Add-ons • Re: Working on a Greasemonkey fork for Pale Moon

INB4: But these extensions are currently being developed in Chrome and Firefox in its default restartless fashion and nothing bad is happening from them. Because WebExtensions are sandboxed by design, old restartless are not - This causes memory leaks, zombie compartments, race conditions, etc... (Again, correct me if I'm wrong)

Ah, that must be why it was a sore subject... it's because that's probably one of the things WebExtensions do better than XUL, and doesn't really make us look good. I do think it's reasonable to be honest about this, though... that the requirement for a browser restart, along with the bugginess of trying to work around that, really is a disadvantage. It enables more powerful extensions, at the expense of more inconvenience, more chances of something going wrong, and an awkward browser restart.

Following this to its logical conclusion... I would have to say that means unless the extension specifically leverages the power of XUL/XPCOM to do things that wouldn't be possible with WebExtensions... what you effectively get with Pale Moon is something more inconvenient and worse than a WebExtension. So the bar of showing the technology offers any value above what WebExtensions offer is actually pretty high, especially since there's not much recently developed using XUL that really showcases that.

And unless the extension is one of those that actually utilizes that power in a way people notice and care about, it just seems like a worse version of what Chrome can do for all the simpler extensions that can be done within the limitations of a WebExtensions framework. We've been saying for years that XUL/XPCOM is more powerful than WebExtensions... but what has been left unsaid (maybe because it was painful) is that a XUL extension that does the exact same thing as a WebExtension comes off as a worse and more inconvenient version of said WebExtension to most users, leaving us at a disadvantage with any kind of "simpler" extension that I never really thought about before. It's like, I understood the tradeoff in terms of sandboxing/security, sure, but I never saw those improvements directly tied to user convenience like this before.

It definitely shows me what an uphill battle we have to demonstrate the value of this technology, that's for sure. And makes me wonder if at some point in the future we would need to improve the way XUL extensions work to keep them even potentially relevant... if we can find the time between fixing web compatibility and keeping up with OS changes. :/

I'm really starting to think XUL isn't the selling point we thought it was... oh, well. I still love Pale Moon/UXP, but it's become clear to me just from this small exchange why it's so hard to get anyone else interested. Because the main thing that should have been a selling point probably doesn't seem like one to a user that might be using simpler, less powerful extensions.