>And yes, I know that you will be consulting with addon authors about api functionality, but i guarantee tons of stuff is still going to be lost...
Not to mention all the potential extensions that nobody has thought up yet that will no longer be possible and probably never will be. The ability to experiment and try out new ideas that nobody had thought of before is what gave us a lot of the extensions people use today. An API that tried to imagine all the possible features people might need and then locked down everything else would have prevented a bunch of the extensions that are popular today.
This problem exists for the web in general though (being a tightly controlled sandbox where only features agreed on by all the vendors are allowed). So I think Mozilla is probably institutionally incapable of understanding the problem, since it undermines the central mission of the entire organisation - which is to convert all end user software into software that runs in a vendor controlled sandbox. People who appreciate the creative cost of tightly controlled sandboxes probably wouldn't go to work for Mozilla.
Not to mention all the potential extensions that nobody has thought up yet that will no longer be possible and probably never will be. The ability to experiment and try out new ideas that nobody had thought of before is what gave us a lot of the extensions people use today. An API that tried to imagine all the possible features people might need and then locked down everything else would have prevented a bunch of the extensions that are popular today.
This problem exists for the web in general though (being a tightly controlled sandbox where only features agreed on by all the vendors are allowed). So I think Mozilla is probably institutionally incapable of understanding the problem, since it undermines the central mission of the entire organisation - which is to convert all end user software into software that runs in a vendor controlled sandbox. People who appreciate the creative cost of tightly controlled sandboxes probably wouldn't go to work for Mozilla.