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Comment by examancer | Hacker News Reader

Currently developing a Chrome extension I was dreading porting to Firefox. I am glad this is coming. Microsoft is also promising a mostly-Chrome-compatible API for Edge browser extensions.

This will mean my extensions for all three browsers can mostly share the same code. Since they use pretty standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript much of the code will also be shared with my app's traditional web services. This sounds like a huge win for bringing rich, native-like experiences to all browsers.

Would be great to see all browsers support a common extensions API. I hope WebExtensions is that API.

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Got similar experience. Writing your first extension for Chrome is reasonable easy, but it is nightmare for Firefox.

I'm glad developers (Edge, Firefox) copy the good model, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Even without strict compatibility it would be much easier to do support many browsers, since plugin platform will be conceptually similar.

As another cross-browser extension developer I too welcome this change.

Firefox Add-on SDK was at best annoying and so inconsistent -- some APIs being sync and some async etc.

I had to prepare an elaborate build system to have a single codebase (well, excluding Safari which is even worse).

Now it'd be possible to move pretty far with Chrome/Firefox/Opera/Edge without the need to hack around the differences.

Same here. Made my own personal extension on Chrome and was avoiding making it for Firefox because of how widely different it was. So I welcome this change. I'm sure it'll piss off some folks who have already put a lot of time into making a FF extension, you can't please everyone. I think in the long run this is a good thing.

There is a library made by the guy who created the Reddit Enhanced Suite that helps you create cross browser extensions right now. I've never used it but it did look very promising: https://github.com/honestbleeps/BabelExt

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