firefox-scripts VS webextensions

For a long time, I've been making use of a MacOS-esque scrollbar I found online. I'm using XiaoXiaoFlood's loader script, and I've made the necessary changes to the files mentioned here to make it able to load .js and .uc.js files again. I've also modified the script a fair bit, though reverted most as it didn't work. Currently, I'm using this one, which has simply commented out the things that rely on Services. Though, even if I add it with something like const Services = globalThis.Services || ChromeUtils.import("resource://gre/modules/Services.jsm").Services; it doesn't make much of a difference. I've also tried using a userChrome.xml file, but that doesn't do much anymore. Was around 72/75 where that stopped working right?

Though for the full value I personally really also need some sort of interface that can show individual page visits in order to answer the question "What other pages did I visit at that point in time?" (sometimes I don't remember the right keywords to find a certain page again, but only some other page I visited during the same browsing session). The built-in history view is only of limited value here, because it always only shows the most-recent visit, so as soon as you visit a page again, it moves to the front of the list again and loses its original place and history context.

As usual, there used to be an add-on for that, which was subsequently broken by the move to webextensions (and even if somebody wanted to rewrite it, the webextension API doesn't cater for its full functionality). Thankfully some kind soul has maintained a version hacked to still work even on a current Firefox (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).

This is what you're looking for.

Heads up though, it doesn't work for most tooltips. For that, I found the only way to change them is to use the above code in an agentsheet (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts, see the "StyloaiX" section)

Bootstrapped extensions are supported (really, xiaoxiaoflood is the only one who maintains any popular ones).

depending on your needs existing extensions may work for you, though the ContentScript based implementations have issues, if that's not enough you can use https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts as it allows you to run the code in the browser UI, unfortunately there's no easy to use extension (and sadly FireGestures require update to work, even with loader injected into Quantum) so you may need to work with the code a bit (or more)

do what exactly? inject code? there are many slightly different approaches, the most reliable seems to be https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts and using an approach like that forks can add extra configs to the UI making users' lives easier

Not in the foreseeable future, but maybe achievable with userChromeJS.

I've edited my comment to also include a link to the Chrome docs, but that FAQ entry also has the link to an issue in the webextensions repository indicating it's a limitation of MV3: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/112

Google outlawing dynamic code in Web Extensions/mv3 is a travesty of high order. There's no place I want to be able to be more alive than my agents. Yet my agents must all be dead. For shame, ye villains.

https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/139

This post definitely was quite a technical explanation. The opening framing, to me, means the world.

The other big change of mv3 that gets no coverage but which is dear to me is that mv3 outlaws any kind of dynamic code. The whole app has to be statically defined. This makes it much easier to know what's running, since an extension can no longer go pull in extra code, but it greatly reduces what you can do as an extension too. Extensions have to have all behaviors predefined. I can't dial home & load my behaviors. Here's the issue, https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/139

For a while it meant that userscripts didn't have any way to run. So Google introduced a new API for user scripting. But those extensions only run in "developer" mode. I'm guessing that means when devtools are open?

I agree a lot with your premise. It sure seems like Google is targeting everyone with these changes, but that better real affordances & escape hatches need to be builtin to not maim the lives of power users. It took a long long time to come up with a userscript solution, and it seems like an awful doesnt-work-for-me workaround (I use userscripts not to dev but to modify everyday experiences). Chrome just hasn't been taking their obligation to user agency seriously.

> the extension APIs are standardised enough that this is actually possible a lot of the time

A bit off topic, but as a co-chair of the WebExtensions Community Group[1] (WECG) I'm a bit touchy about the calling WebExtensions "standardized." A few years back the Browser Extensions Community Group[2] created a spec for WebExtensions, but it never reached a state that we'd normally refer to as a web standard. (Technically W3C community groups can only produce "Reports" and these documents are not on the standards track.[3])

FWIW, I'm very bullish about specifying and (hopefully) standardizing the WebExtensions platform. I'm especially excited about having a good chunk of dedicated time to sit with browser folks at TPAC 2023[4] and try to work out some open questions about where we're going and how we're going to get there.

[1]: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/

While I was trying to find out what Firefox's limits are I came across this interesting issue on the W3C's webextensions repo: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/319

4 days ago the Chromium developers proposed upping the limit for certain types of declarativeNetRequest rules based on data AdGuard provided on real world rule lists.

Manifest v3 is used for Chrome's extensions system. The proposal appears to limit what extensions have access to, and what they can do in Chrome. It is proposed as a W3C standard by Google. It is being tracked at the W3C at https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/44.

Google is not even close to finishing MV3: "On the userScripts API, the proposal has been merged into the WECG but the engineering work has not started yet." https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/f8f430f1904c2a6fa8...

MV2 is sticking around until at least 2024.

Some, but not all, limitations are highlighted in this thread: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/72