Hacker News Reader

>I once talked with a Firefox engineer who felt like an initial urge for openness left them with a lot of API surface area that locked them into a lot of design choices.

LOL, as if Firefox provided a stable API to extensions

View on HN

I think that's the inherent catch-22 of having a big API. You end up in a situation where you can't change things for fear of breaking the API, but you end up also not being able to hold the API stable for fear of not being able to change things. So you end up stagnating and breaking things all at the same time.

Do you think there's any good solution to that problem?

I think companies make brand new products whenever that happens. No legacy baggage. If it gets popular enough then the old software gets killed off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com