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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Oh? If it's that easy, could you explain how you would have applied that in the Firefox case and avoided the massive problems they experienced?

Because in my view their problem wasn't about API versioning. They came out with a new version and deprecated the old, after all. It was that they provided way too much coverage early on.

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I don't get your point. There will obviously be cased where API's are not needed or too complicated to maintain, which was presumably the case with Firefox, which BTW is a locally installed platform. I don't see how this affect the general discussion regarding (mostly) web platforms - which usually run on a client-server model anyway - maximizing their API footprint to expose the most functionality possible via their API.

Just because you or anyone working there doesn't see a useful use case for using that functionality over the API doesn't mean there won't be someone who will come up with something useful based on that in the future.

My point is very simple. You said "the more API coverage a platform can provide the better". I'm saying that's not true because it can create large long-term costs that outweigh the benefits. I even gave an example. I get why you as an API consumer want maximum surface area. But API producers often feel differently, and they have good reason to. I think the better general strategy for API producers is to open up gradually based on actual need discovered via dialog with community.

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