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It's completely legitimate to be unhappy with, and to disagree with, the decision to drop support for XUL add-ons. What I don't appreciate is the incorrect assu
by pcwalton 9y ago
It's completely legitimate to be unhappy with, and to disagree with, the decision to drop support for XUL add-ons. What I don't appreciate is the incorrect assumption that I, along with everyone else who supported this decision, did so in order to enhance DRM. I supported this decision because the XUL add-on "API" did not cleanly separate interface from implementation, and as a result major upgrades to the Firefox front-end and engine were becoming very difficult to undertake.
- brudgers 9y agoWhether or not everyone did it in order to enhance DRM, it is still the case that that is one of the end results. Another is that Firefox no longer supports general purpose computing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
- pcwalton 9y ago> Whether or not everyone did it in order to enhance DRM, it is still the case that that is one of the end results. Virtually nobody who works in DRM would agree that the add-ons model has anything to do with the effectiveness of DRM. If you have access to the user account running Firefox, running arbitrary unsigned native code in the Firefox process is trivial. > Another is that Firefox no longer supports general purpose computing. XUL add-ons were JavaScript. Web Extensions are JavaScript. You can write whatever Web Extension you want for whatever purpose you want.
- brudgers 9y agoA web extension cannot read and write ordinary files on the file system. It cannot assign commands to the key combination Ctl-Shift-Q. It cannot redefine javascript objects created by the web page. These are not defaults that can be toggled by the user. They are hard coded into the design.