Major changes in Firefox will enable it to run Chrome extensions soon

Such problems with the “tight coupling between the browser and its add-ons” created Firefox failures.

Developers always had a hard time writing for Firefox, Mozilla is infamous for using XPCOM and XUL technologies for building user interfaces, which allowed the browser to be written primarily in JavaScript.

The parent company of Firefox, Mozilla is changing the way programmers add extensions to browsers.

Beginning with Firefox 42, developers will also need to have Mozilla review and sign off on extensions before it will deploy them. It also allowed access to numerous browser’s underlying features. This new extension infrastructure is being called WebExtensions API as per Tech Crunch. Developers have known for a while now that it is very hard to write extensions for Firefox as compared to Chrome by Google. Some developers say that moving from XPCOM and XUL toward their new API platform is a death sentence for the company because they’re trying to emulate Google with their extension system.

To ensure third-party extensions provide customization without sacrificing security, performance or exposing users to malware, we will require all extensions to be validated and signed by Mozilla starting in Firefox 41, which will be released on September 22nd 2015.

Mozilla further announced that Electrolysis which uses a separate operating system process to run Web content is almost ready for mainstream usage and will soon become part of the regular Firefox versions.

As Mozilla overhauls the way it treats extensions, many speculate that internal changes represent an effort to compete with other popular web browsers like Chrome.

According to Mozilla, the future of Firefox is bright.

The outcome of these changes are that existing add-ons will have to be re-engineered and some may not make it through the approvals process which will not please users who rely on rejected add-ons.

Overall, this marks a major change in how Firefox will treat add-ons. Some add-ons won’t work with Electrolysis out of the box, so Mozilla is urging developers to test their code to get ready for this switch. In the switchover, it is likely that a large number of older add-ons will simply not be updated, but with a 12 to 18 month timescale for phasing out XPCOM and XUL means there is plenty of time for other developers to come up with alternatives to projects that have been abandoned and will no longer work. That will cause trouble for, as Needham explained, “A major challenge we face is that many Firefox add-ons can not possibly be built using either WebExtensions or the SDK as they now exist”.

The risk for Mozilla, however, is that it’s slowly doing away with numerous features that made its browser unique.