I am honestly starting to believe that Mozilla is trying to run Firefox into the ground. I am not sure if it's just bad decision making or if the decision makers themselves had been bought off by competition, but it sure does feel like this. Why do we need one more Chrome like browser out there? I specifically use Firefox because it's a) not chrome, b) has better addons. If you hamstring the addons and make everythin…
> has better addons The add-ons might be better, but XUL-based Firefox add-ons are not better. They essentially give full control of your computer to the developer of the add-on. There's no permission model. The "APIs" are mostly the internals of Firefox itself, and when Firefox updates, lots of add-ons break. Most add-ons can be ported to webextensions. The ones that can't probably shouldn't have ever been add-ons t…
This statement is contradictory.
>They essentially give full control of your computer to the developer of the add-on. There's no permission model.
Yes. I know. That's why it's better.
>Most add-ons can be ported to webextensions. The ones that can't probably shouldn't have ever been add-ons to begin with.
You're pushing a worldview here in which some entity - Mozilla, presumably - sees fit to decide in what way I should, or should not be able to extend my web browser. I reject this premise.
The whole point of XUL/XPCOM, as you yourself seem to realise, is that it naturally exposes browser internals and thereby enables permissionless innovation. The only reason WebExtensions can even support the use cases it can is because Mozilla basically looked at the popular addons and defined it to be able to support corresponding functionality. Extension developers finding gaps in WebExtensions APIs were invited to communicate this to Mozilla - that is, to ask Mozilla for permission to extend the browser in a certain way (and for them to allocate manpower to adding that API, etc.)
The idea is to make WebExtensions politically palatable by happening to support what's popular, but that very approach proves the impracticality of the premise. If ad blockers were invented tomorrow, would there be a WebExtensions API? Probably not. Would Mozilla bother to allocate manpower to adding an API for it when one person has the idea and asks? Probably not. If Firefox (and before that, Mozilla Suite, etc.) had had only WebExtensions-like APIs from day one, would ad blockers exist today? Probably not. Ergo, we can conclude that future, yet unconceived innovations will be prevented by this change. The "ask us to add an API for it" approach is not acceptable, given that the technology to make this a non-issue (XUL/XPCOM) already exists and is in use.
>Lots of other browsers used to do the same thing Firefox does, and chose to use a webextension-like model instead. Why? Because those screenshots of folks with half their screen consumed by toolbars, weird popups, overlays in the browser viewport, extensions that sneakily inject ads into pages, and track user behavior _still exist_. And there's really nothing Mozilla can do to stop them.
This isn't Mozilla's problem, and as you yourself acknowledge, trying to save users from themselves is a futile effort.
>Do you know how Firefox add-ons get approved? A human sits down and sifts through the obfuscated source code. I helped build these tools years ago, I can tell you it's hell. Beyond being error-prone, it causes months-long delays in add-ons getting approved.
If this upsets Mozilla, they could get out of the extension approval business. Nothing obliges them to intermediate themselves in this way.
No version of Firefox which implements restrictive code signing practices will ever touch any system I control. Currently I use Firefox Developer Edition. It doesn't appear it will be updated after version 56.