There's valid criticisms against WebExtensions, but the biggest misconception is that the capabilities of WebExtensions are set in stone and that X or Y addon "won't be possible". The entire point of announcing WebExtensions so early was to start getting feedback on what needs to be supported to make major and useful addons possible, and to start work on a way for experimentation outside of the officially supported spec to still happen.
Their current schedule only gives a year to build an api, mature the api, get a significant number of popular ported addons, and deprecate their old api. There will either be mature apis and many casualties, or half-conceived apis and lots of addons that will need to be changed with these apis.
With enough time and design, I'm sure this move would result in many positives at the cost of some negatives. But this time frame is just too short for such a huge undertaking.
On the other hand, Tree Style Tabs is far and away the biggest extension I care about, so that link does provide me with some level of hope. For which I genuinely thank you.
On the third hand, my cynical take is that apparently Mozilla really does take community feedback into consideration. When making a wish list of things that could potentially happen in the future to put on a wiki page. I've also heard that it's possible that Pocket could be moved to an extension.
From the FAQ, there's a proposal for a way to do things that require the same level of access that the browser chrome has here: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/proposal-native-js...
To me it seems like a decent way to say "Hey, here's an explicitly unstable way to do things that aren't possible with WebExtensions, and hopefully we can eventually get those things into WebExtensions, or you can just live your life as you do now with no hard promises about compatibility."
> On the other hand, Tree Style Tabs is far and away the biggest extension I care about, so that link does provide me with some level of hope. For which I genuinely thank you.
You're welcome! :D
> On the third hand, my cynical take is that apparently Mozilla really does take community feedback into consideration. When making a wish list of things that could potentially happen in the future to put on a wiki page.
I could talk about this _forever_, but the short version would be: That's not a false criticism of Mozilla in recent times, but it's also not entirely true. Hacker News, r/firefox, and others are very vocal minorities compared to our greater userbase. Sometimes we really need to listen more and change our plans and be more open than we have been, but sometimes the people doomsaying everything we do might have a different opinion if they had all the details and metrics and info (knowing how to navigate Mozilla to find info about something is a skill in itself).
> I've also heard that it's possible that Pocket could be moved to an extension.
I dunno if we've specifically made that decision yet, but it is certainly one of the primary candidates for Go Faster: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster
