I agree that the timeline is rather short. I think it's totally possible for the Firefox team to achieve their goals within that time period, but whether addon authors can keep up is not as clear to me. We'll just have to see how it goes; I don't see why they couldn't extend the timeline if it turns out to be too short.
Re:WebExtensions FAQ
by keeperofdakeys on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @06:11PM
(#10126337)
It really depends how many resources mozilla puts on this internally, which from what I've been reading may actually be quite a bit. But I don't think they'd move the schedule any more than a few releases, there will likely be a whole bunch of addons ported at the last minute, and they likely need the motivation.
Their current schedule only gives a year to build an api, mature the api, get a significant number of popular ported addons, and deprecate their old api. There will either be mature apis and many casualties, or half-conceived apis and lots of addons that will need to be changed with these apis.
With enough time and design, I'm sure this move would result in many positives at the cost of some negatives. But this time frame is just too short for such a huge undertaking.