It’s on www.metafilter.com. Lots of links and opinions.
“While it used to be the leading alternative to Internet Explorer (and others), Firefox has seen its market share erode steadily since the 2008 debut of Google Chrome. The Mozilla Foundation has made several oft-controversial bids at relevancy, including native video chat, Pocket integration, a mobile browser (and OS), a UI overhaul, and a rapid release schedule that’s reached version 40 (and counting). But the latest proposal — part of a reboot of the stalled Electrolysis multiprocessing project — will prove the most daunting. Although it will modernize the browser’s architecture, it also deprecates the longtime XUL framework in favor of more limited and Chrome-like “web extensions” — requiring Firefox’s vast catalog of powerful add-ons to be rewritten from scratch or cease functioning. While developers will have until 2017 to fully adapt, opinion is divided — NoScript’s Giorgio Maone reassures doubters, while the DownThemAll! team says “it feels like I just learned my dear old friend Firefox is going to die.””
From the arstechnica.com article (same as above link):
“Tentatively, it’ll be an opt-in feature in the beta channel from September 22nd, on-by-default in the beta channel from November 3rd, and on-by-default in the release channel from December 15th.
While this change is advantageous from a stability and security perspective, it’s not without its cost. Current Firefox add-ins can intimately intertwine themselves with the inner workings of the browser using an API called XPCOM. With Electrolysis, that’s not easily possible: the add-ins will operate in a separate process from the main Firefox shell, so can no longer wrap themselves around the browser’s internals.”