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the old APIs were actually the only existing, internal and synchronous APIs which does not work in a multi-process, site-isolation architecture.

The internal APIs also had to go. What else would you do?

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Unfortunately not many seem to remember that brief period when the old add-on APIs were being ported and made to work with a multi-process architecture, as part of the effort known as Electrolysis [1], with appreciable results, before being completely killed in favor of WebExtensions. I'm sure there were significant technical challenges, but let's not use these to hide the political reasons behind such a drastic move.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

These APIs were synchronous and thus blocking. People blamed Firefox being slow when in fact, it was mostly extension APIs and the extension code.

Electrolysis was an easier thing to handle, and some APIs would still have been lost.

Fission (process-per-origin) came later and would have broken many, many more.

So people would have still been pissed off at Mozilla (the difference between levels of breakage would have been lost), and Mozilla would still be on the hook for supporting a barely supportable API. Without the resources that would require.

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