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Comment by recoiledsnake | Hacker News Reader

Just got the notification, but didn't upgrade because a lot of my very useful extensions for HTML dev weren't compatible.

I don't think the new features in 7->8 make up for the lack of my extensions.

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Use this extension to "make" your extensions compatible https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

This is great, thanks for posting it. I manage my passwords with 1Password, and while they're good about pushing updates, I've never seen their Firefox extension marked as compatible when a new version of Firefox is released.

1Password 3.8.7 seems to be compatible with Firefox 8 though. They're getting a lot better at keeping up with Firefox version lately (ever since they introduced Aurora and "maybe" Nightly support)

Why 1Password rather than Firefox Sync?

Probably because 1Password doesn't support just a specific browser and it's also available for tablets and smartphones.

The Sync API is documented, and Mozilla encourages development of outside server and client implementations. Sync is available for tablets and smartphones.

Which would beg the question why would I need an addon to make my current addons compatible with Firefox? Everyone knew that 6 weeks release cycle is going to break addons but they've decided to go with it anyway. I'd expect from Mozilla to make such decision after fixing the potential problems. I've been hearing this will be fixed soon but that date is yet to come.

As of Firefox 4.0, there is an extension api that is both version-less and allows restarting extensions without restarting the browser. Especially with Firefox's new release schedule, more extension developers should probably make the effort to start using it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extensions/Bootstrapped_ext...

Unfortunately, there is little documentation. I have looked into adding this for my extensions, and didn't manage to do it. Same documentation issues I had when I first started to port my extensions for Firefox to Fennec: pieces of documentations here and there, but nothing that clearly explains the differences between the 2 platforms.

That said, their extension framework is by far the most powerful of all browsers.

I disabled addon compatibility checking, and jumped from 7 to nightly (version 10) and was surprised to find all of my extensions still work great (including Firebug).

Mozilla is working towards making this happen automatically, but it seems to be working well already.

I just saw this being discussed today.. watch out for it if you have Firebug installed. There could be a performance regression because debugging is on even if you're not using it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699528

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