4 ms·

This in itself is kinda crazy. Maybe Firefox has hit some new stage in its lifecycle, but it seems to have completely turned face on what originally helped it

This in itself is kinda crazy. Maybe Firefox has hit some new stage in its lifecycle, but it seems to have completely turned face on what originally helped it catch on. I can't imagine any add-on author targeting a platform that makes no guarantee on compatibility after 3 months.

rbanffy 15y ago
Why would anyone support old releases of Firefox when it is so easy to keep it updated? I'd rather have a break-early policy for my code than a break-badly-later one. By making changes earlier, the likelyhood of bad breakage is much smaller. This is actually good for plugin writers.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  If it's so easy to keep it updated, then it by definition must be easy to support older versions. I.e., either the changes are big or they aren't. Supporting your existing userbase is never about how easy you think it is to upgrade. Maybe all the big guys are doing it wrong, but with every new Firefox release since 3.6.x I've had problems getting Firebug and 1Password working. And I have a hard time faulting them for not being able to keep up. And I've just had to give up on using the ElasticFox add-on at all.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    I was talking from the perspective of the plugin writer, not Mozilla's.
thristian 15y ago
It's not quite as crazy as it sounds; many of the most popular addons have a significant user-base on the nightly or beta channels (and now Aurora), so there's always been some pressure to update add-ons as changes were made to the underlying platform, even before those changes made it into an official release. Also, these days Mozilla has the "Add-On SDK" which provides an abstraction around the core Gecko and Firefox APIs that is more Chrome-like - more limited than what a traditional Firefox extension can do, but guaranteed to stay compatible for a long time into the future.

4 ms·

This in itself is kinda crazy. Maybe Firefox has hit some new stage in its lifecycle, but it seems to have completely turned face on what originally helped it

by nirvdrum 15y ago

rbanffy 15y ago
Why would anyone support old releases of Firefox when it is so easy to keep it updated? I'd rather have a break-early policy for my code than a break-badly-later one. By making changes earlier, the likelyhood of bad breakage is much smaller. This is actually good for plugin writers.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  If it's so easy to keep it updated, then it by definition must be easy to support older versions. I.e., either the changes are big or they aren't. Supporting your existing userbase is never about how easy you think it is to upgrade. Maybe all the big guys are doing it wrong, but with every new Firefox release since 3.6.x I've had problems getting Firebug and 1Password working. And I have a hard time faulting them for not being able to keep up. And I've just had to give up on using the ElasticFox add-on at all.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    I was talking from the perspective of the plugin writer, not Mozilla's.
thristian 15y ago
It's not quite as crazy as it sounds; many of the most popular addons have a significant user-base on the nightly or beta channels (and now Aurora), so there's always been some pressure to update add-ons as changes were made to the underlying platform, even before those changes made it into an official release. Also, these days Mozilla has the "Add-On SDK" which provides an abstraction around the core Gecko and Firefox APIs that is more Chrome-like - more limited than what a traditional Firefox extension can do, but guaranteed to stay compatible for a long time into the future.