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Comment by Paul-ish | Hacker News Reader

The addon was abandoned by its author because Mozilla was making major changes to the addon API at the time. Extensions used to have carte blanche to change the browser, which was a security risk, not to mention it made threading/parallelizing the browser hard. The new extension API removed a lot of that freedom. After the API change, it wasn't possible (and might still not be) to develop a useful tab groups addon with the new API, so the author ceased development.

I can't imagine Mozilla crippling the addon API to the point where it can't grab data off an RSS feed and display it.

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> Extensions used to have carte blanche to change the browser, which was a security risk …

I don't buy that. It's my browser running on my computer, it's my choice whose code I choose to run on it.

If, say, emacs or vi had this kind of handholding, neither one would be much more than a text editor.

Emacs and vi are used by programmers. Browsers are used by nearly every single person on the Internet. The threat model is completely different.

Time for a developers only Browser! Anyone wants to grab that? :)

Qutebrowser and next browser are both quite programmer-focused. They are WebKit based, however.

qutebrowser uses QtWebEngine, which is based on Chromium/Blink - I wouldn't call that WebKit anymore ;-)

I was probably wrong about next too, then. Still, they both hail from the Steve Jobs school of blurry fonts, which is all any sane person tries to avoid in a web browser ; )

Emacs or vi don't handle potentially malicious third-party code...

Sure they do. That's what extensions are.

That’s like saying everyone is at risk of bear attacks because a few people in rural areas do get attacked. Yes, extensions exist but when was the last time someone clicked on a link in an email and installed an emacs extension? That happens daily to thousands of web users because the population is so many orders of magnitude greater.

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