Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of les…
Humans are loss-sensitive.
When Coca-Cola did blind taste tests for New Coke, it was overwhelmingly preferred. When they told people which was which, the preference for New Coke increased. Instead, when they removed Coca-Cola Classic from the shelves, people clamored for it back. People want the thing they cannot have. Scarcity creates desire.
To some, this is a simple engineering trade-off. You can't have sandboxing, tab isolation, and responsiveness improvements with XUL add-ons in any kind of feasible or sustainable way. You can estimate how many people use add-ons that can't (or won't) be ported to Web Extensions, how many people would benefit from the proposed improvements, what the relative changes in user adoption are likely to be for each, and make a call that gives the best result for the whole Firefox population.
But that won't stop the people who are feeling the loss from being vocal about it, nor others who don't even use those add-ons attaching value to the thing they can no longer have, and resent that it's being taken away.
To reverse course now would fail the other way: if you tell people you're going to hold off on full e10s deployment and the security and responsiveness improvements that will come with it to allow XUL add-ons to remain a while longer, they'll be upset that you've taken away the improvements you promised.
Both times the conversation will only be about one side of the equation. No amount of marketing will fix that. Just ask Coca-Cola.