Add-on developer abandons Firefox

http://www.andyhalford.com/index.html

by EdiX • 14 years ago

12 10 14 years ago

Is there a back story available? I'd be interested in knowing what compelled a developer to abandon Firefox, but this post is nothing more than a rant, lacking both explanation and evidence.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

Agreed.

And taking down the addons without so much as leaving open the possibility of someone else continuing the work seems like a crappy move towards his own users.

nuttendorfer• 14 years ago

>As I do not wish to encourage anyone to use Mozilla's products at this time, I will not be hosting or providing these extensions to anyone.

He really does not want to promote Mozilla products. I think that really shows how much he despises Mozilla (currently).

patio11• 14 years ago

Note: this is a comment by someone who does not even use a particular free thing about what that free thing's creator owes him, justified purely by that thing having once been available for free.

Have I mentioned "charge more" recently?

rfugger• 14 years ago

His link to contact Mozilla is an email to the AMO editors, who approve addons based on performance, security, etc. I'd guess they wouldn't approve his addons for some reason, and he thought their criticisms were unreasonable.

wslh2• 14 years ago

I have also terrible experiences with Mozilla. As an add-on developer it was extremely time consuming to update addons for each new version of Firefox, even in the case of minor updates. You can take a look for example at the source of tab mix plus (if I remember well) and see a lot of "if" conditions to work along other extensions. Also, the docs and the examples were few and old.

On the Thunderbird side the support was horrible too. There were bugs on Thunderbird that the maintainers closed without further research. This "opportunity" made our blog post about migrating from Thunderbird to Outlook a daily success.

Evbn• 14 years ago

Yeah, some things are hard on FF, but impossible elsewhere.

wslh2• 14 years ago

When I look at Google Chrome I am impressed about the excellent decisions related to API organizatoin. Google Chromes extensions can't do a lot of things that Firefox extension can but it is a more controlled environment.

simonster• 14 years ago

As a Firefox add-on developer, I am generally happy with the way Mozilla treats the community. Mozilla developers nearly always respond to my bug reports within hours, and big decisions are (usually) open to public debate.

Firefox add-on development can be frustrating because the exposed APIs are subject to continuous change, but I believe the Firefox developers when they say that the only alternative to this churn is to limit APIs (a la add-ons in all other browsers and Firefox's own Add-on SDK).

Add-on developer abandons Firefox

Related Stories