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Comment by throwaway0x7E6 | Hacker News Reader

they know it.

that's why they've killed XUL. that's why they're going even further by enforcing an inferior extension standard from their supposed competitor. that's why they've killed off the extensions and about:config for the android version. that's why you can't even use a private extension on desktop without jumping through the hoops. that's why usercss (toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets - legacy and disabled by default - the writing is on the wall already) and userjs will get axed. that's why about:config will get axed on the desktop version as well.

all of that is just off the top of my head. and in the end, Firefox will be a clunky and inferior alternative for Chrome with not 2%, but 0.2% of the market. which is the goal.

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No.

> that's why they've killed XUL

We couldn't deliver a multiprocess browser without doing it.

> about:config for the android version

I completely supported this and continue to do so. GeckoView on Android works completely differently than desktop Firefox, and about:config's semantics are not identical between the two. A few of us were interested in offering an alternative that gave users a way to make adjustments in a way that was "safe," but as you can imagine that has never been a management priority.

> We couldn't deliver a multiprocess browser without doing it.

So uh. What was that whole thing about making all the extensions rewrite their code to support multiprocess?

Which many extensions did, putting in huge amounts of work, only to be told shortly after that XUL was going away.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191220054834/https://developer...

> We couldn't deliver a multiprocess browser without doing it.

But you did.[1]

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Add-ons_Schedule

>We couldn't deliver a multiprocess browser without doing it.

even if the management understood that advanced extensions were a major factor for choosing Firefox over the alternatives and were willing to dedicate enough time/people/money to tackling the issue?

Yes. It was an intractable problem.

well, shit. I concede that particular point then.

my presumption of malice was primarily based on what followed - crippled android addons, forced addon signing on non-Nightly, upcoming adoption of manifest v3. put together, the poweruser experience we had in 2015 is better than the one we have now. and unlike XUL, the only explanation I see for all of these is either malice or stupidity.

> which is the goal

I don't think so. There's many more ways and decisions they could have gotten away with to make Firefox worse without outright killing it, that they haven't done (yet).

Rather, I think it's more likely that Firefox, the browser application, is a bit of an albatross to the Mozilla foundation. Something they begrudgingly have to live with, at least in the short term. It's their organization's 'product', but to a certain layer of leadership and above, it's just another vehicle for their broader mission which could be accomplished much easier by just being a chrome fork instead. It'd also remove the need to hire and retain so many pesky and annoying engineers.

Such that the Mozilla corp. is something they have to keep around, but definitely not something they want to keep around.

It is an attractive way of rationalizing the astonishing and bewildering decision making at Mozilla.

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