Mozilla has been under fire from third party coders regarding the company’s announcement that they are going to do away with letting the coders add directly to the browser’s components directory. Mozilla finally came clean with a elaborate blog post about their decision. Open source browser maker’s development boss, Mike Connor, explained the logic behind the move to introduce a ‘lockdown’ feature in Firefox 3.6
The new feature will prevent third party coders from adding their own codes into Mozilla’s components directory. This will help make the browser more stable and free from crashes amidst ever-increasing usage complexity.
“We have a lot of great extensions and themes, but developing these requires a lot of ramp-up time and technical ability, and ongoing commitment to maintaining these across versions,” said Connor.
The problem started with incompatible extensions stopping browsers from upgrading to newer versions. This is bad for Mozilla’s business growth.
“To compete and lead in the browser market now, we want and need to be able to move faster, and not have our hands as severely tied by add-on compatibility,” Connor said.
“We also want it to be safer to run with add-ons, and less disruptive to increasingly longer-lived and more complex browsing sessions. All of these requirements meant major technology changes, and some sacrifices.”