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Great news. With the current system, firefox's stability, upgrade compatibility and performance were entirely dependent on every author of every extension I use

by Tobu 11y ago

Great news. With the current system, firefox's stability, upgrade compatibility and performance were entirely dependent on every author of every extension I use being sufficiently careful. It meant a lot of periodic purges, housekeeping, and reduced trust. I'm sure the overhead helped users move to chrome, despite Firefox's vanilla install being lighter. Reducing the API surface was a necessity. Also, it takes a lot of effort to cope with the churn in internal APIs, and I had to get rid of promising extensions like Pentadactyl because they broke too often. With a smaller, stable API, that problem doesn't exist. I don't believe that the current tradeoff of power vs responsibility was working out in the majority of cases, and I've seen enough evidence in the form of lagging addons and neglected ports.

the8472 11y ago
> It meant a lot of periodic purges, housekeeping, and reduced trust. > I don't believe that the current tradeoff of power vs responsibility was working out in the majority of cases, For me those tradeoffs are worth it. Sometimes it means installing a beta builds of an addon or nagging its developer on github or even finding a replacement. But that's still better than not having the addons at all because the APIs simply make it impossible to have them in the first place. If mozilla separated addons into "uses stable APIs only" and "might break at any time, we may even turn them off if they cause to many crashes" that might allow users to choose which kind of model they want to follow.
- Tobu 11y ago
  XPCOM has support for stable, versioned APIs, but no one cared about using that subset since the rest was also available; it stagnated and the supposedly unstable APIs ended up bearing the compatibility burden. Now there will only be a supported subset, and the trickier stuff will require getting a patch accepted instead of monkey-patching and letting the user cope with the breakage. Your coping skills are above average, I've submitted patches too, it's still yak shaving and not a very productive use of time. Working out APIs is a hard problem, it should be handled as part of the development phase instead of being completely disconnected.

by Tobu 11y ago

the8472 11y ago

> It meant a lot of periodic purges, housekeeping, and reduced trust. > I don't believe that the current tradeoff of power vs responsibility was working out in the majority of cases, For me those tradeoffs are worth it. Sometimes it means installing a beta builds of an addon or nagging its developer on github or even finding a replacement. But that's still better than not having the addons at all because the APIs simply make it impossible to have them in the first place. If mozilla separated addons into "uses stable APIs only" and "might break at any time, we may even turn them off if they cause to many crashes" that might allow users to choose which kind of model they want to follow.

Tobu 11y ago
XPCOM has support for stable, versioned APIs, but no one cared about using that subset since the rest was also available; it stagnated and the supposedly unstable APIs ended up bearing the compatibility burden. Now there will only be a supported subset, and the trickier stuff will require getting a patch accepted instead of monkey-patching and letting the user cope with the breakage. Your coping skills are above average, I've submitted patches too, it's still yak shaving and not a very productive use of time. Working out APIs is a hard problem, it should be handled as part of the development phase instead of being completely disconnected.