I am going to write up some extremely long-winded rant in blog form at some point before the FF57 release materializes, but suffice it to say, most developers that I know who have been involved with Mozilla since the Netscape days (and also those who build most of the add-ons/products that I care about, such as SeaMonkey) have shown nothing but disappointment at Mozilla's reckless plan for the Firefox 57 release. Literally just read the developer comment response to almost any Mozilla blog post about web-extensions/complete themes from the past ~year and you'd see that more than "Very few people" are bothered by this.

Perhaps normal users don't care (or just haven't noticed yet), but most of the features which make the Mozilla platform so enticing to power users (what ever happened to XULRunner?) are being decimated because Mozilla is losing market-share and needs free advertising.

Let's not beat around the bush; Mozilla is losing market-share because people get flustered into downloading chrome due to that Microsoft-tier advert that gets plastered onto the google search page in any non-Chrome browser. Yes, Firefox had been feeling chuggier and bloated for awhile, but the core feature-set that made the platform a dream to use for power users never waned. Speeding up the browser while retaining its core feature-set are not mutually exclusive conditions.

I think that if these "normal" users understood how powerful complete themes and the XUL/XPCOM apis are, they would be up in arms. It's not that people don't want complete themes, for example. Were it not for Mozilla's incompetence (there's a bug somewhere that tracks how the total reported download count for complete themes was inexplicably reduced to just 10% of what it previously was, never recovering; there used to be hundreds of thousands of users of complete themes around ~2007-2009), such as the time wasted making incessant changes to the core browser theme that nobody asked for (nothing has ever looked as good as the Suite/SeaMonkey), is what has truly been the cause of these 'modernizations.'

XUL and the add-on SDK are so powerful that I basically re-created two old unix programs ('picons newscheck-faces' and 'xfaces' [0]) over the past couple of weeks. This simple XUL/XPCOM project of mine now brings an incredibly fast & powerful cross-platform solution to two of my favorite old mail visualization programs that have suffered extreme bit rot (I swear more people used Plan 9's vismon than the verious picons/faces programs).

When the legacy add-on api removal finally hits SeaMonkey, my whole extension will cease to function. In fact, it doesn't even work in the current SeaMonkey 2.54a1 nightly. Can you explain to me a similar cross-platform browser/mail client that provides similar APIs for me to rebuild my extension? The answer is no, because in a couple of months the one that did will no longer exist.

Anyway, my point is that I'm not exactly sure who Mozilla is targeting with the Firefox 57 release — perhaps their jet-setting upper management; perhaps nobody.

[0]: http://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/demo/

https://i.imgur.com/EnDMKuO.png

https://i.imgur.com/k40BISq.png

https://i.imgur.com/lvv9REm.jpg

(features not even pictured above: Face header decoding, X-Face header decoding, X-Image-URL header, and Contact Card Image support)

edit: also, as the one guy that has been updating the internal chrome:// url page in recent years, show me a browser that gives this amount of access to its internal tools: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Chrome_URLs#early_Mozilla_Suite_an...