Okay, you want WebExtensions API suggestions? Here's three.

Not to bring out the "lurkers support me in E-mail" argument but the public blog comments are rather different in opinion and tenor from the E-mail I got regarding our last post upon my supreme concern and displeasure over the eventual end of XPCOM/XUL add-ons. I'm not sure why that should be, but never let it be said that MoFo leadership doesn't stick to their (foot)guns.

With that in mind let me extend, as an author of a niche addon that I and a number of dedicated users employ regularly for legacy protocols, an attempt at an olive branch. Here's the tl;dr: I need a raw socket API, I need a protocol handler API, and I need some means of being able to dynamically write an document/data stream and hand it to the docshell. Are you willing?

When Mozilla decommissioned Gopher support in Firefox 4, the almost universal response was "this shouldn't be in core" and the followup was "if you want it, it should be an add-on, maintained by the community." So I did, and XPCOM let me do this. With OverbiteFF, Gopher menus (and through an analogous method whois and ph) are now first class citizens in Firefox. You can type a Gopher URL and it "just works." You can bookmark them. You can interact with them. They appear no differently than any other web page. I created XPCOM components for a protocol object and a channel object, and because they're XPCOM-based they interact with the docshell just like every other native core component in Necko.

More to the point, I didn't need anyone's permission to do it. I just created a component and loaded it, and it became as "native" as anything else in the browser. Now I need "permission." I need APIs to do what I could do all by myself beforehand.

What I worry is that Mozilla leadership is going to tick the top 10 addons or so off as working and call it a day, leaving me and other niche authors no way of getting ours to work. I don't think these three APIs are either technically unrealistic or lack substantial global applicability; they're foundational for getting new types of protocol access into the browser, not just old legacy ones. You can innovate nearly anything network-based with these three proposals.

So how about it? I know you're reading. Are you going to make good on your promises to us little guys, or are we just screwed?