The plan towards offering Adblock Plus for Firefox as a Web Extension
Posted: Sun Apr 23, 2017 4:25 am
https://adblockplus.org/blog/the-plan-t ... -extension
TL;DR: Sometime in autumn this year the current Adblock Plus for Firefox extension is going to be replaced by another, which is more similar to Adblock Plus for Chrome. Brace for impact!
Originally, we hoped to port Adblock Plus for Firefox properly. While using Adblock Plus for Chrome as a starting point would require far less effort, this extension also has much less functionality compared to Adblock Plus for Firefox. Also, when developing for Chrome we had to make many questionable compromises that we hoped to avoid with Firefox.
Unfortunately, this plan didn’t work out. Adblock Plus for Firefox is a large codebase and rewriting it all at once without introducing lots of bugs is unrealistic. The proposed solution for a gradual migration doesn’t work for us, however, due to its asynchronous communication protocols. So we are using this approach to start data migration now, but otherwise we have to cut our losses.
Instead, we are using Adblock Plus for Chrome as a starting point, and improving it to address the functionality gap as much as possible before we release this version for all our Firefox users.
What about extensions like Element Hiding Helper, Customizations and similar?
Sadly, we don’t have the resources to rewrite these extensions. We just released Element Hiding Helper 1.4, and it will most likely remain as the last Element Hiding Helper release. There are plans to integrate some comparable functionality into Adblock Plus, but it’s not clear at this point when and how it will happen.