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Why? They shouldn't be copying chrome's extensions in the first place.

• Manishearth 10y ago
  More like building a much more powerful, standardized, extensions API that is backwards compatible with chrome extensions (which offer relatively limited tools) It isn't copying, all the browsers want a standardized extensions system and they have agreed on using Chrome as a starting point.
  • J_Darnley 10y ago
    More powerful? I though chrome's API was stupidly limited which is why firefox had better extensions (all of which they want to throw out).
    • Manishearth 10y ago
      That is not the case. Chrome's API is just a base. The proposal is to be able to handle most of Firefox's add-on ecosystem IIRC. The code would have to change, but the functionality would be the same. There is a lot of misinformation out there about Firefox's switch to web extensions. Existing add-ons aren't going to be obsoleted immediately ; rather new apis will be added first, and then they will be asked to switch. Currently Firefox add-ons often hook directly into the browser, which is hard to keep secure and makes it hard to evolve the browser.
    • Sylos 10y ago
      What he's saying is that Mozilla is taking Chrome's API as the base and then adding more interfaces to it, to make it more powerful than Chrome's API and hopefully as close to Firefox's current add-on-capabilities as possible. For example Mozilla has already added an API, so that NoScript can now be ported to WebExtensions.
• deleted 10y ago
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