[piskerpan]

Knowing the history of Firefox, XUL extensions and their demise, this feels more of a limitation.

For those who don't know, Firefox couldn't innovate because any change to the UI broke half the extension ecosystem. This is what happens when you give carte blanche to third party developers on your UI: It's great for the short them.

[cardanome]

I mean it works for both emacs and vim which are even more extensible.

You shouldn't make any UI changes to text editors anyway if you don't plan on pissing off your power users. Never break compatibility.

As for Firefox, well if I could go back to the XUL based UI, I would do so. I don't think the new UI has improved for power users at all it just looks more "modern" which is fashion not progress.

What did Firefox gain from trying to copy Chrome? They are at a negligible market share and are only kept alive by Google money as alibi competition.

So no, that is not a good example. Moving away from XUL extension was not progress for Firefox, it was the beginning of it's decline becoming the rotting corpse of former ideals that it is now.

[piskerpan]

Sorry I don’t think Firefox lost because of extensions. Nobody cared except us. They lost because on Google advertised the living * out of Chrome. Firefox couldn’t compete regardless, it offered an inferior product out of the box.

Again, HN users are not the majority of internet users, which are counted in the billions.