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Comment by NiLSPACE | Hacker News Reader

I see people on Reddit saying they'll leave to Chrome if XUL extensions will no longer work since Chrome would be faster than Firefox, but I don't think they understand that Mozilla is removing XUL extensions so that they can finally make Firefox faster again. And even if this wasn't the case Firefox is still way more customizable than Chrome.

I think that as more and more websites will move away from Java and Silverlight I expect that other companies will be forced to do the same as the customers will keep having less reasons to keep a browser with those plugins supported.

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Yeah, the other side of all of this is that I'd leave Chrome for Firefox if it did drop XUL and get up to par performance/ security / feature-wise. I'm sure many others feel the same.

Yeah, I think our big bet here is that Firefox will achieve better market share by leapfrogging the competition in performance versus remaining insanely customizable despite lower performance.

EDIT: Added "insanely"

I am not the product manager so I don't know for sure but this can go very wrong. Once you disable something and force a user to go somewhere else they will probably not come back. Especially since Chrome and Firefox and to some degree IE are in a race to almost look the same and have no distinguishable features. It used to be that Firefox's selling point were extensions. With that lost, what's the reason for Firefox? I don't think performance matters enough for most users to switch.

It's not like every Firefox extension will be broken. And I'm an ex Firefox user who switched to Chrome for the sandboxing and multiproc architecture. I'll happy go back to Firefox, I'd much rather use a browser by Mozilla over Google.

Maybe in the short term keeping some users is worthwhile but they'll continue to lose them slowly to Chrome, and browsers aren't fighting a short game. Firefox, Chrome, IE, they're not going anywhere - they've been around for a long time with plenty of market share. It makes sense to be forward thinking here.

> It's not like every Firefox extension will be broken

Every Firefox extension will be broken. Only Chrome extensions will be supported.

Hard to say. Clearly there are two camps. While we are indeed forcing an abstraction layer onto extension devs, that does not necessarily mean that we are going to use Chrome as the lowest common denominator with respect to extensibility.

Hopefully we can hit a sweet spot with respect to customization. WebExtensions are a superset of Chrome extensions, and do we have an open process for people to propose new APIs.

Some people are never going to be happy, but hopefully others will step forward and build some cool stuff.

> I see people on Reddit saying they'll leave to [X] if [Y] will no longer work

Every major change ever made in any system brings out those comments. Whether the change is good or bad, successful or not, is not related to the existence of those comments.

Just look through Bugzilla; you can find those comments in (it seems) any change that attracts public attention.

But here you have people (myself included) who use Firefox despite of any performance problems because of specific add-ons.

We all want faster more stable software but if that single feature trumps that for lots of people it seems crazy to just dump it. You can make a car faster and better on gas if you remove almost everything that makes it comfortable too. We all want cars that go faster and use less gas but we also like comfortable seats, storage, and air conditioning.

Thank you!

Remember that Google is an advertising company. Chrome is an ad delivery platform, ultimately. Firefox isn't broken because it isn't like Chrome.

That's the boat I'm in.

Firefox's literal only advantage over Chrome is its extensibility, and that baby is being thrown out with the XUL bathwater. It's slower than Chrome, it's less secure than Chrome, and since Mozilla seems hellbent on turning Firefox into Chrome, I might as well just bite the bullet, use Chrome and save myself the headache.

The only other advantages I can see are philosophical, rather than practical, but given their history of shoving irrelevant shit into the default install and ignoring any and all user pushback to their decisions (the "we're forcing addon signing" comment section was unanimously negative), I'm not sure that's worth much either. If I want to use a browser where my input on features and so forth is discarded, again, I might as well use Chrome and gain some speed and security while I'm at it.

I ask this question in complete sincerity: Why would I want to use Firefox?

We're not breaking legacy add-ons for shits and giggles, or in some misguided attempt at "turning Firefox into Chrome." We're breaking them so we can finally land the architectural changes necessary to make Firefox competitive on speed and security, and we're committed to remaining more extensible than other mainstream browsers. The Containers API that landed in Firefox 53 this week is a great example of that.

I'm not going to shed a tear over Classic Theme Restorer or DownThemAll if their loss means a faster, more secure, and still more extensible browser than Chrome.

Mozilla has been committed to a lot of things. "The only browser built for people". "Freedom is personal".

Apparently, "people first" and "freedom" means "You can only install what we okay" (signing crap).

It also means "we will load the browser with utterly irrelevant add-ons whether or not you want them".

Apparently, "individuals can shape their own experience" means "we will outright prevent you from visiting sites configured a certain way" (see the dupe SSL cert handling bug that's been languishing for nearly a decade)

It also means "all that stuff you spent a decade getting used to gets thrown out, so sorry".

Mozilla, for all their talk of high-minded user-first ideals, sure doesn't treat their users like their time is valuable or their tasks are important. Perhaps I'd find this merely odious, rather than outright offensive if your company didn't continually talk like they wanted to be different and then behave in literally the opposite way.

Call this post gratuitously negative if you want to, but every time I give Firefox another try, I find another slap in the face. At least I know where I stand with Chrome.

I don't think it's logically possible to make Firefox as extensible as it is, and also "secure" as Chrome.

Chrome is crippled in many ways. Extensions are second class citizens, merely along for the ride. They can be removed remotely at Google's whim, and you can't rely on them to run reliably. They also don't have full access to the browser the way Firefox add-ons do.

Among my different profiles, I have profiles to slice and dice the web. I can do a ton of web scraping without having to write any scripts. I can do a ton of cool stuff, and customize Firefox the way I want. Firefox gives me cheatcodes to the web.

Who the hell said extensions had to be sandboxed? That's an overly cautious decision that makes sense for Google. It's a WEAKNESS. It's a COMPROMISE that Google had to make with Chrome. It is not a strength.

The iOS app store makes money for Apple. So does that mean we must copy the weaknesses of the iOS app store? That's cargo cult thinking.

Who exactly are you "competing" against? This isn't a competition. Linux is not inferior because it isn't Windows.

The early days of Firebird were not spent trying to match the features of Internet Explorer! Internet Explorer offered some superior features that Mozilla could never match. It even had awful custom CSS rules, that let websites do things like change the color of scrollbars.

Firebird focused on making a fully standards compliant browser, and then success found it, when the public got sick of Microsoft. And maybe that won't happen this time around, but so what?? This is just hubris on the part of Mozilla, at this point.

I'm horrified at what would have happened, if in 2006, everyone had rolled up their sleeves to bring ActiveX support to Firebird on par with IE6. Is that what you think would have worked?? Microsoft would always be several steps ahead of you.

This is tilting at windmills.

They toss out one advantage to gain flexibility to try to improve in other areas.

For a site that has people who go on and on and on about the innovators dilemma this argument seems pretty shortsighted.

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