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Comment by pcj | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it supports both Chrome and FireFox extensions - http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-br...

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Wow...this kind of levels the playing field. A big reason I stayed away from IE was because of the extensions. If people's favourite extensions start working on Edge, then I'm sure many will give it a serious go.

Edge will have to prove itself as a browser first. IE is inferior to all the others, currently. Edge, as "Spartan", has shown positive results in Microsoft's "lab tests" but they showed same results in the past so viewing such "reports" should be taken with a grain of salt.

Till then, stick with Firefox or Chrome.

If they can make this work seamlessly, its a great way to steal users from both the Chrome and Firefox camps. Single-browser extensions are in effect "bricks" for building a walled garden around a browser.

So I'm happy if MS is able to break down those walls and take us more toward an open browser standard, as yefim commented.

I have to stop and comment how I've never heard anyone make this analogy, or put it so well!

This is a step in the right direction. If every browser extended the same APIs, browser extensions will become more mainstream.

In my humble opinion as an extension developer this is madness. Of course still probably better than rolling out their own.

They should stick to a single stack.

Why?

Many reasons. Leaky abstractions, possible slight incompatibilities/quirks due to having to maintain two extension layers at once. Generally development times split between two completely different environments.

I wonder how they support FireFox extensions -- I was under the impression that FireFox extensions have free reign over the entire browser.

They have. MS probably only supports the ones based on Jetpack, the stable but limited add-on API for Firefox similar to Chrome's.

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