[alphapapa]

Frankly, your response is indicative of the problems at Mozilla.

You need to realize that behind every sarcastic, disdainful comment about Mozilla or Firefox is years, often nearly decades, of Firefox usage, contribution, and promotion. When people come to trust and rely upon a tool for getting work done for many, many years, and then the organization responsible for that tool starts changing priorities in ways that negatively effect the tool's usability and usefulness, people react negatively.

And when the organization then gets defensive and offended at people's negative reactions, it creates a self-reinforcing cycle of negativity and not-listening-to-the-other-side.

Mozilla makes a great browser, saving the world from Microsoft and IE. Nearly two decades later, Mozilla starts mucking with the UI, chasing the mythical never-used-the-Internet-before-and-will-always-be-that-way user, forcing unwanted, unrequested features upon all users, etc.

Naturally, people respond negatively. "Why are you doing this, Mozilla? Why are you ruining this great browser? Why are you now chasing numbers and mythical unicorn users instead of pursuing excellence and usefulness like you always have before?"

Then Mozilla employees get defensive and respond with, "What? Why don't you like what we're doing? Why aren't you being nice to us? We're doing this for you! Stop being mean!" And then they say to each other--especially on Bugzilla reports--"Ugh, more comments from the peanut gallery."--or in Mozilla-speak, "advocacy"--"Locking this bug to editbugs-privileged only accounts."

So now we have two sides that are offended by each other and not listening to each other. But the two sides are not equal, for without users, what is the point of Mozilla and its products? Plenty of well-made software has fallen into obscurity over the years when people weren't using it. And without Firefox, what are users left with but poor imitations?

Undoubtedly Chrome has had an impact here, but Mozilla is mistaken to imitate Chrome to recapture its users. Some people leave Firefox for Chrome because they prefer Chrome, or because Chrome is faster (and they don't mind its memory usage). But other people leave Firefox for Chrome because--wait for it--Firefox has stopped being Firefox! They figure, well, if Firefox is going to try to be a poor imitation of Chrome, I might as well just use Chrome.

But what we really want is authentic Firefox, the browser that we started using when IE ruled the world and Phoenix rose from the ashes of Netscape to save us from the Evil Empire. Microsoft isn't the threat to the Internet it used to be, but monoculture will always be a threat, and proprietary, walled-garden, app-store-style software is a growing threat to user freedom and empowerment.

We need Firefox to be Firefox, not Chrome, not Mozilla's experiment of the month, not Mozilla's platform for enacting social change.

I guess the problem is that Mozilla is literally not who it used to be, because the people are different, and they have different ideas. Probably money has something to do with that; a few years of hundred-million-dollar+ deals obviously has an impact. People get used to the money, and when it comes down to it, they'll do whatever they think it takes to keep the money flowing, even if it means undoing what made them successful.

But the root problem is the Rug Problem: people react negatively when the rug is yanked out from under them without their consent. Mozilla should recognize this and not react defensively.

Instead, Mozilla should interpret every such comment as evidence of bugs in the Mozilla organization, people, processes, and priorities. When "customers" are unhappy, smart companies don't get offended and tell off their customers, they figure out why customers are unhappy, and they make them happy again.

As for myself, I'm keeping an eye on Pale Moon, which has made a commitment to stability in API and UI, and to usefulness for its users. I wish Mozilla would make the same commitment to its users and extension developers.

[callahad]

My response was solely critiquing an exchange which ended up looking like:

    if (requestFeature(x)) { complain(); } else { complain(); }

That flow doesn't get anyone to a better place, but there are tons of ways to refactor it into productive dialogue. Let's do more of that.

I promise you that I legitimately do hear the frustrations felt by long-time power users of Firefox. I don't agree with all of them, but I do my best to represent them internally nonetheless. To your concerns regarding stable APIs: that's exactly what WebExtensions are designed to address: decoupling add-on APIs from implementation details so that we can keep add-ons working, even as we refactor Firefox to be faster, more stable, and more efficient.

[alphapapa]

> To your concerns regarding stable APIs: that's exactly what WebExtensions are designed to address: decoupling add-on APIs from implementation details so that we can keep add-ons working, even as we refactor Firefox to be faster, more stable, and more efficient.

Ok, that sounds nice, but is this yet another extension API that does it Chrome-style, restricting extensions to a solitary button in a solitary toolbar, rather than giving them the freedom to truly extend the browser and its UI? Because if I wanted handicapped extension APIs, I'd just use Chrome.

And besides, isn't that what Jetpack was supposed to be? How long until the next extension API that will get it right This Time?

One of the foundational pillars of Firefox is its powerful extension API, however messy and difficult-to-refactor it may be. Take that away, and it's just another browser, no better than Chrome.

[callahad]

> How long until the next extension API that will get it right This Time?

WebExtensions are likely to be The One True API. Chrome, Opera, Edge, and Firefox all support them, and we're all working on standardizing them at the W3C: https://www.w3.org/community/browserext/

> If I wanted handicapped extension APIs, I'd just use Chrome.

Though we're trying to avoid reinventing wheels, we're not limiting ourselves to Chrome's APIs. For example, https://bugzil.la/1242871 extends Chrome's webRequest API to provide additional metadata needed by the NoScript and RequestPolicy add-ons. The initial development is focused on Chrome parity, since that covers most add-ons, but once we get there you'll see more of an emphasis on landing APIs that are needed by existing, more powerful Firefox add-ons.

If you're an add-on developer yourself and are concerned about APIs you need, please fill out this survey so we have a record of it: https://docs.google.com/a/mozilla.com/forms/d/1PtRXcs9UHVMjg...

[alphapapa]

> If you're an add-on developer yourself and are concerned about APIs you need

I'm actually not, and one reason is because I've seen over the years how extension authors have to keep up with the churn constantly breaking things, and that's not a pool I want to wade into. I'm amazed that, e.g. the Pentadactyl authors have the time and patience to do so.

So, if this new API stabilizes things long-term, that's fantastic. I would love to have extensions that never break again.

But forgive me for being skeptical, because with the CADT-style development models ruling the world nowadays, what usually happens is, the old API is deprecated and dumped before the new one has feature parity, leaving authors and users hanging. And with Mozilla's trend of imitating Chrome, this seems even more likely.

I can hear the cries now of, "The old API is too hard to maintain, so we're removing it in Firefox 72. We hope to reach approximate feature parity by Firefox 84, but we do not plan to reimplement all features in the new API. Regrettably, this will prevent some addons from being ported to the new API," with the implied, "But 'no one' [compared to the number of users on the Internet] was using those addons anyway, so who cares." And cue me switching browsers.

Please prove me wrong. :)

[CelticSuperhero]

That is the point.

Is it so surprising that power users are the most vocal one's and do complain if one of their pet features is going to be axed? (And many of our pet features have disappeared since that Chrome UI annoyance called Australis has ruined a big part of Firefox)

And instead that Mozilla goes back a step towards power users and brings our features back what do we get instead? Features which more simple minded users do want and prefer.

It is the deconstruction of Firefox as geek base what we hate and that is the reason we are so vocal about it.

The moment where Mozilla makes a significant turn back to their roots, the moment will be the one where complaints are going to stop or at least where people can believe in Firefox again.. a little bit.