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Firefox WebExtensions

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Raymond Hill edited this page Oct 13, 2017 · 67 revisions

Stable release of uBO/webext has been available on AMO since early September 2017. uBO/webext is compatible with Firefox 52 and above. With Firefox 52 specifically, some features in uBO/webext may be disabled.

Read carefully if using uBO/webext

There are many reports of people experiencing issues with some web sites, or images not loading, etc. Turns out many of these are a result of using some legacy extensions along uBO/webext. For instance, Reek's AAK in GreaseMonkey has been causing issues with images not loading.

If you experience such issue, you will have to disable all your legacy extensions and see if this fixes your issue. If so, then you will have to re-enable your legacy extension one by one to find the one(s) causing the problem.

Those legacy extensions can cause multi-process to be disabled in your browser, and apparently when multi-process is disabled, this can cause many cases of page load failure.

Everything is moving to WebExtensions, so it might be just a good time to start giving up on legacy extensions, they are not going to be supported at all in a couple of weeks when Firefox 57 is released.

There are also Firefox issues specific to webext extensions which can cause a web page to load improperly:

Another option is to install uBO 1.13.8 and disable auto-update for it.

Having issues with uBO's cache storage being wiped-out on every restart of the browser? See if http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3034189 helps.

Firefox for Android

As per documentation, only with Firefox Mobile 55 (beta) you can access uBO's popup panel.

However it appears there is an issue with installing webext extensions on Firefox for Android 55, the browser thinks the extensions are corrupted -- this does not appear specific to uBO/webext. Consequently, for now it seems it's best to stick to uBO/legacy on Firefox for Android. Update: this is fixed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1367494.

Differences with uBO/legacy

  • script:contains filters will stop working
    • uBO's own filter lists have long ceased to rely on this filter syntax to solve reported filtering issues.
  • cosmetic filters will no longer use the browser's user styles Fixed with f32868766340e2fb8ec689f4b5683a413de847b6
  • uBO/webext has limited access to behind-the-scene network requests, unlike uBO/legacy which had full access to all behind-the-scene network requests. For example, you won't be able to see (and block) network requests made by other extensions. Related: "Support moz-extension: urls in MatchPattern".

Future of uBO/legacy

For all those Firefox and Firefox-based browsers based on Firefox v52 and less, uBO from https://addons.mozilla.org/ will cease to work, and they will have to install manually the xpi version from the repo here if you want to keep using the dev version of uBO.

As of writing, there is no plan to cease development of uBO/legacy. Hypothetically, this may change in some future if ever it becomes really non-trivial to keep a working the legacy version.

I do expect users of legacy versions of Firefox to test and report any issues with uBO -- I can't afford the time needed to test all those versions.

If you still want to use uBO/legacy, a volunteer created an extension to enable uBO/webext to update automatically: https://github.com/JustOff/ublock0-updater.

Miscellaneous

Issue #2795 will be a collection of bugzilla.mozilla.org issues which currently affect the uBO/webext specifically.

Be sure to create backups of your uBO settings, if the transition from uBO/legacy to uBO/webext fails, you can always just restore all your settings from the backup file (see Settings pane in the dashboard for the backup/restore features).

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