this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Yay another extesion that is already broken on the current gnome version...
At this point why even advertise extension support
I installed the Fedora 39 beta and every extension I had was already updated and compatible. Not many people are even on Gnome 45 yet.
They've improved and standardised the extension system, making it easier for devs. Not sure why that bothers you so much.
Let me give you another analogy: You see an article about a Firefox extension, click in but it is also not supported.
Now lets say you are already annoyed your adblocker also doesn't work because Mozilla breaks extensions every few months.
Then someone commented:
I don't use adblock. (Or even the extension advertised) Most people use Chrome anyway. Not sure why that bothers you so much.
The thing is, Firefox has an extension API. It's a proper thing that they maintain, and make guarantees about. GNOME intentionally doesn't have an API, because if they did, the things extensions could do would be limited to what those APIs expose. Instead, they let extensions do whatever they want, patching the code of the shell directly. This comes at the cost of extensions needing to be updated for new shell versions, but it lets extensions be extremely powerful.
In fact, Firefox had this issue a few years back. They switched from a GNOME like system to the WebExtensions API, which is more limited and broke basically every extension if they didn't update. There are still some add-ons that can't be replicated because they need functionality the API doesn't expose.