Your engineers may have a lot of work to do if they want to support Firefox 57

Norton Family | Parental Control
1

Hi KatieQ!

Way back when Firefox 41 was released, the Symantec team wasn't ready in time. Norton Family for Firefox stopped working correctly for more than three months, until the Symantec team updated their browser extension. See here, here, and here.

If your software development engineers don't take major action in time, Norton Family for Firefox will likely stop working again on November 14th of this year.

Norton Family for Firefox is a "legacy" add-on. Around November 14th, Firefox 57 will arrive. It only supports "WebExtensions" add-ons. (Source.)

WebExtensions is both good and bad. It's bad because it might be a lot of work for your engineers to support. But it's good because it will probably allow Norton Family for Firefox and Norton Family for Chrome to share a lot of the same computer software source code in the future. (Source.)

You might want to support WebExtensions even sooner than November 14th. Here's why:

  • Firefox Beta will reach version 57 around September 25th. (Source.) If you want to fully support Firefox Beta users, you must support WebExtensions by then.
  • And it's possible that Norton Family for Firefox might stop working even sooner — maybe even as soon as Firefox 54 is released, around June 13th. See here. So the ideal might be to support WebExtensions by that date.
  • If Symantec needs some functionality which is not yet included in the WebExtensions API, they'll have to ask the Mozilla team to add this functionality. (Source.) Then they'll have to hope that the Mozilla team will add the necessary functionality to Firefox before it's too late. The sooner they file a bug report in the BMO Bugzilla tracker, the better their chances will be.

Adding WebExtensions support to Norton Family may be quite a time-consuming project. Your engineers might want to start within the next few weeks.

WebExtensions don't work at all in Firefox versions below Firefox 48.

I'm using Firefox Nightly 55.0a1 (which is what most of your engineers should also be using), and might be able to test any WebExtension you write before it's released to the public.

May I ask?: Have your engineers already started coding work on a WebExtension port? If so, do they have any estimate regarding when the WebExtension might be ready for release?

Thanks for your time!