found out the hard way. This despite the fact that maintaining "legacy" extension technology is going to be a lot less work than trying to keep up with Mozilla's moving target that is Gecko.
So, if you think about this at this point in time, I say "don't bother". The devs are extremely unlikely to pay us any sort of mind or be wiling to even listen to the request for what Mozilla has hammered in in its dogma "it's obsolete tech, follow us or die". Remember when they were saying "Adopt Australis or die" to Pale Moon? Same thing here but this time with "WebExtensions", despite how limited they are.
First, check the Pale Moon add-ons site
First and foremost, checking the Pale Moon add-ons site at https://addons.palemoon.org will give you a good selection of extensions that have already been created, adapted or modified to specifically work in Pale Moon (and likely other UXP-based browsers too). This may provide you with alternatives or similar extensions to fit your workflow with guaranteed compatibility.
As of Phoebus 2.0, the site provides extension developers/publishers with a complete self-serve portal to publish extensions on the add-ons site. It has also been extended to more easily serve other/additional UXP applications with their own unique extensions.
Secondly, fork fork fork!
If nothing matches, then you have the option to fork existing Firefox "legacy" extensions to explicitly support Pale Moon, Basilisk and other applications. If you are wanting to do this, then please read the following post I made a while back about hacking away at extensions. In short: make sure you stay within the confines of what you are legally allowed to do with the extensions.
UPDATE: Despite what I wrote above apparently there have been more than a few extensions that were impromptu re-licensed to different licenses when forking. Understand that you cannot do this! Many Open Source licenses are incompatible and simply re-licensing an extension under something you personally agree with more is not allowed (and that is a legal not-allowed, not an arbitrary decision we've made). If you want to release something under your license of choice then you have to write your own extension from scratch. You aren't allowed to pick a license at will when forking because you must stay compatible with the original author's licensing!
With the recent communication I've had with several Firefox extension authors, and the kind of responses I tend to get when asking normal questions, it seems clear to me now more than ever that we have to rely on our community members, and our community members alone, to keep the XUL extension ecosystem alive.
This post is sort of a guideline to follow when you are looking for extensions to the browsers, that you've seen previously on Firefox.
Contacting extension developers to ask for XUL based versions of their extensions seems to be folly and leads to a lot of drama and unnecessary argumentation, as I found out the hard way. This despite the fact that maintaining "legacy" extension technology is going to be a lot less work than trying to keep up with Mozilla's moving target that is Gecko.
So, if you think about this at this point in time, I say "don't bother". The devs are extremely unlikely to pay us any sort of mind or be wiling to even listen to the request for what Mozilla has hammered in in its dogma "it's obsolete tech, follow us or die". Remember when they were saying "Adopt Australis or die" to Pale Moon? Same thing here but this time with "WebExtensions", despite how limited they are.
First, check the Pale Moon add-ons site
First and foremost, checking the Pale Moon add-ons site at https://addons.palemoon.org will give you a good selection of extensions that have already been created, adapted or modified to specifically work in Pale Moon (and likely other UXP-based browsers too). This may provide you with alternatives or similar extensions to fit your workflow with guaranteed compatibility.
As of Phoebus 2.0, the site provides extension developers/publishers with a complete self-serve portal to publish extensions on the add-ons site. It has also been extended to more easily serve other/additional UXP applications with their own unique extensions.
Secondly, fork fork fork!
If nothing matches, then you have the option to fork existing Firefox "legacy" extensions to explicitly support Pale Moon, Basilisk and other applications. If you are wanting to do this, then please read the following post I made a while back about hacking away at extensions. In short: make sure you stay within the confines of what you are legally allowed to do with the extensions.
UPDATE: Despite what I wrote above apparently there have been more than a few extensions that were impromptu re-licensed to different licenses when forking. Understand that you cannot do this! Many Open Source licenses are incompatible and simply re-licensing an extension under something you personally agree with more is not allowed (and that is a legal not-allowed, not an arbitrary decision we've made). If you want to release something under your license of choice then you have to write your own extension from scratch. You aren't allowed to pick a license at will when forking because you must stay compatible with the original author's licensing!
