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Comment by guilhas | Hacker News Reader

Following the trend should we be expecting Chrome XUL addons?

You may be joking(?), but I thoroughly enjoyed developing XUL based applications[1]. I found the design paradigm to be well ahead of the curve and cleaner than it's successors (like Angular) are today.

[1] only gripe I had with XUL was the use of rdf for backend data representation

There is no data, there is only XUL!

I also thoroughly enjoyed that era.

I loved XUL addons, they did everything, Chrome was not even an option for an advanced user, it took years for webext to reach a similar point of usefulness. And still there are small things that worked better in XUL

My problem is Mozzarella keeps removing Firefox features that Chrome adds later

Not sure if that typo was intentional, but really gave me a chuckle.

Unlike XUL, extensions are just passengers, with no power to override core browser engine features. I don't think that web extensions have reached a similar level of usefulness today. And even if they did, why should we have waited so many years to gain that functionality back?

Google's decision to have crippled extensions was made in a corporate board room to maximize Google's leverage at the expense of utility for users. So it is tragic and baffling to see Mozilla pantomiming what Google did, since throwing away a far more mature and powerful extension framework benefits nobody but Google.

Google could troll Mozilla by just announcing that they are deprecating local bookmarks (and they may very well do that), and watch as Firefox obsequiously removes bookmarks from Firefox, "to stay modern", and then Google could pull the rug out from under then by not deprecating it.

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