I find myself in a bit of a conundrum. You see, I like to save the critiques that I get of my writing on Scribophile to my hard drive as PDF files. Up until a few days ago, I had a perfectly good Firefox AddOn that allowed me to do just that (Print Pages to PDF). It would save all of the page layout, including text background colors which Scribophile displays for comments and other markups. I have over 33 megabytes of such critiques saved off to more than 100 files. Wonderful critique-saving goodness.
All of that goodness has changed with the release of Firefox 45.
The Print Pages to PDF AddOn has suddenly stopped working. In fact, it disappeared from my list of installed plugins when Firefox finished rebooting after the install. I found it, still listed in the AddOns section of Mozilla’s site, and reinstalled it. No joy. It now does nothing but sit there and stare at you when invoked.
I’ve tried most of the other alternatives available in Firefox. None of them provided the same speed and capabilities. Previously (and again today), I’ve tried programs that allow you to print any file straight to PDF. Again, I found none that does what Print Pages to PDF did.
Before you start talking about “signing” AddOns, the Print Pages to PDF AddOn is signed.
This is not the only plugin that has been affected. I had one called Scrapbook Plus. It, too, disappeared, leaving 112+ megabytes of now useless data sitting in my Google Drive. I’ve since found other various AddOns which users have reported as broken since the release of Firefox 45.
I finally broke down, dug up my old Mozilla login (and migrated to the “new” Firefox login), and found the support e-mail for the AddOn. I am sad to say that he no longer develops the AddOn—according to him, one certain individual at Mozilla had been rejecting his code commits without explanation. As a result, he gave up on development.
I have to question if this is intentional on Firefox/Mozilla’s part. Are they deliberately trying to break AddOns, with the side effect of making important parts of the Internet obsolete? What are doing? I wish I knew.
In the meantime, I’m afraid I’m going to have to bite the proverbial bullet and consider a subscription to Adobe Acrobat. There goes my budget—thank you, Firefox 45.
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