The Flagfox 6.0 update to support Firefox 57 (prior post here) is still slowly being worked on, though it’s going much slower now due to bad luck and timing, as I’ve gotten rather sick. It’s not that serious; I’m not dying, or anything, but I’m coughing horribly, sleeping badly, and am a bit lightheaded in addition to just feeling like crap. (The person I caught this from is still sick, as well, so I don’t know when this will be out of my system.) This is not conducive to programming well, let alone quickly, in an alien API, often having to deal with some really stupid junk that I’ll be reporting to Mozilla via bug reports after all this is done. Again, just to reiterate, I am the only Flagfox developer and this is a hobby project.
Anyway, it’s time for me to post another explanation of a problem caused by a recent stupid Mozilla decision:
If you’re wondering why I hadn’t put up any Firefox 57 support status update message on Flagfox’s page on the Mozilla Add-ons site until today, it’s because doing so is shockingly difficult, especially as of Mozilla’s latest revision of the website. (it’s crap in a variety of ways, but this one is particularly annoying) Previously, there was a “Developer’s Comments” section in addition to the “Add-on Description” section (currently labeled “About this extension”) where I could put updates like this, though at some point they started hiding it by default, which was annoying. Now it’s gone completely. I still seem to have it available to configure in my settings, but it doesn’t actually show on the page, even with all the stupid dead-space below the mostly hidden by default description (again, there’s a lot of dumb in their recent site refresh). My guess is some Mozilla web developer thought it was pointlessly redundant, however it’s most definitely not. Updating the addon description requires editing each and every one of the dozens of Flagfox description translations into many of the various languages supported by Flagfox. Updating the developer’s comments, on the other hand, was simple; there was only English, shown to everyone (if you can’t read it, that’s a problem, but at least it’s there and you can see it, and maybe attempt automatic translation, potentially using Google Translate via the built in Flagfox action…). There is no mass-edit/change/upload feature for Mozilla Add-on’s listing data, though it has of course been requested by many addon developers over many years. (unless there’s some secret way to do it they’ve added at some point and not told anyone about) As a result, the simple logistics of me putting a message on that site that can actually be read by more than a quarter or so of the Flagfox userbase required me to slowly go through the menu of listed translations and delete each description (there isn’t even a delete button; I have to click “edit”, then select all, then hit delete, then save), one by one, until just the English one remains for me to edit and show to all. This is stupid, but sadly, the least stupid thing I’ve had to deal with during this transition to Firefox 57.
Flagfox 