Hmm, I wasn't aware of a change.

I don't know of a way to get old extensions back on the Add-ons page, but you could at least find out their names using an old copy of the extensions.json file. The way to get this is a little obscure, but bear with me.

Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either

• "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Troubleshooting Information
• (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
• type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

In the first table on the page, click the "Open Folder" button. This should launch a new window listing various files and folders in Windows Explorer.

Scroll down and find extensions.json, right-click it, and choose Properties.

In the Properties dialog, click the Previous Versions tab. Windows will search restore points for older backups of the file. If it finds any, select the old file and use Copy... to restore it somewhere outside of the Firefox folder, such as Document, Desktop, etc.

Then you can open that file in Firefox, for example, by dragging and dropping it on the Troubleshooting Information page. Firefox should take a moment and then displayed a structured viewer showing the data from the file.

You can use the Find feature (Ctrl+f) to look for

"extension"

(including the quotation marks) to jump to the older extensions.

(Ignore the ones that have the location "app-system-defaults", those are used for Firefox features.)

As for finding replacements, you may need to just look for similar keywords. Or you could mention their names in case a volunteer has a suggestion.

JMJimmy said

Users were told they had until May 2018 before Legacy addons were deleted.

This comment may have been about the Firefox 52 ESR as the last update was going to be 52.8.0esr on May 8 and then later decided to make 52.9.0esr (July 3rd) be the last major version update for 52 ESR. This was due to next ESR being based on Firefox 60.0 and not 59.0

Did you look for 'Unsupported' extensions in the Add-ons manager (about:addons)?

Helpful suggestions but they're just gone.

The way FF57/58 is thrashing my HDD constantly & leaking memory/getting stuck in processes (25% CPU per thread that gets stuck) it's not worth the hassle to wait for fixes/extension/webextension updates to get back to a stable/addon rich environment.

Goodbye Mozilla, it's been a pain in the ass.

JMJimmy said

Helpful suggestions but they're just gone. The way FF57/58 is thrashing my HDD constantly & leaking memory/getting stuck in processes (25% CPU per thread that gets stuck) it's not worth the hassle to wait for fixes/extension/webextension updates to get back to a stable/addon rich environment. Goodbye Mozilla, it's been a pain in the ass.

Yea that really help. If one doesn't take the time to do a diagnosing then help will not come. Your description sounds more like a corrupted or problem install instead. Extension/Addon aren't property of FF and if they fail to update then it behooves on them not FF or Mozilla to fix their problem.

WestEnd said

Yea that really help. If one doesn't take the time to do a diagnosing then help will not come. Your description sounds more like a corrupted or problem install instead. Extension/Addon aren't property of FF and if they fail to update then it behooves on them not FF or Mozilla to fix their problem.

Mozilla eliminated every single one of my previous extensions with the move to FF57. 2 had replacements - Adblock Plus + Element Hiding Helper was replaced with uBlockOrigin and QuickDrag was replaced with the crappy FireDrag addon.

The problems have been exclusively as a result of FF57+ with single threads leaking up to 2.2GB before I have to manually kill them. Processes getting stuck at 25%, kill the tab process reload the page, it would go back to normal until the next random tab decided to do it. Rendering would pause half way through the page, then 10-30 seconds later it would finish. Once RAM hit about 80% usage, due to the impacts of FF57, it would start thrashing the drive - Windows hadn't yet kicked in pagefile thrashing but FF had. FF56 wouldn't exceed 1.5GB typically but between the leaks & extra programs I now need my RAM usage is ~70% higher than it used to be - thanks for that btw.

I found the list of addons on another computer - 14 addons with no viable replacement for the functionality they provided. Why would I want to stick around and diagnose problems Mozilla has created for me when they obliterated 90% of the addons that kept me using Firefox instead of switching?

/Posted from Chrome, which also sucks but at least it's stable

Again Addon issue aren't FF problem that is for the Addon creators to fix and or update but if they don't do that there is nothing FF can do about it. This is about Security and Stability updates going forward.

WestEnd said

Again Addon issue aren't FF problem that is for the Addon creators to fix and or update but if they don't do that there is nothing FF can do about it. This is about Security and Stability updates going forward.

And how do they update their addons when WebExtensions doesn't give them the functionality required? Oh right - they can't.

/Still Posted from Chrome