Hi,
I cannot understand. Some time ago, Firefox was a prosperous browser and attracted lots of very talented developers to develop little extensions (addons) that made Firefox uniquely awesome. Every extension was examined by the community and by the number of installations you could see how many users liked the functionality provided by this extension. So not only did those developers improve your browser basically for free and were responsible for a large part of the growth of Firefox’ userbase. But you also had the opportunity to actually see which features your community esteems. This could have been a perfect way to not only acquire new ideas but also have a proof of the acceptance of those features. It could have been a very effective way to decide which features to include next.
But what did you do instead? You set everything on fire, wiped out a decade of hard work by very talented developers and you didn’t include ANY of the features from the addons you just destroyed. You even limited the addon API such that most of the wonderful addons could not even be reimplemented.
Here are some examples.
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LiveClick: This wonderful addon received a lot of praise from the community. It’s just a few GUI tweaks, but they make the live bookmarks so much better. These features are just objectively better than the current very limited live bookmarks. It would probably cost you a single afternoon to implement this. But you didn’t do this. Here is what people on reddit think about this. This addon had fans all over. Why the hell don’t you just integrate something like this in Firefox? Unfortunately, as mentioned by the users on reddit, you even destroyed the API to make something like this work in principle.
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FindBar Tweak: Oh my god, this addon made me so much more productive. Again these are only a few GUI tweak but they really help a lot. It’s so much easier now to search though long websites. The response from the community was gorgeous. It even was a featured addon back then. But now it’s all gone and you didn’t even implement a single feature from this addon.
I can’t understand. Isn’t you goal to improve the usability of Firefox? You could have such an easy job. Just copy from the most popular addons and everyone would think you are geniuses. In reality, you didn’t even realize this great opportunity. Instead, you wasted your time with being pyromaniacs (setting everything on fire and destroying large part of the addon ecosystem) or developing bullshit features like Firefox Hello and then remove it because (luckily) someone from the team realized what a failure that was.
Best,
mario