[toyg]

> Mozilla is bonkers, doing this.

No they are not. Anyone who has done (or tried to do) any cross-browser extension development will attest that working with Chrome-style apis is so much faster than trying to make sense of XUL. Look at how many new extensions start life as Chrome-only these days. Chrome did to Firefox what Firefox did to IE - which had an extension mechanism that required C++ (!). Ease of development always wins, because humans are lazy. Mozilla tried for years (and failed) to match that ease of development, and then decided XUL is not a hill worth dying on - especially considering how it also held back a lot of performance-related improvements.

As others have said, it will hurt but it's worth doing if the browser is to survive. It would have probably come sooner had it not been for the FFOS distraction. Once the ecosystem is fully rebased on webextensions, then Mozilla can try an embrace-and-extinguish play if they really want to.