Hi-Angel Reporter
	Description • 8 years ago

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20161115075801

Steps to reproduce:

There's a plan of dropping XUL in preference of WebExtensions, but some addons may not be rewritten yet because Firefox didn't offer yet required functionality in other ways.

This bug is supposed to be a list of blockers to dropping XUL. I encourage every owner of a bug with such functionality missing to set "Blocks" field to this bug.

You can see some relevant big discussions here https://github.com/5digits/dactyl/issues/99 (near the end of the page, the issue initially opened for irrelevant reason), and here https://webextensions.uservoice.com/forums/315663-webextension-api-ideas/suggestions/9455088-make-sure-add-ons-that-completely-change-the-ui-l (for some reason voting been closed)

P.S.: cc'ing author of this bug https://bugzil.la/1306671 — Pentadactyl and Vimperator *heavily* relies on this funtionality.

	Tim Nguyen :ntim
	Comment 1 • 8 years ago

Changing to the wording to "legacy" since it includes more broad technologies such as "XPCOM/XUL/add-on SDK"

	Hi-Angel Reporter
	Comment 2 • 8 years ago

Tim Nguyen, fair enough, but I think we need to point out in the title the need of porting *before* dropping the old API.

E.g. currently there's a plan of dropping XUL in FF57¹, but it's not quite right, because it's possible that FF57 would still lack some important parts of its API (and I am not even talking about a time for devs to port extensions — there at least have to be something to port to).

Would the title "[meta] Port legacy APIs used by most popular add-ons before dropping them" be okay?

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/2017#Firefox_57

	Tim Nguyen :ntim
	Comment 3 • 8 years ago

(In reply to Hi-Angel from comment #2)
> Tim Nguyen, fair enough, but I think we need to point out in the title the
> need of porting *before* dropping the old API.
> 
> E.g. currently there's a plan of dropping XUL in FF57¹, but it's not quite
> right, because it's possible that FF57 would still lack some important parts
> of its API (and I am not even talking about a time for devs to port
> extensions — there at least have to be something to port to).
> 
> Would the title "[meta] Port legacy APIs used by most popular add-ons before
> dropping them" be okay?
It's fine to me. Although realistically, I think some APIs (maybe 10-5%) will probably be implemented a few releases after 57. But a lot of APIs (at least 70%) should be ready by then depending on the importance of the APIs.

	Tim Nguyen :ntim
	Comment 4 • 8 years ago

Turns out there's already opened for this.