Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?
&gt; I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by this choice.<p>Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising at all since people lost a lot of useful functionality that still do not have replacements today. <i>Users were not stuck on XUL as a technology. They cared about functionality and power user functionality!</i><p>I’m using mainline Firefox and not some fork that still supports XUL addons, but I still miss not having good replacements for:†<p>* Tab Mix Plus (I haven’t seen any replacement for this; and if you haven’t used this in the XUL world, you wouldn’t know the value of it)<p>* Lazarus (form saver)<p>* Session Manager (no, other session saving extensions still feel iffy to me)<p>For reasons I haven’t delved into, these extensions cannot live in a WebExtensions world today. <i>So yes, I’m one of the people hurt by the choice not of removing XUL, but not providing alternatives even several years later.</i><p>&gt; The main drawback is, of course, that WebExtensions do not give add-on developers as much power as the promiscuous extension mechanism. I hope that all the power that add-on developers need can eventually be added to WebExtensions API but that’s something that takes engineering power, a critical resource that we’re sorely lacking.<p>I don’t have a lot of hope since years have passed with progress in making some more addons work with WebExtentions but not really close to being there for other addons. Though the Firefox team has said it’s currently not planning to implement Manifest V3, if and when it does (and depending on how it does), that could potentially make uBlock Origin obsolete. That would be a much larger blow to the users.<p>†: Please let me know if you have suggestions for great replacements for the first two extensions.