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Comment by martin-adams | Hacker News Reader

I wrote my first extension for a proof of concept project for Chrome last month, and I literally had my first working example doing something interesting within 2 minutes.

I tried to do the same in FireFox, and gave up. I couldn't get my head around the documentation without taking a day out to get going.

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Firefox is also starting its third extension model now. At first it was XUL/XPCOM where extensions could basically hook into ANYTHING in the browser, then there was the Add-on SDK (formerly Jetpack), which is kind of nice, but a lot more limited, and now they're going with WebExtensions, because, well, Firefox basically does nothing but copy Chrome anymore ;)

But yes, that does make it complicated to figure out what's the best way to make stuff for Firefox.

>Firefox basically does nothing but copy Chrome anymore ;)

Thanks

If you can wait for the WebExtension API. If not use Jetpack. Don't write new extensions with XUL/XPCOM.

Sorry, that was unnecessarily snarky. But it does seem like Chrome is leading and Firefox is following on a lot of things. The look, multiprocess, extension model, all things that started in Chrome.

I was pleasantly surprised by Jetpack though, the jpm tool is very nice.

As a primarily Firefox user on Linux I do agree with you about Firefox mostly following Chromium these days. It seemed like for a long time Chromium was adding in features Firefox had with improved implementations, but now Firefox appears to be lagging. The Firefox extension model did allow for extensions like DownThemAll which I don't think can survive in this generation of extension models.

Yes; I have no problem with adding an API to make simple things easy, but TreeStyleTabs, VIMperator, Firebug, all of them need something more powerful than the Chrome model. I really hope they don't deprecate the old model and leave power users out in the cold.

And frankly, the old model is not so bad; if you're building any kind of extension that does more than connecting a button to an HTTP call, the couple of hours you'll need to get started are irrelevant in the long run.

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