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0 pointslewisl902910y ago0 comments

Seeing the vibrant plugin ecosystem revolving around Atom makes me cautiously optimistic for Firefox's future prospects. Implementing the entire interface and plugin system in standard Web technologies will also make plugin development more welcoming to web developers who found XUL development too archaic.

In fact, I'm one of those developers, and the first thing I'd do in post-XUL Firefox would be try to create a Tree Style Tabs alternative.

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wldcordeiro10y ago· 2 in thread

Atom was a new program though so people started from scratch and had no pre-existing code-bases (unless you count ST3 ports), whereas here Mozilla's change would drive many developers away because they would now need to rewrite addons entirely for the new API or if the API doesn't support what their addon did they're SOL. It seems like a bad way to go about it, they shouldn't deprecate the API till there's feature parity in the new API.

Tobu10y ago

Feature parity is a meaningless term. Extensions currently have access to the entirety of Firefox internals. That huge internal surface couldn't be stabilised without stopping development entirely.

pc2g4d10y ago

Couldn't that internal surface be gradually phased out? Make an API that gives you full access to it, then piece-by-piece replace the full access with safer replacements?

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