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Comment by snek | Hacker News Reader

fondly thinks back to the launch of firefox preview where hn was convinced that them not explicitly mentioning extensions in their first quarter goals meant they weren't ever going to have them and the end of the world was coming

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Yes, and you can likely thank the backlash / such comments for this change of heart. Oh, you were implying they always highly valued Addons for their new FF? I don't see anything in this blog post supporting that stance.

I don't know anyone who works here who doesn't use addons all the time.

Maybe its just me being disgruntled / fondly remembering the XUL days (pre multi-process in 2008ish was when I was messing around with it) were it felt like addons could anything. The possibilities seem way more restrictive now that there only seems to be a specific list of white-listed api's. Scaling that back even more for performance and (somewhat justified) security reasons seemed like the next natural step.
Anyway, I'm thankful for leaving a comment.

At the same time, all Addons I've installed right now require "Access your data for all websites", making absolute trust in the developer / reviewer necessary.

My understanding (from the outside, so probably wrong) was that a while back they had an expired certificate that broke all add-ons. This caused the existing Firefox for Android (Fennec) to get a bunch of 1-star reviews on Google Play Store, and _that_ (plus the complaints elsewhere) convinced them that not having add-ons in Firefox Preview (Fenix) was a bad idea.

Corrections welcome — I've probably missed something somewhere.

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