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Comment by charlesism | Hacker News Reader

I don't have sufficient command of the English language to fully express how strongly I disagree with this. I have an extension which I made for Chrome and Firefox. The Chrome version basically consists of a single Javascript file, and a tiny json file with about 15 entries. I spent perhaps an hour to learn the basics from scratch. I don't have space here to describe all the crap I went through to get the same extension working on Firefox - and I was using their easy API. The Firefox extension development process is one of the most confusing, complicated, experiences I've ever had on a computer. Good riddance!

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Nobody said Firefox was easy to develop add-ons for, the GP said "The add-ons are what makes firefox good". The add-on API itself might be arcane and confusing and horrible, but you basically have access to everything. Since the entire browser is written in XUL, add-ons can override and recreate anything at any level.

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).

Well I disagree with him/her there too. What made Firefox good was that it was a lightweight, simple browser, that rendered content exactly the same on three OSes. It's still my main browser, but that's only because I want less Google in my life, and because Safari aspires to be a motion picture instead of a tool. But I haven't considered Firefox actually "good" since probably 2010, or whenever it was that they dumped a bucket of LSD on the interface. Since then it's become a bloated mess.

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.

Tell it to NoScript.

Ha, well you do have a point there.

Have you tried the Jetpack SDK?

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.

> I guess that it's inevitable that Firefox has creeped from a "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.

The mission of the Phoenix browser was to be end user focused. This did involve jettisoning a bunch of complexity that was there for the Mozilla suite or whatever else anybody with commit privileges had thought of, but simplicity wasn't an overriding goal.

That's not exactly how I remember its origin story, nor how I remember it being written about when it rode its first crest of popularity. The last thing people talked about was Firefox being a tool for power users. It was "Tell your friends and relatives to switch to Firefox! Finally MSIE has worthy competition! Look at how uncluttered and easy to use it is!" I don't recall anyone talking about flexibility, or advanced features, unless they were tied into its ability to render webpages without a bunch a glitches.

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."

That sounds pretty compatible with what I wrote. End user and average user mean about the same thing, and my use of "overriding" was pretty intentional.

And convenience comes with lack of power. Some extensions need access to more powerful features to do their thing. It would make more sense to just keep both.

Firefox could support WebExtension, and hence be as easy as Chrome, without deprecating XUL addons.

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