I am a bit cranky over the entire thing, while I can understand the devs think this will be cleaner code, it sounds like a lot of time spent on working on things to get back to the status quo.

From the article: "It sounds like you've made decisions without community input, why?"

"We believe that moving Firefox away from XUL and XPCOM is a long-term strategic necessity. We need to find a way to do that. We have announced WebExtensions and the deprecation as early as possible so that we can get feedback from the community on how to make the transition. We know that WebExtensions will need to be improved. To innovate will require input and assistance from the community, which we are actively seeking. The path for WebExtensions will evolve in the coming weeks, months, and years, and we want the developer community to be a big part of that evolution."

Let's break this apart a bit. They think its a necessity, so they did not ask others? I don't think this is anything but ignoring the question.

They then go on to ask for help so that they can spend a bunch of time to return us to a status quo with less working extensions today, and continue to say that you should postpone development for a Firefox extension if you are thinking about working on one, "for a few months." Might as well start targeting Chrome since you cant even rely on FF to have a reliable API to even build a new extension against for a year.

Not to mention all the time and energy spent learning XUL's magical inner workings all gone to rot.

I guess there must be some HUGE technical impetus for this, because from my personal user perspective it seems mind bogglingly wasteful of time and resources.