The next v30 release can, and likely will, not be compatible with v30.0.0/v30.0.1. Please do not use this information to update addons as you will likely be wasting your time.
As we're about ready to release Pale moon v30 which puts into effect the changes the community asked for, a brief overview of what it means to run extensions on Pale Moon 30 and beyond.
For those that aren't yet familiar with the change in direction: Pale Moon has dropped its own globally unique identifier to carry the one from Firefox instead again (like it did in very early versions). This was done to answer the user community's desire to draw upon legacy and unmaintained Firefox extensions as-is and at their own risk (and peril
). While this does mean a much larger pool of potentially usable extensions, the consequence will also be that it will be up to the community itself to figure out compatibility issues and update as-needed. We are especially disclaiming any responsibility for the operation, safety and compatibility of extensions that are not at the very least verified to some degree on our addons site. But even so, the ultimate responsible for extensions are extension developers/maintainers. We just provide a distribution platform for those submitted to our addons site, streamlining installation and updates. Please understand that to submit to our addons site, we still do expect a certain level of code quality and no malicious content, of course.Please note that our current add-ons site will, for a while, serve both older versions of Pale Moon and newer ones in a side-by-side manner, and it is important that you do not spoof your user agent when visiting the add-ons site or you may be served the incorrect type of add-ons or add-on updates, or not receive them at all.
Initially and for a very short period of time, we will still allow the installation of Pale Moon exclusive-identifying extensions using the Pale Moon GUID to aid in the transition of extensions not on our addons site. Please do note that these may still not work properly because they do need adjustment if they were not targeting multiple applications (so they may install but not work).
In addition, all the extensions that were on the addons site were checked for transition to milestone 30. A portion of the submitted extensions did not meet the automatic transition requirements and have not been carried across to the new (rewritten) addons site catering to Pale Moon 30, which means they won't be immediately available. Once the panel part of the new addons site is up and operational (should be on a relatively short term) extension developers may re-submit adjusted extensions to the website for Pale Moon 30. We'll let you all know when the panel will be available again for extension submission.
Qualifing extensions had their install manifests normalized by a scripted process.
As part of this transition process I have personally manually adjusted many chrome manifests to transition extensions to milestone 30. I have however not touched any of the code inside extensions. Such extensions modified by us (normalized and manifest-edited) will have a -fxguid suffix to the version of the extension on our new addons site. Like Mozilla's .1-signed process, the version suffix is meant to allow the transitioned extensions to be newer than the current version (allowing automatic updates) but older than the next release by any developer. Also note that one should NEVER use a dash in an add-on version.
All extensions developers are of course still strongly urged to verify, fix where needed, and re-submit extensions themselves once the new site panel is fully operational.
I apologize if this causes inconvenience but this is a massive change as regards our extension ecosystem, extension manager and the extension website and we're doing our best to have things ready as soon as we can.
P.S.: Due to time restraints to address a critical security issue needing Pale Moon 30 to be released ASAP, the new addons site is not very feature-rich at the moment but the core functionality of it works. This will be addressed very soon.
