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A comment on Bye bye BetterSlack. Parent comment

Re:Bye bye BetterSlack by wpietri on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @07:46PM (#17873047)
I really feel both sides of this. On the one hand, I like customizing things, and I love to see users getting involved in platforms they love. On the other, I see how responsibly providing APIs is a big long-term burden that can prevent internal innovation.

I was talking a while back with some Mozilla people about the move from their legacy API [1] to WebExtensions [2]. It was a giant pain, but their old API exposed way too much surface area in ways that were too closely tied to the original implementation. The way I heard there were significant ongoing costs in trying to maintain the old API and support popular extensions while trying to improve the underlying tech and the user experience. So I get why Slack is very reluctant to expose API surface area, especially for the UI.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Leg...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

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Re:Bye bye BetterSlack by dotancohen on Thursday August 30, 2018 @07:30AM (#17875793)
That is because an API should express high-level concepts, not low-level implementation.

Just as the new WebExtensions API does. And as any hypothetical Slack API should.

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Re:Bye bye BetterSlack by apotheon on Saturday September 01, 2018 @12:51PM (#17892703)
In deprecating functionality necessary for the extensions that made Firefox worthwhile for me, though, the reasons to prefer it over other browsers evaporated.
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