Why do you think they are getting rid of the community? They are (presumably) making life easier for cross browser extension developers, and the first big deprecation is about 16 months away.
We are implementing a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers.
> Why do you think they are getting rid of the community?
They're getting rind of those people who are willing to dive deep into the internals do develop something that nobody thought of before (if they did there would be high-level APIs for it).
I don't think there is anything to worry about there. The blogpost says that they are adding things to the API to allow popular addons to work in the new model, and those addons certainly count.
I think the point of the comment above that is it's precisely because of the extensive access that such useful addons could be made in the first place and subsequently become popular.
The default behavior with firefox is honestly borderline unusable for me. I can understand the need for a better add-on API, but I think limiting capabilities will probably end up driving a fork.
We will also continue supporting SDK add-ons as long as they don’t use require(‘chrome’) or some of the low-level APIs that provide access to XUL elements.
Seems like there's still a lot of power available, if you really want to dive in.
They're completely broken. Vimperator has an issue on github about getting e10s support but it looks like with these changes it doesn't matter Firefox will permanently break or cripple them.
Mozilla has an add-on review process in place. So you probably wouldn't get a new addon approved that relies on those APIs.
And with enforced signature signing you can't even distribute it to users yourself.
So effectively it will restrict extension-development to a whitelist of APIs. Everything else will be verboten, maybe with varying degrees of enforcement.
It certainly doesn't sounds like an open system to me.
We are implementing a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers.