So, you're saying that:
- some people kept using Firefox because it had more powerful extensions than Google Chrome.
- these people are upset because mozilla is breaking the old extensions in favor of a less powerful alternative (still better than Chrome's, that the main point of the OP)
- then people are going to move to Google Chrome which still is the worst browser for extensions
Who reasons this way ? There are legitimate reasons for being upset (my favorite addon disapeared and that makes me sad / I need to rewrite all my addons, depending if you're a user or an addon dev), but I don't think anyone will shoot himself in the foot and use a worse (addon-wise at least) alternative just because mozilla's people are mean !
Firefox on Linux seems to me to be slower and crappier save for interesting extensions.
Enough so that I've just decided to ditch Firefox even before interesting extensions go south.
> Now I don't.
Well, imagine for a moment that you're whoever is in charge of firefox development at mozilla:
- You want to take advantage of modern hardware such as multiple cores, GPU's etc.
- You want to get rid of XUL which is an evolutionary dead end.
- You have an existing extension model which basically allows extensions to more or less freely poke about in the internals of the browser
- You want to improve security for users, both against malicious sites and (to a lesser extent, I suppose, but still) malicious browser extensions.
Now, what would YOU do if the constraint is that you can never ever break existing extensions?