Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I been holding off on upgrading Firefox. Basically, it breaks addons > that I just can't go without. Tab groups and some other tab utilities > are among them.
Basically the situation is the following: >=firefox-57 support so-called WebExtensions which intentionally are less powerful (hence safer) than legacy extensions. For security and compatibility reasons, it will *never* be the case anymore that WebExtensions are able to change browser behaviour. Exceptions are only certain well-defined APIs which will presumably not change dramatically in future versions. For instance, there is a tab API, but essentially it is limited to basic things like searching/activating/closing/opening tabs etc: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Working_with_the_Tabs_API So no WebExtension will ever be able to offer tab functionality which goes beyond that. Essentially, there is no other choice than to live with it: Stable firefox-52 and maybe some firefox forks (palemoon, waterfox, tox-browser) support legacy extensions for a while. However, if they support them for a longer period and do not have similar resources than mozilla, I would not trust them anymore, because it means that they diverged from upstream too much to fix all security issues by pulling. (Not to speak about security issues existing in the legacy extension code which will never be fixed by upstream, anyway). As usual, there is the balance "convenience" (old plugins) <-> "security". In the beginning (say, until firefox-52 is no longer supported upstream), there is a certain choice. But after that staying on the "convenience" side is not sane anymore.
