> The raw access is also what made Firefox slow and cumbersome compared to Chrome. The recent performance improvements would have been impossible with the legacy extension apis.
This is simply not true as evidenced by the fact that Nightly still has the legacy extension API and the improved performance.
That being said FF was slowing down to keep extensions compatible. This is why I think WebExtensions are a good idea. They should be the recomended path with promised future compatibility. Then FF can not worry as much about refactoring the internals as there are fewer extensions that would be broken and they "signed up" for it.
I would rather have a faster FF and have to patch VimFX every couple of releases then have FF show down development for fear of breaking things. That being said loosing the extensions that gave FF it's magic is not a good tradeoff in my opinion.
