Shipping Firefox features as Web Extensions

What about using Web Extension APIs to implement core firefox features? Here is the opportunity I would like to discuss today.

Not only new features (Hello, Pocket) but also existing built-in features (e.g Session Restore). I recently blogged about building it as a web extension.

Session restore is a critical feature of Firefox. It uses many mozilla-only technologies: XUL, XPCOM, message managers, jsm and so on. It also involves mostly privileged code whereas it isn't really needed, possibly leading to security issues. Even if it is living in it's own folder /browser/components/sessionstore/, there are many hardcoded parts of it elsewhere. It is clearly not self contained.

Instead of just hardcoding this feature into Firefox, we could possibly ship it as an addon. That would have various benefits:

About contribution. I asked about how many people contribute(d) to session restore. There is mostly one active employee working on it: mconley. Then sparse contributions are being made by other employees like ttaubert, yoric, dragana, mystor, mayhemer,... But there seem to be only one non-employee contribution made by Allasso Travesser with just one patch.

I'm convinved we can engage more with simplier workflows (Addon versus built-in) and technologies with a lower learning curve (Web Extension vs XUL).

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