Add-on developer abandons Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Add-on developer abandons Firefox

andyhalford.com

12 pointsEdiX10 comments

Is there a back story available? I'd be interested in knowing what compelled a developer to abandon Firefox, but this post is nothing more than a rant, lacking both explanation and evidence.

Agreed.

And taking down the addons without so much as leaving open the possibility of someone else continuing the work seems like a crappy move towards his own users.

>As I do not wish to encourage anyone to use Mozilla's products at this time, I will not be hosting or providing these extensions to anyone.

He really does not want to promote Mozilla products. I think that really shows how much he despises Mozilla (currently).

Note: this is a comment by someone who does not even use a particular free thing about what that free thing's creator owes him, justified purely by that thing having once been available for free.

Have I mentioned "charge more" recently?

Owe is a strong word (if I felt like he owe me, I'd contact him), but as a former developer of a Firefox addon and other free stuff, yes, I felt like I owed them at least not purposely taking it away when I stopped developing it.

I feel it's a matter of having respect for the people who rated, promoted and even just used your addons.

Monetary transactions aren't everything in life, and it's not like it costs him anything just leaving the addons alone hosted on AMO.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm pretty sure he didn't pay Mozilla anything, but he still felt like they owed him for, among other things, promoting Firefox. You know, like people did for his own addons.

His link to contact Mozilla is an email to the AMO editors, who approve addons based on performance, security, etc. I'd guess they wouldn't approve his addons for some reason, and he thought their criticisms were unreasonable.

I have also terrible experiences with Mozilla. As an add-on developer it was extremely time consuming to update addons for each new version of Firefox, even in the case of minor updates. You can take a look for example at the source of tab mix plus (if I remember well) and see a lot of "if" conditions to work along other extensions. Also, the docs and the examples were few and old.

On the Thunderbird side the support was horrible too. There were bugs on Thunderbird that the maintainers closed without further research. This "opportunity" made our blog post about migrating from Thunderbird to Outlook a daily success.

Yeah, some things are hard on FF, but impossible elsewhere.

When I look at Google Chrome I am impressed about the excellent decisions related to API organizatoin. Google Chromes extensions can't do a lot of things that Firefox extension can but it is a more controlled environment.

As a Firefox add-on developer, I am generally happy with the way Mozilla treats the community. Mozilla developers nearly always respond to my bug reports within hours, and big decisions are (usually) open to public debate.

Firefox add-on development can be frustrating because the exposed APIs are subject to continuous change, but I believe the Firefox developers when they say that the only alternative to this churn is to limit APIs (a la add-ons in all other browsers and Firefox's own Add-on SDK).

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