A great read. However, this part remains unfulfilled:
> we still haven’t taken the time to explain in-depth why we had no choice but to remove XUL-based add-ons.
I'm still waiting for an acceptable explanation. The author basically says "XUL was too vulnerable to security problems and crashes" but why couldn't it be left in? I think the real answer is a mix of "We don't have the developer resources (despite millions in revenue every year) to work on it, those resources are going to develop stuff like Pocket" and "We know better than the users, and the bug reports are tiresome, so let's lock it down and disallow people from using XUL addons"
This all happened due to pressure to compete with Chrome, but I think in doing so, Firefox lost it's uniqueness and became just another Chrome follower rather than a contender for web leadership.
> The author basically says "XUL was too vulnerable to security problems and crashes" but why couldn't it be left in?
There's an entire section called "The problems with XUL" that attempts to respond to this question (and another one called "The problems with XPCOM"). Do you feel anything is missing in either section?
> we still haven’t taken the time to explain in-depth why we had no choice but to remove XUL-based add-ons.
I'm still waiting for an acceptable explanation. The author basically says "XUL was too vulnerable to security problems and crashes" but why couldn't it be left in? I think the real answer is a mix of "We don't have the developer resources (despite millions in revenue every year) to work on it, those resources are going to develop stuff like Pocket" and "We know better than the users, and the bug reports are tiresome, so let's lock it down and disallow people from using XUL addons"
This all happened due to pressure to compete with Chrome, but I think in doing so, Firefox lost it's uniqueness and became just another Chrome follower rather than a contender for web leadership.