30 July 2017

Compatibility with Firefox 57

Many users have been wondering about plans to make the AE Creations extensions compatible with Firefox 57, which is scheduled for release in November 2017, and is expected to remove all support for legacy extensions.  Clippings, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs are all legacy extensions, and would need to be completely rewritten as WebExtensions to be compatible with Firefox 57 and future releases of Firefox afterwards.

After spending the last few months studying developer documentation, developing prototypes and understanding the capabilities and limitations of WebExtensions, I have enough information to announce plans for compatibility with Firefox 57.

Clippings

Clippings will be completely rewritten as a WebExtension.  The legacy extension will continue to be supported for Thunderbird, which is not switching over to WebExtensions at this time.

Clippings will be subjected to the limitations of WebExtensions, in that many existing features will no longer be available.  Examples are color-coded labels on clippings, ability to choose data source location, backing up and restoring the data source, and exporting clippings to HTML.

For current users of Clippings, there will be a migration step that everyone will have to perform when upgrading to the WebExtension-compatible version of Clippings.  A final legacy version of Clippings will be released in advance of Firefox 57 to make it possible to perform this migration; more information on this is coming soon.


Panic Button

Panic Button will be completely rewritten as a WebExtension.  Like Clippings, it will be subjected to the limitations of WebExtensions; as a result, some features in Panic Button 3.x will no longer be available in the WebExtension-compatible version of Panic Button. Examples include the "Hide All Windows" action, custom toolbar button icons (but the 20 predefined toolbar button icons will still be available to choose from), and changing the shortcut key for invoking the Panic Button action.


Send Tab URLs

Send Tab URLs is the least-used extension from AE Creations, with 5,786 average daily users between July 2016 and July 2017, compared to 8,354 for Panic Button and 35,962 for Clippings.  I've decided to discontinue development of Send Tab URLs, and focus on Clippings and Panic Button.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Many thanks for your job! Waiting Clippings as soon, as possible. It`s no alt) You`re the best, man!

MTNK said...

Thanks for your great work!
Eagerly waiting for upgrade to FFX 57.

FenixSEO said...


Hi guys,
Thank you so much for this wonderful article really!
If someone want to know more about the Firefox extension I think this is the right place for you!

adam said...

I use "SendTabsURL" almost daily. Do you know of any other add-ons that replicate it's functionality?

Unknown said...

Seems that you have the hard data saying that Send Tab URLs is the least-used extension, but, for me, it's the only one from AE Creations that I use (never even heard of Clippings or Panic Button). I run Send Tab URLs often on many machines...even published an article about it that may interest you..."How to save the names and URLs of open Firefox tabs in a plain text file":

https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/17495/

Of course, I'm extremely disappointed that you are discontinuing it. But I thank you for the more-than-a-year that I had with it, and for providing such an excellent tool at no cost. That said, I'd be happy to pay for it, and I suspect that many of your 5,000+ daily users would be, too. I urge you to reconsider your decision to discontinue it and, instead, rewrite it as a WebExtension for Firefox 57, perhaps even charging a fair price for it. Thanks, Joe