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Comment by interfixus | Hacker News Reader

Came here with exact same quote in clipboard, ready to grumble. Not that this is in any way an essential feature to me, but the trend is one way, and one way only: The paring down of choice and useful public features. Firefox of ten years ago was UI-wise a far superior product to the sorry quasi-Chrome of today. I no longer use it with any kind of joy or excitement because it's somehow best. I use it because everything else is even worse. No, please, spare me the recommendation: I do not use Google products. Period.

[Edit: typos]

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> the trend is one way, and one way only: The paring down of choise and usefuls public features.

...and creating APIs so that extensions can handle the functionality instead.

Creating XUL, really?

You cannot create an restricted API for everything, the very point of extensions, plugins, addons is community is always bigger than your developers team, and much, much more diverse. The 'long tail' effect is what extensions community is about, not '90 per cent of users'. 90 per cent of users might need just a couple of the same extensions, the other 10 per cent of users need a thousand of different extensions.

Well, we had XUL (which was awesome), now it's gone

I need to say at least one relatively good thing about Firefox - it has extensions on Android. I don't know for how long but still.

The community still has XUL thanks to Pale Moon.

Not really. I stuck to Pale Moon for a while, but it gets untenable: Stuck with dead extensions, or ancient versions of live ones. Left behind with no support for essentials like grid-view display, which the Pale Moon maintainer seems to consider a kind of personal affront. And knowing with close to absolute certainty that you are setting yourself up with a variety of gaping, unpatched security holes.

I haven't found it to be untenable. Then again, it seems that you're worried about maintaining the bleeding edge, and I'm, well, the exact opposite of that. My mantra in terms of technology has been "If it ain't broke, stop trying to fix it" for the last, oh, 4 years or more.

XUL the platform should still live on, unless Mozilla pulled the devkit

Hmm, now to check up on xulrunner....

You can't create a UI that makes everyone happy either.

For example, extensions that use the tabs WebExtension API are significantly more varied than the removed Panorama feature.

> You can't create a UI that makes everyone happy either.

That's why every software project having a user community has theme support.

Browser themes change appearance, not functionality.

> ...and creating APIs so that extensions can handle the functionality instead.

If they were actually doing that, I'd be first in line for their defense, but they aren't. Additionally, they keep shoving in features that should be extensions.

They're definitely actively working on giving WebExtensions as much power as they can.

There's a number of new APIs in the pipeline[1] with additional experimental prototypes in various stages of progress[2].

1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Projects#New_WebExtension_A...

2. https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb

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