Enhanced Steam author waves goodbye to Firefox

Enhanced Steam is a popular browser extension that improves and adds features to the steampowered website, home of the Steam gaming platform on the Internet. Ghacks reviewed the Firefox version of Enhanced Steam back in 2013  and found it to be an excellent tool for Steam users.

Among the features it adds are DRM badges so that you know when games use extra DRM, a pricing history for games, an empty cart button or better DLC selection through the use of checkboxes.

The extension has been available for Firefox and Chrome, with Chrome users making up 90% of the extension's user base.

The author of the extension just announced on Steam that he decided to stop developing the add-on for the Firefox web browser citing upcoming changes as the reason for the decision.

The major change that he refers to is add-on signing which Mozilla announced a while ago. It requires all add-on authors to submit a version of their extension to the Firefox web browser so that it can be signed.

The idea behind the feature is to make Firefox more secure by blocking unsigned extension installations on third-party websites, a major source of malicious extensions installed by Firefox users.

According to the author, this adds more workload to the time and work consuming process of getting an add-on or an update of it listed in Mozilla's add-on store on the official website. While add-on signing is automatic provided the add-on author has created a store account already, Mozilla's add-on verification process as a whole seems to be more of a problem to the author.

One of the biggest issues I had with Mozilla's approval process was that in addition to the amount of time it would take, they were always requiring increasingly ridiculous stipulations on the extension for it to pass.

He cites several incidents where add-on updates were not accepted because of how something was handled by the extension but were suddenly accepted in later updates.

Note: Enhanced Steam is not listed in Mozilla's store right now, probably because of the issues the author experienced in the past. It would obviously take long to get the extension listed in the store again.

New versions of Enhanced Steam won't be released for the Firefox browser anymore. While the current version will remain available for download on the developer website, it won't be updated anymore and cannot be installed in Firefox Stable or Beta once add-on signing lands in those versions (there won't be an override, Nightly and Aurora versions are not affected).

The developer is working on a standalone client for the extension which Firefox users may want to check out if they want to keep access to the functionality of the extension.

Closing Words

It is likely that we will read about additional developers stopping extension development for Firefox if their add-ons are not already listed in store.