Forking brave browser [1], or one of other electron based browsers may be a good way forward, as it will allow easy customizability of the ui, and get all the hard to maintain native parts from chromium.
Mozillas browser.html project may be helpful too, but it seems to be a bit too experimental for now.
No need to fork Brave, we will collaborate on extensions APIs as we scale. We're supporting tested chromium extensions that we curate and fetch from our own S3 (essentially a cache backed by the Chrome Web Store).
For future extension APIs that go beyond the chromium ones, we won't support XUL, but I'd like to take advantage of our Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon - we forked Electron, because security) React.js-based front end.
In 2Q2017 I'll hope to have more to say about extensions and where we'll go. Interested extension developers are welcome now to join our https://community.brave.com/ discourse. Thanks.
Great to hear you are interested in colaborating on this issues. muon and react based ui is exactly why i was suggesting to use brave as a base for experimentation.
I was not talking about the type of extension that allow to do some common things based on small api created specifically for that.
I am more interested in extensions that get full access to existing react components, and can modify the browser ui in arbitrary ways, e.g. by adding splitview similar to what cloudy has, or adding proper tabs on mobile instead of carousel.
I was chief architect of Mozilla back in the 1998 October roadmap period and onward, when we created XUL. Indeed we wanted powerful extensions, and got them. Problem is they tied Mozilla down for too long, without anyone stepping up to find a way forward that didn't just seem to signal "XUL going away... <angry dev feedback>. Oh never mind; or maybe later".
Brave UX will evolve but slowly and without big changes that break too many users (Australis). Still, we need to be able to change our UX. So if we have powerful extension APIs into that UX, we can't promise never to break extensions that use those APIs in ways that become unsupportable.
All we can do is try to co-evolve nicely and cooperate better. I don't see a silver bullet here, but I do see how Mozilla has burned a lot of add-on developer good will -- and we won't make that mistake at Brave.
