I understand the reasoning behind why XUL and XPCOM had to go, but I learned about this technology when I was in college, just starting to become really passionate about technology, and Mozilla sold these things as "important" ideas, technological paradigms that were not just the best way forward but would make the world a better place by making development easier, exposing more things to power users, allowing better sharing of common components, etc.

Except in the end these were not the best way forward (well, at least for now, old technological paradigms do come back periodically, making the whole idea of an obvious unified "best way forward" questionable), and so Mozilla had to ditch them, and I understand that.

But that means when Mozilla is preaching that WebAsm or Rust or whatever is a truly revolutionary technology that will save the world, well, I don't ignore Mozilla, I just don't trust in their technological foresight like I used to.

In the bigger scheme of things, I tend to be more skeptical that programming paradigms like this really are revolutionary in general. Programming paradigms are interesting ideas, but I no longer see them as some forward march of progress that is paving the way to a golden age of technology.

I feel a little silly that I once thought this way, and a little silly for once being as passionate as I was for Mozilla.