RIP firefox
For the time being, I'm going to stop building the webext version of uBO, there are too many serious issues now with it. I will resume when things stabilize, it's unclear whether it is expected things will have to change in uBO or whether things will be fixed in webext.
About accessing the dashboard, it's unclear to me whether this is something that will be fixed in WebExtensions[1], the answer from the Firefox dev is ambiguous: bugzilla.mozilla.org
I could create a link to the dashboard, but this would mean downgrading uBO's current behavior: currently, if the dashboard is already opened, uBO will merely just activate the tab. If I have to change this to a plain link, then this means the tab will be reloaded, and any changes not yet committed in the dashboard would be lost. But anyways, this would not solve the document-blocked case, where uBO really need to programmatically load the tab with a specific moz-extensions: URL.
The performance issue is real, I did run some benchmarks a while ago using the page-load-speed tool, and there is definitely an extra overhead incurred with WebExtensions. The webext version of uBO is pretty much exactly the Chromium version of uBO (code is imported as is), and it performs excellently on Chromium. Wherever uBO performs best, I consider this the reference performance, and if one platform suffers performance regression, this has to be addressed by the platform.
I've put (and still do) a lot of work into finding out where things can be improved, and it's discomfiting to see these performance gains being negated on the current webext platform. Hopefully with the ongoing work being done on the webext API, these issues will resolve with time.
- gorhill
forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=14751077#p14751077
