If you’re a Mozilla Firefox fan you’re in for quite a rude awakening when Mozilla practically overhauls the browser from the ground up come December.
Mozilla has announced that it will be adopting a new extension API, which will allow Google Chrome and Opera extensions to run within the Firefox browser. Moreover, this also means that the old-style extensions we’ve come to know and love will fall by the wayside, unless they’re recompiled.
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It’s particularly sad news for those who can’t afford to rewrite entire extensions.
Other changes include Mozilla Firefox‘s move to a more Chrome-like multi-process makeup, which Mozilla’s calling “Electrolysis.” Each tab will effectively be a new Firefox instance in Microsoft Windows’ Task Manager, which will bring about a certain degree of stability to the browser, but possibly slow it down.
Read more: Firefox OS first impressions: no Android killer, yet
We’ve seen Chrome often devour vast allocations of RAM as a multi-process browser, so Firefox could very well suffer the same fate.
Of course, “fate” isn’t something Mozilla’s thinking about at all here.
“The strategy announced here necessarily involves a lot of trade-offs,” explained Mozilla’s Kev Needham.
“Developers who already support Chrome extensions will benefit since they will have one codebase to support instead of two. Developers of Firefox-only add-ons will have to make changes. Those changes may require considerable development effort up-front, but we feel the end result will be worth that effort for both Firefox’s users and developers.”
From Firefox 41, the changes will be opt-in thanks to the Firefox browsers’ three different browser development cycles. These changes should be instituted as early as Firefox 43 Stable, due out in December 2015.
Feature image: Kārlis Dambrāns via Flickr
