The new extension framework for Firefox was necessary to get rid of legacy codebase and its limitations are there to prevent malicious addon behavior and other security issues.

All of the undinspensable addons (uBlock Origin, uMatrix, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, Privacy Badger...) have survived the framework change. Very few interesting addons have stayed legacy-only.

Change isn't always bad. Sometimes you need to start from scratch.

@Siphonay in Waterfox's defence "unindispensable" is in the eye of the beholder. 🙂

Also, this is exactly what makes free software awesome. When a project goes in a direction not all of its users agree with, they have the opportunity to fork.

Unfortunately in Firefox's case most of its frustrated users switched to Chrome instead. Now it has 80% desktop browser share. 🤦‍♂️

@bobstechsite Chrome has had such numbers for a long time and Firefox's market share has actually bumped up a little bit since the release of Firefox Quantum