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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

But Mozilla cares about average users, not about making something for power-users only. That seems to be the big conflict here: power users saying "you've lost the masses, so make something for us" while Mozilla's mission is making something that would be good for the masses, and they'd rather fail trying than failing that mission by abandoning it.

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Except this doesn't make sense.

The set of clueless users who would install arbitrary malicious extensions and the set of clueless users who would download and run arbitrary executables is basically the same. Yet if they do the latter, any extention sandboxing is completely and utterly moot. It's the same issue as with mandatory extension signing; requiring signing for extensions while nothing stops someone from downloading an unsigned .exe (which could memory-patch Firefox if it so wished) is absurd.

I think the difference is that they want to try to prevent installers from installing unapproved extensions, which even many of the software that looks more legitimate often does. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/AMO/Policy/Revie...

Yes, and the point of this is what, exactly?

In particular, all the checked by default boxes to install things like the Ask Toolbar.

The only reason Firefox became popular in the first place is because it was adopted by power users, who then evangelized it to their less technical friends and family.

When Firefox is no longer an attractive option for power users, the only thing it will have going for it is ideology. And that will not be enough to compete.

The power users are saying, Firefox became successful by being powerful. When it ceases to be powerful, it will cease to be successful. People will just use Chrome.

Most average users have already switched to Chrome. Even slightly above average users are going to lose from the switch to WebExtensions.

I do not consider myself a power user of Firefox, but the two extensions I use (DownThemAll and tab groups) are not going to be ported.

But when they roll out their Servo Renderer late this year everyone will be singing a different tune. Firefox is already faster then Chrome with the Electrolysis update, but Servo is rendering completely on the GPU. I just tested the the dev build of Servo and it's so fast it almost kicked my dick off!

Servo has been in Dev for 5 years, so if google isn't working on something to compete with that, Firefox is going to completely dominate the web for years.

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