And getting rid of the entire firefox add-ons community is just insane. The add-ons are what makes firefox good. It's why people use Firefox. I guess if they just want us to use Chrome this series of changes will work great.
New, simpler addon APIs are fine, but not when they replace more powerful ones.
I guess that it's inevitable that Firefox has creeped from a "power user browser" to a dumbed-down maintstream one. I guess it's time to start looking for a new power-user browser.
Think about that statement in the context of Firefox's history. It's totally backwards. Firefox was not supposed to be a power user's browser. That was Netscape. Firefox was supposed to be a simple browser. And once upon a time, that's exactly what it was.
Here's the introduction they gave it over at boingboing.net:
" Firefox, an Internet Explorer killer, has gone 1.0
By Cory Doctorow at 3:46 am Tue, Nov 9, 2004
Firefox, the finest, most secure Web browser ever created for average-user applications, went 1.0 today. You can download it below, toss out Internet Explorer, and be relatively assured that you computer won't be compromised due to Microsoft's bad design decisions and lax security maintenance."
The end result is that Firefox users have a much wider array of add-ons to use (despite the add-on system being somewhat crazy by today's standards).
If someone wants to add toolbars and skins, etc, I suppose the new API would disappoint. But it's hard for me to relate, because I'm not that adventurous. The ones I really care about, generally AdBlock and privacy extensions, just interact with web content, not chrome. That sort of add-on is just as available on Google Chrome.
Firefox's experience was hamstrung by having to learn XUL and a new and different set of tools and way of doing things. Their approval process and packaging scheme was surprisingly not as streamlined as I would have expected from them either. Chrome's experience is fairly standard and intuitive HTML, JS, and JSON interactions. In most cases it really shouldn't take too long for someone to port or migrate an old Firefox plugin to the new format.
Extensions are probably the least reason why i use Firefox. The few extensions i use are also available in Chrome. Other reasons to use Firefox (at least for me):
- It's free software.
- Uses less RAM than Chrome (when having many tabs open).
- The address bar is awesome; i can always find previous pages i visited from there without having to google them.
- It's backed up by a non-profit organization, instead of an advertisement company.
That's become my default response to Mozilla news. It reminds me a lot of what I started going through maybe 6 years ago or so with GNOME. 'Wait, what?' 'Why?' 'You've got to be kidding me!'
We are implementing a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers.
They're getting rind of those people who are willing to dive deep into the internals do develop something that nobody thought of before (if they did there would be high-level APIs for it).
Seems like there's still a lot of power available, if you really want to dive in.
That's the powerful parts. The high-level APIs are fairly restrictive, quite similar to chrome APIs, maybe even less powerful on their own.
And with enforced signature signing you can't even distribute it to users yourself.
So effectively it will restrict extension-development to a whitelist of APIs. Everything else will be verboten, maybe with varying degrees of enforcement.
It certainly doesn't sounds like an open system to me.
That kind of keyboard permission could be used for keyloggers though, it's not something every extension should get.
And that's with several extensions and many tabs.