Updated on 28th August 2015

Many of you have read a certain announcement about the future of Firefox's add-ons and are worried about some extensions, including NoScript, being deeply rooted into those Mozilla's core technologies, such as XPCOM and XUL, which are going to be deprecated.

Developers and users are also concerned about add-ons being prevented from exploring radically new concepts which would require those "super powers" apparently taken away by the WebExtensions API.

I'd like to reassure them: Mozilla is investing a lot of resources to ensure that complex and innovative extensions can prosper also in the new Web-centric ecosystem. In fact, as mentioned by Bill McCloskey, at this moment I'm working within Mozilla's Electrolysis team and with other add-on authors, involved in the design of mechanisms and processes helping developers experiment in directions not supported yet by the "official" the WebExtensions API, which is going to be augmented and shaped around their needs and with their contributions.

I've just published a proposal, tentatively called native.js, to "embrace & extend" the WebExtensions API: all the interested parties are invited to discuss it on discourse.mozilla-community.org.

native.js has been linked in the Web Extensions FAQ and now there's a Bugzilla entry about implementing a native.js prototype (please keep the discussion on Discourse rather than on Bugzilla, though!!!).