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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

My issue is simply that I want an extension mechanism which I can use to do anything to my browser. For me, 'extension security' means 'I must write C++ to add the functionality I want,' and I never, never want to write C++.

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What prevents you from writing a patch for Firefox then? After all, it is one of the great advantages of FOSS. At this level of power you'd likely have to change the addon every upgrade anyways.

because what you are purposing is fork a browser which is only slightly less complicated than fork operating system and involves a major investment in time/money to maintain.

To whatever extent, there have been forks that are still alive today that support XUL extensions. Pale Moon [1] is one of them.

[1]: https://www.palemoon.org/

So would an extension with that kind of power. FWIW, extensions as they are already do require quite a bit of maintenance, and it is also reasonable unlikely that any one source file would be modified in one given update.

> What prevents you from writing a patch for Firefox then?

'I never, never want to write C++.'

Seriously, I can't say how much I want not to write C or C++. Life is too short to use unsafe languages.

I've wanted something more like Emacs for the web -- a bunch of fast primitives and hooks everywhere, with a good-enough language to allow me to modify everything about the browser as I see fit, without having to drop down into the C++ hex mines.

I think this is the honest answer. The people upset simply don't want a browser with measurable market share. In the Stack overflow survey Emacs has a market share of <5%. Non programmers have never heard of Emacs. If Firefox was targeting these users there would be no Firefox...

If the web wasn't so overly complicated a niche browser like that would be viable.

Right. My old boss at Apple used to encourage me to rant about how our products should work, and then shake his head and with a Gallic chuckle say, "we'd go broke if we made products for you".

That's exactly what I want: an Emacs for the web. Or enough web-browsing capability built into Emacs to just browse every site in Emacs.

Seriously, though, I want the software I run to obey me, not someone else: not Microsoft, not Apple, not some government on the other side of the world — and not Mozilla. I want to be able to modify its functionality in a straightforward manner, in a reasonably-sane garbage-collected language (so, not C, not C++, not Java and not JavaScript).

I would like to be able to add pull data from sites I visit and plumb it through the rest of my system using something like Plan 9's plumber. I don't want a browser which says, 'sorry, I won't trust you to choose the extensions you like.'

There are still some forks of firefox around, you can use those. I'm glad they traded out some configurability for security and multiprocess browser. I'm sure they would accept any patches from you that allowed the old configurability with the current performance, stability and security.

So, install Firefox 56, or 52 ESR, and never update it. Or run PaleMoon or one of its relatives, I suppose; that community's doing what it can to preserve archives of XUL-based extensions and API documentation.

Have you checked Chromium Embedded Framework?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework

There are bindings for several languages, no need to write C++.

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