Re: [Enigmail] Future OpenPGP Support in Thunderbird

"Robert J. Hansen" <[email protected]> Tue, 8 Oct 2019 12:41:27 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.mozilla.enigmail.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

> I have a terrible feeling that as with Firefox, this change in
> Thunderbird is going to carpet-nuke Thunderbird's add-on ecosystem and
> severely reduce its overall utility.  WebExtensions has been around
> since 2015 and the Firefox WebExtensions add-on landscape is still a
> blasted plain sparsely dotted with a few stunted trees.  It is still
> shocking to me how *few* pages the entire list of Firefox WebExtensions
> takes up.

I'm wildly in favor of WebExtensions mostly because of how it brings at
least theoretical cross-browser portability to what had previously been
the Wild West.  I agree the Firefox ecosystem of WE is pretty desolate
right now, but the Google Chrome one is doing pretty well and the nature
of WE is they can be ported from Chrome (and all its derivatives: Opera,
MS Edge, etc.) to Firefox and back again without much headache.

Further, WebExtensions are already much better-documented than XUL and
XPCOM ever were.  Very often in order to understand just how to write a
Firefox or Thunderbird plugin I had to dig into Mozilla's interface
definition language and read the source code looking for any stray bits
of API that might be useful.  Even today, at the termination of XUL and
XPCOM, the available documentation for it is a sick joke.

I completely understand the fear that WebExtensions will be a wasteland.
 But let's be careful about praising the old system, because really, it
didn't deserve much in the way of praise.

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