Firefox WebExtensions

暂定时间表	7 月 19 日	8 月 22 日	10 月 3 日	11 月 14 日
Firefox 正式版：	Firefox 54	Firefox 55	Firefox 56	Firefox 57
AMO 开发通道	混合型 uBO/webext	uBO/webext
AMO 稳定通道		混合型 uBO/webext	uBO/webext
未解决 bug		1367494 1313401

在稳定版 uBO/webext 发布之前本文会时常更新。

First install

The first time uBO/webext executes, there might be a noticeable delay (a few seconds): this is caused by the fact that uBO/webext will import all the data from legacy storage, into webext storage. This is done only the first time the uBO/webext is executed, after this the import step will be skipped.

If you subsequently remove uBO/webext, this will cause the webext storage to be removed by Firefox, and upon re-installing uBO/webext version, the import code will again kick in.

Note that uBO/webext will still be labelled as "Legacy" in about:addons, because uBO/webext is really a webext-hybrid extension. Once the legacy storage has been imported at first install by the thin legacy wrapper, uBO/webext will fully function as a pure webext extension despite the "Legacy" label.

The legacy storage is left untouched by uBO/webext, so you can always go back to uBO/legacy (stable release) if you do not want to use the webext version in the short term.

Firefox for Android

As per documentation, only with Firefox Mobile 55 (beta) you can access uBO's popup panel.

However it appears there is an issue with installing webext extensions on Firefox for Android 55, the browser thinks the extensions are corrupted -- this does not appear specific to uBO/webext. Consequently, for now it seems it's best to stick to uBO/legacy on Firefox for Android.

Differences with uBO/legacy

• script:contains filters will stop working
  • uBO's own filter lists have long ceased to rely on this filter syntax to solve reported filtering issues.
• cosmetic filters will no longer use the browser's user styles Fixed with f32868766340e2fb8ec689f4b5683a413de847b6
• uBO/webext has limited access to behind-the-scene network requests, unlike uBO/legacy which had full access to all behind-the-scene network requests. For example, you won't be able to see (and block) network requests made by other extensions. Related: "Support moz-extension: urls in MatchPattern".

Tentative schedule

As stated above, the current version of uBO/webext is really a hybrid version. So in this section, let's distinguish the hybrid webext version from the pure webext version: uBO/webext-hybrid vs. uBO/webext.

Stable release of uBO/webext must be available to all users when Firefox 57 is released.

Of course for practical reasons, the stable release of uBO/webext should be available on AMO in advance of Firefox 57 release date.

So I am just going to try this: publish stable release of uBO/webext one release cycle ahead of Firefox 57, i.e. publish stable uBO/webext when Firefox 56 is released.

However, before releasing uBO/webext to stable channel on AMO, I must release uBO/webext-hybrid first, a necessary step for a seamless transition to uBO/webext. Again, it feels reasonable to publish uBO/webext-hybrid one release cycle ahead of Firefox 56, i.e. publish stable uBO/webext-hybrid when Firefox 55 is released.

These are the dates of coming Firefox stable release versions, as per RapidRelease/Calendar:

• Firefox 55: August 8
• Firefox 56: September 26
• Firefox 57: November 14

Ideally this is what should happen:

• August 8 + 2 weeks
  • uBO/webext-hybrid published on AMO's stable channel
  • uBO/webext published on AMO's dev channel
• September 26 + 2 weeks
  • uBO/webext published on AMO's stable channel

However this is theoretical:

• uBO/webext-hybrid on Firefox for Android is not ready yet:
  • Firefox for Android 54: no way to access the popup panel or dashboard.
  • Firefox for Android 55 (beta): "The add-on downloaded from addons.cdn.mozilla.net could not be installed because it appears to be corrupt".
  • Firefox for Android 56 (nightly): works.

Future of uBO/legacy

For all those Firefox and Firefox-based browsers based on Firefox v53 and less, the dev channel of uBO will cease to work, and they will have to install manually the xpi version from the repo here if you want to keep using the dev version of uBO, or install the stable version of uBO on AMO.

As of writing, there is no plan to cease development of uBO/legacy. Hypothetically, this may change in some future if ever it becomes really non-trivial to keep a working the legacy version.

Miscellaneous

Issue #2795 will be a collection of bugzilla.mozilla.org issues which currently affect the uBO/webext specifically.

+Be sure to create backups of your uBO settings, if the transition from uBO/legacy to uBO/webext fails, you can always just restore all your settings from the backup file (see Settings pane in the dashboard for the backup/restore features).