I DON'T MEAN TO RANT BUT, I'm a little ticked off at Norton's suggestion the Mozilla Developers dropped this change on them suddenly. Norton was supposedly notified early in May, 2015 of the upcoming transition affecting the Norton Toolbar. From May, 5 2015 to Sep, 28 2015, about 145 days. Looks like they had a little over 4 months to adapt to the change in technology used in FF Addon's.
I myself have decided to keep using Firefox Version 40 until Norton finally gets the new Toolbar completed. I do not want to use IE, Chrome, Opera, Safari or any other browser's I failed to unmentioned. Here we are on Oct, 31 2015 and still no revamped Norton Toolbar.
My thinking, the more I read the forums and see people's comments about leaving Firefox for some other browser, seems to me it may have been a ruse to distract Firefox users away to these other browsers. Can not think of a reason for this and I sure hope this wasn't the reason for the delay in implementing a change earlier.
Not entirely sure this is the case but some disturbing facts should be examined.
I really DO NOT want to point fingers at Mozilla or Norton.
I just want the Norton Toolbar back.
Mozilla: What I find from Mozilla searches.
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(The date is in the URL)
Quoted from: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/05/04/dropping-support-for-binary-components/
"Notice of intent to remove the API XPCOM support from Firefox beginning in the FF 40 version releases. Was initially intended for FF version 40 but was changed to FF version 41."
Benjamin Smedberg May 4
With the landing of bug 1159737, I have removed support for binary XPCOM
components in extensions. This is planned to ride the Firefox 40 train.
This change is necessary because we no longer expose or intend to expose
a binary-stable API to XPCOM. Most addons have already moved away from
binary XPCOM components, but those that haven't are a source of
instability around Firefox releases.
Extension authors that need to use native binaries are encouraged to do
so using the addon SDK "system/child_process" pipe mechanism:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Low-Level_APIs/system_child_process
If this is not sufficient, JS-ctypes may be an alternative mechanism to
use shared libraries, but this API is much more fragile and it's easy to
write unsafe code.
I will be updating MDN documentation and removing or archiving old
documentation about binary XPCOM components in the next few weeks.
--BDS
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Norton's: What I find from Norton searches.
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Quoted from: https://community.norton.com/en/blogs/product-update-announcements/firefox-41-and-norton-toolbar-compatibility
""Some of you may wonder why Norton cannot provide zero-day support as it used to. Up to this point, Norton has used a Mozilla technology called ‘binary XPCOM’, to establish secure communication between the Norton product and Norton’s extension for Firefox. We chose this originally because it was the best way to provide the most secure communication and at the same time offer the best user experience for customers. Since this Mozilla technology will not be available anymore, we have to make significant changes to our design and implementation to provide the current functionality with equal level of security. It is a big effort since there are many components of our extension that need to be re-written. More updates to come closer to the fix.""
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Thanks for taking the time to read my RANT
Henry