Mozilla just announced the depreciation of XUL and XPCOM, which power Firefox’s famous addons. Understand that these two features are old, so Mozilla may just want to clean up some of the older legacy code.

However, this change is going to kill Firefox’s killer feature: addons. This has been Firefox’s best feature for a while. The gamut of addons that the current system provides is ridiculous. Why Mozilla would want to remove their biggest weapon against other is beyond me. I mean, AMO is awesome.

Mozilla has been shedding browser market share to Chrome for a while now, so this move is totally counter-intuitive. I wouldn’t remove this code unless it was a complete mess and absolutely holding the browser back. After all, you should never ditch perfectly good, working code.

Mozillan #1: We need to gain market share. Any ideas?

Mozillan #2: I know! Let’s remove our killer feature that makes us better than everybody else!

Mozillan #1: Bloody brilliant Johnson!

The above was not an actual conversation.

Now, if Mozilla replaced the API with something better, I’d be okay with it an applaud the action. However, the current API that Mozilla has specified is only on par with Chrom{e,ium}, and still is regressing in terms of features. Mozilla hasn’t even formally reached a full specification and they’ve already committed to depreciating XUL.

Hmmm. They’ve already committed, so there’s no turning back, and they don’t even have a finished product to allow devs to begin migrating. Sounds really smart.

Personally, I am sad because one of my favorite addons, Downthemall! is probably going to die or be gimped. According to the same developer, Greasemonkey and NoScript (another two essential addons) are also going to be severely limited too under the new API. This is going to absolutely destroy my current Firefox setup. sniff sniff :(

Fortunately, there is some saving grace to this move. Mozila has said that it will be adding some APIs to WebExtensions to make up for lost functionality (NoScript and TabMixPlus are explicitly named; yay!). This is turning right to go left though.

Now, know that I criticize Mozilla because I love their software and want them to succeed. I use Thunderbird and Firefox as my daily drivers, and I really, really don’t want to have to switch to Chromium. Please Mozilla, don’t mess this up.

With all the bullcrap in Mozilla’s recent past, it doesn’t look like they know what they’re doing. Mozilla isn’t acting like they care about their (open) standards or developers.

At least one company still loves their developers.