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Some time ago, Mozilla announced WebExtensions as the future of Firefox add-ons. At the time, it was not fully clear to me what this would mean for my add-ons, I was optimistic in that they would at least keep working in some way, but over this past year it became clear that this is not the case.

WebExtensions are great for adding functionality to the browser, and without a doubt are versatile and easy to use. However, manipulation of the browser window's interface and functionality will be extremely limited by definition, and even if it wasn't, the implementation of such abilities is nearly impossible to achieve in WebExtensions.

Four out of five of my add-ons rely heavily on these abilities: FindBar Tweak, Beyond Australis, OmniSidebar and Puzzle Bars. From all of those, probably only FBT's Find All feature could work as a WebExtension; I wrote it following the suggestion of several users at the time, I have never used it myself, I don't think I've clicked that button a single time since; in fact I keep that feature disabled in my main profile and only really use it when someone reports a problem with it.