by Martin Brinkmann on November 29, 2018 in Firefox – 21 comments
We knew that the day would come on which Mozilla would remove all classic extensions, Mozilla calls them legacy, from the organization’s AMO website.
Legacy extensions are not compatible with recent versions of the Firefox web browser.
The website returns “page not found” errors for any legacy extension that you might still have a link for; search has been updated already to return only those extensions compatible with recent versions of the Firefox web browser.
Mozilla switched to a new extensions system in Firefox 57 which it released to the stable channel in 2017; only new extensions, called WebExtensions, are supported in recent versions of Firefox.
Firefox ESR, the Extended Support Release, was the last version of the Firefox web browser that supported legacy extensions. The Firefox 62 updates, released in September 2018, moved Firefox ESR installations from the legacy extension supporting 52.x version to the WebExtensions exclusive 60.x version.
Mozilla planned to remove legacy extensions in October initially but October passed without action. Mozilla wanted to remove legacy add-ons from the frontend Store only so that they would not appear in Search or listings anymore. The extensions would still be available in the backend so that developers could update the listings and publish new (WebExtensions) versions of extensions that were removed from Mozilla AMO.
No version of Firefox that is officially supported supports legacy extensions anymore. Browsers based on Firefox code, e.g. Pale Moon or Waterfox, support legacy extensions and will continue to do so at least for the foreseeable future.
Those users may use project-specific extension repositories, if they exist, or an add-on like Classic Add-ons Archive.
Closing Words
It makes sense from a usability point of view to hide or remove extensions that Firefox users can’t install anymore in any supported version of the browser. It is still a sad day to see that many extensions, many excellent, removed from the Internet.
While you may be able to use the Wayback Machine, the classic Add-ons archive, and other preservation services to look them up, it would have been a nice gesture if Mozilla would have created a read-only archive of legacy extensions on its site that would be separate from the actual extensions Store.
I have to comb through all Firefox extension reviews of the past 15 years or so to remove any link or even the review from this site. Our list of the best Firefox extensions will shrink to a third of its current size once I’m done with it.
Now You: What is your take on the removal?