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Have you tried the Jetpack SDK? New, simpler addon APIs are fine, but not when they replace more powerful ones. I guess that it's inevitable that Firefox has

Have you tried the Jetpack SDK? New, simpler addon APIs are fine, but not when they replace more powerful ones. I guess that it's inevitable that Firefox has creeped from a "power user browser" to a dumbed-down maintstream one. I guess it's time to start looking for a new power-user browser.

charlesism 11y ago
> I guess that it's inevitable that Firefox has creeped from a "power user browser" Think about that statement in the context of Firefox's history. It's totally backwards. Firefox was not supposed to be a power user's browser. That was Netscape. Firefox was supposed to be a simple browser. And once upon a time, that's exactly what it was.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  The mission of the Phoenix browser was to be end user focused. This did involve jettisoning a bunch of complexity that was there for the Mozilla suite or whatever else anybody with commit privileges had thought of, but simplicity wasn't an overriding goal.
  - charlesism 11y ago
    That's not exactly how I remember its origin story, nor how I remember it being written about when it rode its first crest of popularity. The last thing people talked about was Firefox being a tool for power users. It was "Tell your friends and relatives to switch to Firefox! Finally MSIE has worthy competition! Look at how uncluttered and easy to use it is!" I don't recall anyone talking about flexibility, or advanced features, unless they were tied into its ability to render webpages without a bunch a glitches. Here's the introduction they gave it over at boingboing.net: " Firefox, an Internet Explorer killer, has gone 1.0 By Cory Doctorow at 3:46 am Tue, Nov 9, 2004 Firefox, the finest, most secure Web browser ever created for average-user applications, went 1.0 today. You can download it below, toss out Internet Explorer, and be relatively assured that you computer won't be compromised due to Microsoft's bad design decisions and lax security maintenance."
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      That sounds pretty compatible with what I wrote. End user and average user mean about the same thing, and my use of "overriding" was pretty intentional.

charlesism 11y ago

> I guess that it's inevitable that Firefox has creeped from a "power user browser" Think about that statement in the context of Firefox's history. It's totally backwards. Firefox was not supposed to be a power user's browser. That was Netscape. Firefox was supposed to be a simple browser. And once upon a time, that's exactly what it was.

maxerickson 11y ago
The mission of the Phoenix browser was to be end user focused. This did involve jettisoning a bunch of complexity that was there for the Mozilla suite or whatever else anybody with commit privileges had thought of, but simplicity wasn't an overriding goal.
- charlesism 11y ago
  That's not exactly how I remember its origin story, nor how I remember it being written about when it rode its first crest of popularity. The last thing people talked about was Firefox being a tool for power users. It was "Tell your friends and relatives to switch to Firefox! Finally MSIE has worthy competition! Look at how uncluttered and easy to use it is!" I don't recall anyone talking about flexibility, or advanced features, unless they were tied into its ability to render webpages without a bunch a glitches. Here's the introduction they gave it over at boingboing.net: " Firefox, an Internet Explorer killer, has gone 1.0 By Cory Doctorow at 3:46 am Tue, Nov 9, 2004 Firefox, the finest, most secure Web browser ever created for average-user applications, went 1.0 today. You can download it below, toss out Internet Explorer, and be relatively assured that you computer won't be compromised due to Microsoft's bad design decisions and lax security maintenance."
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    That sounds pretty compatible with what I wrote. End user and average user mean about the same thing, and my use of "overriding" was pretty intentional.