vannilla wrote: ↑2019-03-25, 17:44
As a developer I believe it's better to give users more power to extend the browser (that's what extensions are for) than make life easier for developers.
The latter folks are usually a very small subset of the people dealing with extensions, and losing features just to make life easier for that 1% is not worth it.
Why does it have to be exclusive, though? Can't we have both?
Moonchild wrote: ↑2019-03-26, 12:12
Right you are.
I still don't get the point why this would have to be an issue. If you are a developer of extensions targeting different applications, you can't expect those applications to take the exact same extension code and be happy with it -- unless of course you are really thinking that browser extensions should be akin to web page scripts and nothing more (which is the point I touched on before: content manipulation only). But in that case, why make extensions to begin with? There are these wonderful things like GreaseMonkey etc. that already let you create content manipulation scripts.
Yes, I'm mostly thinking about content manipulation, because that's what my extension does. Greasemonkey and the other script managers are much more limited than WebExtensions, and can lead to really bad performance with large scripts. My extension used to be a script, but as it grew, it reached a point where I had no choice but to upgrade it to a WebExtension to access more privileged APIs, and it became incredibly faster when I did that. I assume this is the same reason why Enhanced Steam, one of the most popular content manipulation extensions, also started as a script but moved to a WebExtension eventually.
But still, isn't that what standards are for? Taking the exact same generic code and specializing it internally? When I call `browser.storage.set()`, for example, I'm telling the browser that I want to save something in the storage of the extension. Of course it will be implemented differently in each browser, but they all understand what I want.
Moonchild wrote: ↑2019-03-26, 18:21
But browser APIs are, by definition, browser-specific.
Not the ones being standardized by the Browser Extension W3C group.
Anyway, I get that WebExtensions are limited, and I understand if they won't be implemented on Pale Moon because of the maintenance required, but for some cases, they are enough. Not that it matters to me now anyway, since I've already created my compatibility layer using the SDK API, so for as long as the SDK API is supported, my extension will run fine.
Also, sorry for the late reply, I forget about forums sometimes.
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