Just thought the following would interest people using the UXP forks:
It is the personal goal of upstream developer M.A.T. (but also backed-up by Moonchild himself) to completely debilitate all Firefox-targeting "legacy" extensions from being installable in official UXP browsers like Pale Moon/Basilisk...
Already, unstable Pale Moon 29.0.0a6 official builds come without the buildconfig option "--enable-phoenix-extensions", which means already installed compatible Firefox XUL extensions will be disabled , with no option to re-enable , while "new" ones (e.g. from CAA) can no longer be installed ...
One way to circumvent that artificial block is to manually edit the add-on's install.rdf file to include a Pale Moon specific <em:targetApplication> section... Or, for a more automated/user-friendly procedure, install and use JustOff's MTT:
https://github.com/JustOff/moon-tester-tool/
A confrontation between M.A.T and JustOff has been brewing for some months now (on several levels), let's just say that M.A.T wasn't enthused by the CAA extension nor the recent update of the MTT one ... In a recent post:
What future M.A.T. refers to is tracked in official UXP issue #1659 and work on it has already started:
https://repo.palemoon.org/MoonchildProductions/UXP/commits/branch/xpiprovider-work
I'm not implying, though, that official devs have any ill intent; their view on things is that they should (forcibly) migrate their users from long-deprecated, "insecure", no-longer-maintained Firefox specific legacy extensions (e.g the ones provided by CAA) - despite the fact they are currently working OK - to PM-exclusive format and extensions, forks of the original ones, with current maintainers sourced from the UXP communities (and elsewhere) ... Lofty as it may sound, the net result is yet another wave of plain user inconvenience...
Should we be concerned? I'm not yet sure... I don't know what fate awaits the --enable-phoenix-extensions buildconfig flag; if the supporting code stays put, then we should be OK with regards to Fx XUL add-ons; however, in due course, upstream extensions and their repositories will move to the new format, which we'll have to somehow support too, if we are to make use of (or abuse of, as upstream claim ) ... Is supporting both formats (old: install.rdf, new: install.json) in the core browser a possibility, even? I'm no coder, so can't say myself... But, definitely, this part of the official UXP development is one our maintainer @roytam1 should keep a close eye on...
Best wishes, stay safe