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I agree in principle, although in practice allowing Firefox add-ons to be fully equivalent to other features has been a detriment to security, stability and per
by rhelmer 10y ago
I agree in principle, although in practice allowing Firefox add-ons to be fully equivalent to other features has been a detriment to security, stability and performance - hence the switch to WebExtensions (which rely on stable APIs purposely exposed by Firefox).
Having the codebase be as small as possible is a laudable goal - with browsers it is difficult since Web standards are fairly complex on their own, and being cross-platform brings along a lot of weirdness.
An important aspect of security is compartmentalization - for instance, using separate sandboxed processes for web content vs. the main UI (which runs with full user privileges).
Sandboxing is a good example here since it improves perf/stability/security but also adds to the size and complexity of the code.
- slrz 10y agoI agree in principle, although in practice allowing Firefox add-ons to be fully equivalent to other features has been a detriment to security, stability and performance Only in an abstract "we might have been able to implement security/performance improvements faster if we wouldn't have had to worry about breaking addons" sense. Any other effects are restricted to those people actually using the addon and don't affect everyone else. A powerful extension interface can also be used to improve performance/stability: while e.g. adblocking certainly doesn't come for free, its cost should be more than offset by not running all that crappy code pulled from ad networks.