- What language are mozilla firefox extensions written in update#
- What language are mozilla firefox extensions written in full#
This should lead to a flood of new extensions in an ecosystem that could frankly use it. In many cases, only a few tweaks are needed for a Chrome extension to run in Firefox, meaning there’s no reason your favorite Chrome extensions can’t come to Firefox now if you ask the developer nicely enough. The new WebExtensions API won’t fix this overnight, but it does make it a lot easier for Chrome extensions to be ported over to Firefox because the language used to write extensions is similar enough to make porting superficial. Sure, there are a few Firefox extensions that you can’t get in Chrome, but Chrome has the bigger ecosystem by far. These days, Chrome is by far the leader in terms of add-ons, while Firefox can feel like a graveyard of unmaintained extensions from years gone by. Once upon a time, add-ons gave people a compelling reason to use Firefox over Chrome. Cross Platform Compatibility Was a Problem Many upcoming changes to Firefox were similarly being held back by legacy add-ons, meaning the ecosystem had to change in order for Firefox to evolve. This is a reality that the traditional extension ecosystem simply was not built for, and it’s hard to imagine making it work without a lot of layers of abstraction that would inevitably slow things down. Four separate processes handle Firefox’s interface and tabs, meaning Firefox can use all four cores of your processor instead of just one. The multi process capability, for example, is a big part of Firefox Quantam’s speed boost. The change also makes some of Quantam’s best features possible. The result should be fewer extensions breaking in the long run, but to make this possible, Mozilla needed to abandon the old extension ecosystem. This means developers only need to ensure that the API is functioning properly, and not worry that a performance tweak or UI change will break particular extensions. The WebExtensions API makes all of this easier by specifically defining what extensions can do and how they can do it. The Firefox team would do their best to ensure popular extensions were working before pushing a new version, but it’s easy to imagine all of this slowing down development. Because Firefox extensions could affect Firefox so directly, it was possible for even minor changes to Firefox itself to break add-ons completely, or just introduce performance-sapping bugs.įirefox users, not knowing the extensions were causing the problem, would assume the new Firefox version is buggy, and from their perspective it was.
What language are mozilla firefox extensions written in update#
Traditional Extensions Made Improving Firefox Difficultįirefox Quantam isn’t the first update to break an extension: this has been an ongoing problem for years. For two years now, Firefox has offered a similar API called WebExtensions, which it has encouraged developers to adopt. Those browsers offer extension developers specific APIs they can use, meaning there’s a set list of things extensions can and can’t control.
It’s also why these extensions tended to break with new Firefox releases.Įxtensions for Chrome or Safari don’t work this way. This is why those extensions were so powerful: there wasn’t a prescribed set of things they could and couldn’t change. If that went over your head, just know this: Firefox extensions had a more-or-less total ability to change your browser, and they made those changes directly.
What language are mozilla firefox extensions written in full#
These add-ons also had near full access to XPCOM, the powerful component object model used by Firefox. This is the language Firefox’s user interface is built with, and XUL-based extensions could modify that interface directly. Traditional Firefox extensions were generally written in XML User Interface Language (XUL).
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