Tuesday, August 21, 2018

TenFourFox and legacy addons and their euthanasia thereof

Presently TenFourFox uses Mozilla Addons as a repository for "legacy" (I prefer "classic" or "can actually do stuff" or "doesn't suck") add-ons that remain compatible with Firefox 45, of which TenFourFox is a forked descendant. Mozilla has now announced these legacy addons will no longer be accessible in October. I don't know if this means that legacy-only addons will no longer be visible, or no longer searchable, or whether older compatible versions of current addons will also be no longer visible, or whatever, or whether everything is going to be deleted and HTH, HAND. The blog post doesn't say. Just assume you may not be able to access them anymore.

This end-of-support is obviously to correlate with the end-of-life of Firefox 52ESR, the last version to support legacy add-ons. That's logical, but it sucks, particularly for people who are stuck on 52ESR (Windows XP and Vista come to mind). Naturally, this also sucks for alternative branches such as Waterfox which split off before WebExtensions became mandatory, and the poor beleaguered remnants of SeaMonkey.

For TenFourFox users, there is an archive available from SourceForge of the last Firefox 45-compatible versions of popular addons, both classic and current. Naturally this archive is not comprehensive and won't ever be, though I'll consider adding other addons I believe are notable. Download and drop the XPI on any open browser window. Other users are welcome to grab stuff from our archives, but I consider 52-compatible versions out of scope, so please don't ask.

For OverbiteFF users, I will probably move it back over to Floodgap's gopher clients page and maintain it there, since if you have an interest in Gopher I can pretty accurately predict you probably don't use a vanilla stock web browser either. However, because OverbiteWX and OverbiteNX are fully compatible with WebExtensions, they will not be affected by this change.

4 comments:

  1. a couple of great ones I've had luck with have been

    Places Maintenance (that sorts out any problems with the Places .db before bookmarks or history can get lost/damaged (has really helped when the machine was being temperamental and Kernel Panicked a lot https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/places-maintenance/

    And StayOnline that prevents Firefox from going into Offline Mode when the connection is unstable (not sure where to get it, but can pull it from my system if anyone wants it).

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  2. Damn I installed extensions to my mother's Windows XP FF just a few months ago... I hope she'll be able to use this computer a few more years ...

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  3. Linus Talks RISC5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8jqGOgCy5M

    So I guess AIM alliance and OpenPOWER don't count because...

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  4. Firefox's deliberate issues with classic addons is why I switched to Chrome on my Intel MacPro at work. On my Snow Leopard only MBP at home this puts me in limbo because my version of Chrome is too old and T4Fx doesn't run on it.

    All that said, I have a set of addons I long since settled on and my profiles are the same across all the PowerPC Macs I use. As dissapointing as this news is, it's not now going to affect me.

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