

Add-on developer abandons Firefox - EdiX
http://www.andyhalford.com/index.html

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monkeyfacebag
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.

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icebraining
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.

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patio11
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?

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icebraining
Owe is a strong word (if I felt like he owe me, I'd contact him), but as a
former developer of a Firefox addon and other free stuff, yes, I felt like I
owed them at least not purposely taking it away when I stopped developing it.

I feel it's a matter of having respect for the people who rated, promoted and
even just used your addons.

Monetary transactions aren't everything in life, and it's not like it costs
him anything just leaving the addons alone hosted on AMO.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm pretty sure he didn't pay Mozilla anything, but he still
felt like they owed him for, among other things, promoting Firefox. You know,
like people did for his own addons.

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wslh
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.

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

~~~
wslh
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.

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simonster
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).

