Bookmark Favicon Changer and all of my add-ons were banned.

[sonthakit]

This is a note to tell the my users. I don't have any other way to tell them.

All of my add-on "Bookmark Favicon Changer", "Gmail Watcher", "Hotmail Watcher", "Yahoo Mail Watcher" and "Yandex Mail Watcher" were disabled (banned) by Mozilla. I did not delete them myself.

The reason that they tell me was "I do not upload new version to them" And "I use Mozilla as a link to go to my site".

The reason I don't upload to Mozilla because I am protesting. I need Firefox to be "add-on backward compatibility", not broke my add-on every time when new version of Firefox was released. And I need them to listen to the people, like how much people complain about Australis. (And yes, Australis make my head spin 4 times to fix bugs.)

Is "Banning all of my add-on" make people who use Firefox better?
Is "Banning all of my add-on" make Chrome users turn back to use Firefox?
While Chrome getting more and more advance add-on, Firefox is rapidly losing it.
And the bad news for Mozilla is "All of my add-on have a Chrome version"

Anyway, what you think that I am wrong or Mozilla is wrong is not important.
I am here to help my add-on users. They cannot contact me and my be in desperately finding alternative add-on.
If you need my add-on, please goto
https://sites.google.com/site/sonthakit/

All of my add-ons are completely safe. They were not banned because they were harmful. If you suspected, you can read the source code. Add-on itself is source code. You just download and rename it to zip file. Then extract the zip file and read the source code. You will find that they were absolutely safe.

If you want to contact me, please email to me at (email removed)

Thank
Sonthakit

[edit]email removed. no mail support here but harvesting robots. trolly (moderator)[/edit]

[lithopsian]

I feel for you.

[patrickjdempsey]

Well, you did choose a method of protest that just happens to look identical to a method used by malware distributors who want to circumvent AMO's AV scans and code review. Mozilla does allow off-site hosting of addons, but you still have to upload them to AMO for code review and use a developer verification process. And yes, it's purposefully made difficult to do because again, malware.

And I totally sympathize with you. I've stopped development of my Firefox themes and extensions and have happily moved over to SeaMonkey.

[Trippynet]

I do feel for you. Perhaps Mozilla should have warned you first about this, before taking such action. I agree with Patrick that I do understand the logic behind the decision, but it does seem very heavy-handed to me. Have you contacted them to complain and ask why such action was taken without warning?

[Frank Lion]

The reason I don't upload to Mozilla because I am protesting.

Well, sort of.

Certainly in the case of the Bookmark Favicon Changer extension isn't it a fact that you knew back in Firefox 24 that there was no way that was going to pass Mozilla review, due to the fix you needed to do to get it to work?

That's OK, sometimes we have to take extreme measures to fix stuff, but don't forget most people just accept things at face value. So, it's important, certainly in these forums, that developers give full details and reasons for things.

[jorgev]

I do feel for you. Perhaps Mozilla should have warned you first about this, before taking such action. I agree with Patrick that I do understand the logic behind the decision, but it does seem very heavy-handed to me. Have you contacted them to complain and ask why such action was taken without warning?

We give some slack to developers that point to their websites for the latest version while it awaits review from us, especially at times when reviews are slow. In this case, the developer had the link up for a long time with no indication of wanting to update any of their add-ons. We warned them about this almost a month ago. Since nothing came out of that, we downgraded the add-on. After warning the developer again and getting no positive response, we disabled the listing, recently. All the developer needs to do to enable the listing again is upload a new version.

As far as I see, the main problem here is that the developer disagrees with one of our policies about add-on performance, which is to not allow calls to processNextEvent in the main thread. I don't see how that has anything to do with compatibility, but of course the developer is free to self-host if that works better for them.

[Noitidart]

Come on man, don't be like that. We appreciate your add-ons and want you to not protest. All the changes are made for the better. Using ff addons is a no question totally confident move that you're safe. (unlike others like chrome)

I'll help you with fixing the bugs what do you need help with ? You have great addons man. It would be nice if you were FF only, google steals everything from firefox via money. (ie: the engineers who dev'd it down to addons, guys who make the api's reach out to addon devs off addons to come make it for chrome)

The chrome version of addons is so limited ie in your favicon changer "Unlike Firefox, Chrome do not support right click on bookmark bar. You need to open extension’s options page to change favicon.". In firefox your addon is so beutiful. With Australis you can make some gui tweaks to make it even more beautiful.

Well, you did choose a method of protest that just happens to look identical to a method used by malware distributors who want to circumvent AMO's AV scans and code review.

lol sounds correct and funny at same time



but yea: i know firefox is going through a lot of changes but its for the best its so easily seen. so stick around man. you have over 20k users and over 150 reviews. don't abandon those users. mozillazine will not reach out to more than like 50 of those users maybe.

[Mike_tn]

I've been on Firefox on my PCs for 10 years and love this extension, AdBlock and Firefox in general. However, I just got my first smartphone and it's a Droid, which gets me using Google Chrome Browser on the phone for starters and if I cannot control my bookmark favicons on Firefox...grrrrrrrrrr. Right now the old Favicon extension still works. I want it on Firefox!!

[Cornan]

Seems like some serious silliness going on here.

I've been using Firefox and Waterfox for about five years, and add-ons have been both necessary for how I use my browser... and as a group, extremely unstable.

Over and above add-ons being abandoned, it seems pretty clear that Mozilla makes it hard for add-on developers to keep their software running from release to release.

Firefox features disappear, Firefox add-ons disappear or stop working, leading to a near constantly changing browser experience.

Mozilla, if you want your developers to stay with you and users have an experience that is stable from year to year, perhaps you need to give them a more stable platform on which to develop.

Another add-on that disappeared was "Restore old bookmarks behavior". And then when I select "Edit Bookmark", Firefox doesn't even show me the current folder so I could consider moving it. (Support of bookmark folders is extremely week in general - can't search for a folder name, folder not shown in properties or search...)

Why does Mozilla even care if I put the same bookmark in more than one folder?

Mozilla, please make the environment for add-ons more stable for the developers, and stop removing features as much as possible.

[Frank Lion]

Mozilla, please make the environment for add-ons more stable for the developers, and stop removing features as much as possible.

Users, please put your money where your mouth is and actually donate to the addons that you claim you love/couldn't live without. The rise of Android means that the free ride is coming to an end.

[Martii]

Users, please put your money where your mouth is and actually donate to the addons that you claim you love/couldn't live without.

Some interesting info about donations can be found at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donation#Legal_aspects . Since there is no return consideration for this type of income this leads directly into extortion at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion... so not entirely sure that assumption on the change would be wise from any involved party.

I don't see how that has anything to do with compatibility, but of course the developer is free to self-host if that works better for them.

Random quote... perhaps more evidence of the recent 180deg turn here along with stifling creativity.

[Noitidart]

Sad part is the author had no problem uploading to chrome store and god knows what all google is doing with his data. I feel so bad for the poor guy Having more faith in google then someone who is doing him no wrong they are just trying to help him help others but making an update to his addon because calling processNextEvent on the maint thread is killer on performance. i love my addon users and if i knew my addon was impacting their performance so hard i would immediately make an update to the alternative

i do wish firefox had a addon help to help authors that get demotivated fast like these transition as updates happened

[lithopsian]

Sad part is the author had no problem uploading to chrome store and god knows what all google is doing with his data. I feel so bad for the poor guy Having more faith in google then someone who is doing him no wrong they are just trying to help him help others but making an update to his addon because calling processNextEvent on the maint thread is killer on performance. i love my addon users and if i knew my addon was impacting their performance so hard i would immediately make an update to the alternative

i do wish firefox had a addon help to help authors that get demotivated fast like these transition as updates happened

If you'd ever been through the tortuous process that can be involved, then you might have a different feeling on the matter. First you get a generic rejection message that only the most creative person would link to the actual problem. Then if you can ever find out what the real problem is, it isn't at all obvious what alternative might actually be appropriate. There are ways to get feedback short of just randomly upping addon updates, but it isn't always clear what they might be and of course the reviewers (or Jorge) don't necessarily know the ins and outs of every addon. Finally when your massively re-written addon does get accepted, but a couple of buglets come to light, attempts to fix them can easily get rejected again because of some new requirement, leading to unhappy punters who are now stuck with a broken addon instead of one that infringes some requirement that didn't even exist a week earlier. It helps nobody to be that inflexible.

If all that sounds a bit far-fetched then stick around for a year or two. Pretty much every serious addon developer has now run up against this at some stage. If Mozilla's official policy was to discourage the only people that can make Firefox better than other browsers (hint, it isn't Mozilla devs, they can only make Firefox as good as other browsers), essentially for free, then they couldn't do a better job than they already are.

About the only good thing is that most minor addon updates are now reviewed very quickly, presumably because so many addon devs have given up

[patrickjdempsey]

Add to all of that the new signing requirement coming... that ALL Firefox extensions will be required to be signed... another torturous processes added to the already torturous process of getting a review. It will make developing and testing more complicated and almost certainly lead directly to more addons developers leaving. Mozilla has created this requirement in order to fix the problem of disreputable extensions installing themselves. So instead of fixing the hole of allowing extensions to install themselves, they are just going to make it harder for legitimate extensions authors to develop and release their products.

[James]

Mozilla, if you want your developers to stay with you and users have an experience that is stable from year to year, perhaps you need to give them a more stable platform..

Mozilla, please make the environment for add-ons..

Note that mozillaZine is not a part of nor run by mozilla.org and this thread is about Extensions mainly and not also Themes, Plugins, and search engines.