[pcwalton]

> What Firefox can do, your add-on can do, and a lot of more things as well. You can customize Firefox to the point it really is a new browser (with thinks like Tab Mix Plus, Tree tabs, vimperator/pentadactyl)

Those are popular add-ons. See the post: "Over the coming year, we will seek feedback from the development community, and will continue to develop and extend the WebExtension API to support as much of the functionality needed by the most popular Firefox extensions as possible."

> What Firefox can do, your add-on can do, and a lot of more things as well

XPCOM has never exposed everything, and in fact has steadily reduced its scope since "de-COMtamination" began a decade ago.

[tn123]

Yeah, and the not-so-popular add-ons can screw themselves, I guess. Your add-on only has 10.000 users? 200 users? uhhh... Sorry, priorities.

Then again, actually look at the vimperator or pentadactyl code... That code interacts and/or hooks a ton of stuff. Designing and implementing APIs just to support that will require a lot of time. And that is just one add-on.

Furthermore, do you really believe that add-ons like vimperator or Tab Mix Plus or Stylish or SqliteManager would have been created if there was no "open API"? I don't think so.

Also, did you know that a lot of the Chrome extension API was created after directly soliciting feedback from Firefox add-on developers? Yet, a ton of add-ons still couldn't or just weren't supported in the Chrome API. And added to that, the Chrome API kinda stagnated after that.

[nextos]

This is really sad. I cannot surf the web without vimperator/pentadactyl now. It's so useful. I have quick keybindings for switching to an ssh tunnel, or doing site specific web searches, etc.

I don't see anyone developing a vim/emacs-like browser from scratch. Many projects like uzbl or luakit failed. It takes a lot of manpower. Doing things on top of Firefox made it relatively easy, not a heroic effort.

[brighteyes]

Maybe the Chrome API stagnated, but that doesn't mean the same will happen here. The stated goals already include addons impossible in Chrome's API.

[the8472]

But that still means you have to ask the gatekeeper first to please make an API available for what you have in mind. And the gatekeeper might say "no". Or say "sounds nice, but our backlog is thiiiiiis long".

With the old model nobody had to ask for permission, they could just develop and then mozilla could choose to support their use-case through a less hacky API.

[brighteyes]

It's true that the new model will be more limited. But you can't deny the old model had downsides. That's why Firefox is moving away from it, and why no other browser uses the old model.

It might be interesting for someone to make a browser that is easily extensible in every way. That probably wouldn't become a mainstream browser, so it wouldn't compete for market share with chrome, firefox, edge, and safari. But it could be fun for power users.

[simonster]

Mozilla and later Firefox were browsers that were easily extensible in every way. Given experience with the XUL/XPCOM/JS stack, you can still pretty much do anything you want without too much difficulty. However, three things have happened since then:

1) No one outside of Mozilla adopted XUL/XPCOM/JS as an application platform. There are probably many reasons for this, but the main one, based on my recollection of early Mozilla, was that XUL was too slow and didn't look native, and JS was likewise too slow and not considered to be a real programming language. That has changed significantly since Mozilla's introduction, as both the layout and JS engines have improved substantially, but that was the picture at its introduction. In time, JS was revitalized, but so was HTML. HTML has now achieved some success as an application platform (e.g. Atom and Spotify), but XUL remains basically unused outside of Mozilla.

2) Because no one adopted XUL/XPCOM/JS, Mozilla stopped looking at it as an application platform and started looking at it as a legacy technology that they at one time used to build a browser. As a result, it began to stagnate, and interest in documenting things so that other people outside of Mozilla could use them waned. And because XUL/XPCOM/JS are now niche technologies, no one knows them and there's no value in learning them outside of being able to write Firefox extensions, so Firefox does not seem so easily extensible to outsiders.

3) Chrome happened, and Mozilla saw what Chrome gained by not building a fully extensible platform and wants that for itself. On the flip side, I'm not sure that Mozilla fully recognizes what it currently gains from having an extensible platform.

[mook]

> 1) No one outside of Mozilla adopted XUL/XPCOM/JS as an application platform.

As somebody who worked on things that adopted the platform and shipped commercial products (see Songbird): Mozilla didn't and doesn't want to be a platform. Or rather, they wanted to be a platform when they started, but didn't want to do work like look at bugs that didn't affect Firefox. They did take the smaller patches, but there was never any chance of bigger changes landing. They never got away from the Netscape legacy; there were very few super-reviewers over the years that never worked for Netscape/Mozilla because OMG can't let people you have no control over delay shipping Netscape/Firefox.

The actual developers were all nice and mostly time-constrained. People I interacted with were great. But organizationally, the platform always played second fiddle to the browser.

[the8472]

> But you can't deny the old model had downsides.

Sure, but also upsides. That doesn't mean the change, as announced, is the ideal trade-off.

You could easily add an "you can continue to access all browser internels if you flip this switch" option to let those who are willing to break their browser do so and let everyone else be nannied by mozilla.

> That's why Firefox is moving away from it, and why no other browser uses the old model.

That is a distinguishing factor to many users. Maybe not to the majority, but that majority might also be just as happy with chrome and simply stick with firefox due to inertia, who knows.

[brighteyes]

Of course I agree, it had upsides as well.

But you can't add such a switch - if it's there, malware can access it. A switch might prevent other problems, but not that main one.