For the past week I’ve been damn near incapacitated by whatever bacteria took up residence in my body, though the antibiotics seem to have worked. I haven’t been stuck in the bed all the time, but I have been so out-of-it that I had trouble reading something I’d code ten minutes earlier. Anyway, long story short, with Mozilla’s Firefox 57 update, I thought it’d take dozens of hours to rewrite things to get Flagfox working under it, but it’s taking hundreds of hours, and that’s before the lightheadedness. I gauged my estimate based on the last time I rewrote things for a major overhaul on their part (no, not addon SDK; I was able to skip that; the one before that), and wow, we’re not on the same scale here. I’ll get something released eventually, but the illness delay hurt in more ways than one. That’s not why I decided to post something here again, nor why I’m leaving comments on this time.
I have a question: When did Mozilla get this bad? I know when they made the decision to do all of this, but what I’m talking about specifically is what I just discovered today. Apparently, if you’ve got Firefox 57 updated on your primary profile with legacy addons installed (something I obviously avoided), not only are all the “legacy” addons hidden in a separate new menu in the addon manager, but they’ve only got two buttons shown for them: “Remove” and “Find a Replacement”. Click on that rather insulting button, and it takes you directly to what seems to be a human-chosen replacement (seems to look up just by legacy addon’s ID). The designated replacement for Flagfox seems to be Country Flag +, which shows a flag for the given IP with a tooltip with basic info, and when you click on it it shows a big flag and a popup with that basic info shown more pretty, and a vague (especially if in US) Google Map for the location. Oh, and when it points at Oklahoma for every website in the US, it gives you latitude and longitude for the useless map marker. The one thing you can actually do with this thing is click a little button in the lower left of the popup to do a lookup with Alexa for the site info. That’s it. This is a toy; somebody at Mozilla was told to just find a replacement for all addons that didn’t jump through all of their hoops fast enough, and this is what they came up with. Granted, it’s better than picking an alternative that tracks/sends all your browsing data somewhere or asks to download binaries to work better (those were actual existing options). Instead, it’s the toy that shows a flag and a bigger flag, yet somehow is 5 times the file size of Flagfox even though I also managed to include full translations into 36 other languages, including every name of every country on the planet (79 people have worked on these translations, over the years).
I got an email or two reaching out from Mozilla on the topic of porting, months ago and again last month, but I got no indication of the scale of things here. I knew this was going to be annoying and piss a lot of people off, but I didn’t suspect every person I talk to to say they hate Firefox 57, before talking about addons. I didn’t expect Mozilla to change their addons site to hide reviews by default, or decide all I’ve been doing for 10 years was making a thing to show a pretty picture of a flag and promote that as my replacement like I’ve died.
I used to be an active triager for Firefox bugs on Mozilla’s Bugzilla. The stats is has for me are: 470 bugs filed, 3084 bugs commented on, 4011 bugs poked (no clue what this specifically means), and 1079 bugs where I changed the status to resolved (fixed, verified, invalid, but for some reason the stat doesn’t show duplicate marking). There was a time when I was actively investigating crash reports as they were reported to Bugzilla, and I even wrote an entire addon to help with things by trying to auto-diagnose crash reports that got a few thousand users (but that addon has long since been obsolete and discontinued). I haven’t gotten involved with bugs or support requests in a few years now, so I’ve been apparently out of the loop when it comes to the way Mozilla deals with people. I knew enough that when I filed a bug about the bug in Firefox that was causing script cache problems breaking Flagfox 5.x (and probably some other addons) in the months prior to Firefox 57, I wasn’t completely astounded when they immediately WONTFIXed it, but I was take-aback by the lack of even trying to investigate if maybe it affected them and not just addons that were going to be unsupported by Firefox soon.
So, here we are. We’ve gone from Mozilla accepting my latest update to Flagfox 5.2.x on November 9, and then 5 days later on November 14, Firefox 57 gets released and I’m dead to them. Look, I’m not going to act like the fact that I haven’t been able to get a compatible version out yet is all their fault, but I didn’t realize they’d end up being, well, mean about it. Maybe from their perspective the “real” deadline to rewrite was passed once they started putting that “legacy” label on things everywhere (don’t even remember when I first noticed that). I decided to pick a month to spend free time rewriting things, but apparently it was implicit that I should’ve started 3 months prior and devoted every waking hour to not only rewriting things from scratch, but fixing Mozilla’s problems in these APIs.
I knew Mozilla had some severe problems high up ever since the Eich CEO fiasco that everyone other than them could see coming a mile away, and I know that some of the stuff that they do that ticks people off is due to sheer lack of resources and personnel to work on things, but I feel like something changed somewhere that I just didn’t see. I don’t ask rhetorical questions; does anyone know what changed and when that got them to this point? Or, were they always on this path and just never had a way to step out of it? They somehow managed to release the new Firefox Quantum to everyone and the first thing my mother said when she got the update is that she hated it, as it got rid of her bookmarks button and search bar, and changed her homepage to that new tab page that has ads in it, and has those weird spaces in the toolbar around the address bar (who thought that was a good idea? probably someone with a way bigger screen resolution). She basically thought it was unusable until I got to it to change the settings to something she could live with. I’m accustomed to clusterfucks in the tech world, but I’m only now beginning to realize how badly things have gotten.
Bottom line of this rambling: I used to think I was part of the Mozilla community. I have a Firefox logo mug I won for a guesstimate on when Bugzilla would hit some bug number milestone (I think the contest was discontinued after it hit a million). I’ve got multiple Firefox T-shirts that I have never worn that Mozilla kept sending me for various reasons. However, at this point, I now consider myself just a person who writes an addon that will hopefully work in Firefox again in the not-too-distant future. I’m just another user of Firefox and Thunderbird, and I’m apparently just as confused as everyone else as to what happened.
Flagfox 