Followup: modularity, WebExtensions, and going faster

[Ian Bicking]

On Sun, Oct 9, 2016 at 11:50 PM, Benjamin Smedberg <benjamin at smedbergs.us>
wrote:
>
>
>    - The focus of my post is about requiring good module boundaries for
>    code that wants to move quickly, and the notion that WebExtensions are the
>    right way to do that. Although I like indulging in talk about making the
>    entire browser modular, that is clearly not something we can accomplish
>    soon. I am talking about the pipeline of development that we're building
>    which starts out with test pilot, through SHIELD studies, to system addons.
>    We are shipping these *today*, and shipping is a tedious and fairly
>    high-risk process because we don't have modular isolation or testing.
>
> Shipping through Test Pilot is *much* easier than shipping through Go
Faster/System Add-on, simply because the impact of mistakes is so much
smaller.  Mistakes hit fewer people, and if you really mess things up
someone can uninstall the add-on and we've only lost a feature user, not a
Firefox user.  In both cases the release process could be improved, but
it's unrelated to WebExtensions.

I also think exactly the kind of pacing of these ideas makes WebExtensions
a hard fit, though Hybrid WebExtensions would be a good fit.  Page Shot
could be rewritten fairly easily to be 95% WebExtension.  The last 5% could
be fixed with probably-acceptable product changes, but we'd be left
wondering... is there something we could do outside the boundaries of
WebExtensions that would be an important and valuable product direction?
The data-driven process we want to do requires us to actually ship those
ideas. And then be ready to un-ship them as well, ideally without making
the WebExtension team run around for our capricious and unfounded requests.

Making System Add-ons less stressful to ship would be great. It's an
important goal, because stress leads to avoidance or other maladaptive
behavior.  But I'm skeptical about doing it through code modularity.
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