David E. Ross wrote:
On 2/4/2021 10:52 AM, Rubens wrote:
Today I upgraded to 2.53.6.
But half of my dear extensions used for years stopped working.
Some of them have new WebEx-compatible updates though.
Does anybody know which future Seamonkey version is planned to support WebEx ?
Would it be possible to get a list showing what Webextensions and newly
internal SeaMonkey features are available that are equivalent to the old
xul extensions? I am still with SeaMonkey 2.49.5 because I have some 28
extensions that I either really like or else truly depend upon.
Actually, in my other reply, I didn't really answer the gist of this
question.
With WebExtensions, it's an entirely different API than was what was
used originally in XUL. With WebExtensions, that's a Google creation.
The plus to WebExtensions is that it allows for extensions to be used
interchangeably by both Firefox and Chrome (and I suspect, a way of
keeping extension developers from completely defecting from Firefox
work). However, at the core, what WebExtensions is capable of doing is
still primarily focused on what Google wants to do with Chrome.
The two are radically different, enough where for any extension, it has
to be re-coded in WebExtensions from the ground up. For many XUL
extensions, that's not possible, for a variety of reasons. For some,
the old extensions have been done by hobbyists (often, only a single
developer) and where the last of what was available in XUL represents a
lot of years of evolutionary development. Many have been unable or
unwilling to invest that kind of time to start over again. However, a
different issue is that there's some number of things in XUL that simply
don't exist in WebExtensions, and where it's simply not possible to do
that function with the limitations imposed, as much as an extension
developer would want to.
David, I know that you're a long-time enthusiast of PrefBar, and that's
one of the extensions that has died. The author indicates that many of
the functions of PrefBar are now available in other WebExtensions work,
but not all of them, and I think that was a factor of the author
deciding not to continue. For me, the most compelling thing about
PrefBar is the control that allows for changing UA strings quickly.
I've seen 3 or 4 in Firefox, and one that is sufficiently similar that
I'm happy with that. But it is different, and there's other functions
in PrefBar that I use occasionally enough that it's not a problem, even
if I still wish they were there.
With other extensions, I've seen some new ones that have the same name
as old ones, but with "-WE" appended, indicating that it performs the
same function as the old one, but that it's coded in WebExtensions. And
I've found plenty of other extensions that are more or less the same
function of what I've had in XUL, but where they're not the same. Some
of it is simply new UI, but sometimes, capacities are different (both
new things and loss of old things), as dictated by what's possible with
the tool set provided by WebExtensions.
From my experiences with Firefox (and I do keep a profile with as many
functional equivalents as I have with my preferred set in Seamonkey as
possible), most of the capacities that I want in extensions are there,
although not necessarily in the same way as I'm accustomed to seeing in
Seamonkey. And where some of the functions will never be there, because
WebExtensions doesn't make it possible.
It's also worth noting that this is where Thunderbird struggled up until
about 78.3, in handling the Enigmail extension. Enigmail relies on
functions that were included in XUL, but are not in WebExtensions, and
there's enough Thunderbird users that want the PGP integration that the
Thunderbird developers decided to bundle the capacity into Thunderbird
directly. I didn't follow things closely enough to know why Thunderbird
chose to do the 68.x branch based on Gecko 56, the way that Seamonkey
continues to do, but in retrospect, it could be that one of the major
factors was that Thunderbird releases based on Gecko 68 continued to
support XUL, because Thunderbird was simply not ready for supporting PGP
directly.
As I suggested in another posting of experimenting with betas, something
that might be worth doing is setting up a profile in an ESR version of
Firefox (possibly a portable apps installation), and then seeing how you
can replicate the functionality of your Seamonkey extensions there --
and what you can't. That won't do anything for immediate issues with
Seamonkey, but it's a pointer of where the future is of what you will or
will not be able to do with extensions, and how they behave.
On my main working machine, besides my Seamonkey installation, I do
maintain an installation with a current version Firefox, where I keep
one profile that is there just to check extensions, both in replicating
what I currently have with Seamonkey, as well as new extensions that
have no XUL equivalents, but may be useful.
The problem is with old software, whether extensions or anything else,
if you've become accustomed to using something that is abandoned, then
you have to choose between either dropping the old stuff (and changing
your workflows to match) or sticking with stuff that's becoming
increasingly archaic, relative to new stuff, including stuff that is no
longer getting security updates.
To that end, there's still plenty of people that are using both XP and
Windows 7, because they have reasons not to upgrade. But in the same
way, there's holdouts that won't upgrade Firefox past 52.9, or
Thunderbird past 68.12, often because they don't want to lose the
ability to run XUL extensions.
Smith
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