I think this is the tip of an iceberg. Extensions arepopular because
they let us avoid a lot of the hassle of installing things in our OS.
But the reason they let us avoid the hassle is that they shorcut a lot
of the protections and access controls that an OS offers us. And the
reason the OS offers us those capabilities is that they get really
important when large numbers of components of different qualities need
to work together. If we only installed one or two simple applications
on our machines, we wouldn't need all the power of the OS. As extensions
get more and more complicated and numerous, we're going to discover we
want all those OS-type protections inside firefox. Perhaps we'll turn
firefox into an OS to compensate, get annoyed at how complicated it
becomes to "install" new extentions through those protections, pick some
popular extension that most people have running in firefox, and develop
a framework for installing extension-extensions inside that extension,
thus starting the whole game over again.
Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
> Found this via MozillaZine
>
> http://dbaron.org/log/2006-01#e20060122a
>
> Food for thought.
>
Received on Sun Feb 12 2006 - 04:34:03 EST