The IT Nerd

On November 14, Mozilla will be releasing Firefox 57. It promises to be massively faster than any other Firefox that came before it because it will better leverage the hardware that you have to run faster.

However, it also brings a major change for those who use extensions to add functionality to the browser. Up until now Firefox has supported two types of extensions. The traditional legacy ones and the WebExtension ones that work more like what Chrome uses. As of Firefox 57, the browser will only support the latter. The reason for this change is that legacy extensions slow down Firefox and cause stability problems that end users often blame on Firefox. Thus Firefox becomes way more stable by taking away the ability to run legacy extensions. But it also means if you have the former installed and you happen to like them, you need to check for updates or they will stop working the second that you install Firefox 57.

My advice is that you should check Are we WebExtensions yet to see if the extensions that you use have WebExtenion versions and upgrade now to avoid some pain in a few days. But don’t be surprised if you favorite extension is missing a WebExtension version. Well known ones such as Lastpass, DownThemAll, HTTPSEverywhere and Flashblock are among the extensions that haven’t made the transition. Which is kind of odd as developers knew that this was coming for well over a year as Mozilla has been pretty public about this change. Thus if you want to be ticked off at someone, direct your outrage towards the developer and not towards Mozilla. Your other option is to remain on the version of Firefox that you’re running, but that’s a bit of a security risk as you’d be running a version that may have exploits that are patched in newer versions.

It will be interesting to see what happens when Firefox 57 ships next week. Will there be a lot of rage or will this be much ado about nothing? Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on November 10, 2017 at 11:17 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.