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Yeah, the other side of all of this is that I'd leave Chrome for Firefox if it did drop XUL and get up to par performance/ security / feature-wise. I'm sure man

Yeah, the other side of all of this is that I'd leave Chrome for Firefox if it did drop XUL and get up to par performance/ security / feature-wise. I'm sure many others feel the same.

dblohm7 10y ago
Yeah, I think our big bet here is that Firefox will achieve better market share by leapfrogging the competition in performance versus remaining insanely customizable despite lower performance. EDIT: Added "insanely"
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  I am not the product manager so I don't know for sure but this can go very wrong. Once you disable something and force a user to go somewhere else they will probably not come back. Especially since Chrome and Firefox and to some degree IE are in a race to almost look the same and have no distinguishable features. It used to be that Firefox's selling point were extensions. With that lost, what's the reason for Firefox? I don't think performance matters enough for most users to switch.
  - staticassertion 10y ago
    It's not like every Firefox extension will be broken. And I'm an ex Firefox user who switched to Chrome for the sandboxing and multiproc architecture. I'll happy go back to Firefox, I'd much rather use a browser by Mozilla over Google. Maybe in the short term keeping some users is worthwhile but they'll continue to lose them slowly to Chrome, and browsers aren't fighting a short game. Firefox, Chrome, IE, they're not going anywhere - they've been around for a long time with plenty of market share. It makes sense to be forward thinking here.
    - kasabali 10y ago
      > It's not like every Firefox extension will be broken Every Firefox extension will be broken. Only Chrome extensions will be supported.
  - dblohm7 10y ago
    Hard to say. Clearly there are two camps. While we are indeed forcing an abstraction layer onto extension devs, that does not necessarily mean that we are going to use Chrome as the lowest common denominator with respect to extensibility. Hopefully we can hit a sweet spot with respect to customization. WebExtensions are a superset of Chrome extensions, and do we have an open process for people to propose new APIs. Some people are never going to be happy, but hopefully others will step forward and build some cool stuff.

Yeah, the other side of all of this is that I'd leave Chrome for Firefox if it did drop XUL and get up to par performance/ security / feature-wise. I'm sure many others feel the same.

dblohm7 10y ago

Yeah, I think our big bet here is that Firefox will achieve better market share by leapfrogging the competition in performance versus remaining insanely customizable despite lower performance. EDIT: Added "insanely"

maxxxxx 10y ago
I am not the product manager so I don't know for sure but this can go very wrong. Once you disable something and force a user to go somewhere else they will probably not come back. Especially since Chrome and Firefox and to some degree IE are in a race to almost look the same and have no distinguishable features. It used to be that Firefox's selling point were extensions. With that lost, what's the reason for Firefox? I don't think performance matters enough for most users to switch.
- staticassertion 10y ago
  It's not like every Firefox extension will be broken. And I'm an ex Firefox user who switched to Chrome for the sandboxing and multiproc architecture. I'll happy go back to Firefox, I'd much rather use a browser by Mozilla over Google. Maybe in the short term keeping some users is worthwhile but they'll continue to lose them slowly to Chrome, and browsers aren't fighting a short game. Firefox, Chrome, IE, they're not going anywhere - they've been around for a long time with plenty of market share. It makes sense to be forward thinking here.
  - kasabali 10y ago
    > It's not like every Firefox extension will be broken Every Firefox extension will be broken. Only Chrome extensions will be supported.
- dblohm7 10y ago
  Hard to say. Clearly there are two camps. While we are indeed forcing an abstraction layer onto extension devs, that does not necessarily mean that we are going to use Chrome as the lowest common denominator with respect to extensibility. Hopefully we can hit a sweet spot with respect to customization. WebExtensions are a superset of Chrome extensions, and do we have an open process for people to propose new APIs. Some people are never going to be happy, but hopefully others will step forward and build some cool stuff.