[Silhouette]

With respect, that doesn't really matter.

I used to have a useful feature that worked.

Now I don't.

That was the practical result of the change we're talking about for this user, regardless of any theoretical benefits elsewhere or any theoretical ability to provide equivalent functionality within the new architecture.

Other people are welcome to use other browsers, but I was using Firefox, and a big reason I was still using Firefox despite various other changes I didn't particularly want was the range of useful extensions I could choose from.

[jabl]

> I used to have a useful feature that worked.

> Now I don't.

Well, imagine for a moment that you're whoever is in charge of firefox development at mozilla:

- You want to take advantage of modern hardware such as multiple cores, GPU's etc.

- You want to get rid of XUL which is an evolutionary dead end.

- You have an existing extension model which basically allows extensions to more or less freely poke about in the internals of the browser

- You want to improve security for users, both against malicious sites and (to a lesser extent, I suppose, but still) malicious browser extensions.

Now, what would YOU do if the constraint is that you can never ever break existing extensions?

[michaelmrose]

I guess you would lose some of your remaining market share to chrome and wonder how much smaller your revenue is going to be when the yahoo deal expires?

[littlestymaar]

> I guess you would lose some of your remaining market share to chrome

So, you're saying that:

- some people kept using Firefox because it had more powerful extensions than Google Chrome.

- these people are upset because mozilla is breaking the old extensions in favor of a less powerful alternative (still better than Chrome's, that the main point of the OP)

- then people are going to move to Google Chrome which still is the worst browser for extensions

Who reasons this way ? There are legitimate reasons for being upset (my favorite addon disapeared and that makes me sad / I need to rewrite all my addons, depending if you're a user or an addon dev), but I don't think anyone will shoot himself in the foot and use a worse (addon-wise at least) alternative just because mozilla's people are mean !

[michaelmrose]

Most users aren't developers they aren't judging the relative power of extension systems they just are liable to notice useful extensions going away.

Firefox on Linux seems to me to be slower and crappier save for interesting extensions.

Enough so that I've just decided to ditch Firefox even before interesting extensions go south.