'cause i feel like being obnoxious: refusing to provide support for unmaintained ff addons you didn't make is ok, encouraging people to learn xul and fork the ones they like is fine, stepping aside and saying "what we're doing now is unsustainable, we need to make changes" is a reasonable thing for a guy running any ship to do, arbitrarily breaking those still-kinda-functional ff extensions en masse because
WE ARE YOUR GODS AND WE DEMAND IT is bull and you know it. there is nothing that justifies this decision for the end user, this is just you making these extensions harder to use for the people who know how to circumvent the blocklist and giving them the middle finger. warning people is nice but that doesn't change the fact that you're still barging into their houses and breaking stuff that was working fine beforehand. this isn't going to solve the problem you claim it's going to fix.
not saying any of the uxp contributors are literally as bad as google/microsoft/apple/hitler/whatever but this is the
exact same reasoning that big tech chucklefucks and lazy devs use when they want to strip out "legacy" cruft from old software - i don't use [x] and i don't want people to use it, so i'm going to forcefully remove it because haha get bent. you're fine with people running deprecated plugins (yes i know there is no reason to remove npapi itself) like java and silverlight and god knows what else, but some rando still using old firefox extensions in Current Year that he can't replace yet is an active danger to society? blocking ads and telling manipulative advertising firms to bite it is cool, but using adnauseam is going too far? i'm not surprised, this mentality is an irreplaceable part of pale moon's branding and it has been for years, but this decision in particular just feels incredibly unnecessary to me.
if you want to complain about people tearing you apart for this and how waterfox is supporting xul without any backup plan, fine, but you incited this to begin with by continuing to support these addons up until now, and you're going to piss off people by taking away things that haven't broken yet; i don't even use a lot of ff-specific extensions, but some people do, and most of them aren't going to magically learn xul and javascript and start cranking out addons, because learning is hard and the vast majority of people physically can't be assed to maintain an extension. instead, they're just going to give up, ditch pale moon, bitch about it, and this'll go down in the books as yet another pr disaster - like that openbsd thread on github that people still link to. i
want to see pale moon/uxp thrive in
a future where everything is chrome, but it's hard to encourage people to develop uxp addons when all of those users have moved away and the devs keep antagonizing their own niche, fractured userbase. i'm not even trying to viciously tear anyone apart here, i'm just incredibly frustrated
i don't think pm-specific addons are rare just because the old ff ones still work, they're rare because (as much as i hate it) xul and other old mozilla/netscape technologies are becoming increasingly obscure, pale moon is fundamentally niche (and becoming gradually less viable to use as a daily driver. thanks webcomponents!) and the few diehards that still care enough to work with/learn xul either get driven away or lose interest. breaking ff addon support and telling people "JUST FORK IT" isn't going to fix the multitude of issues that have led us to this point