Typical &quot;follow, not lead&quot; mentality from Mozilla.  Anybody who remembers the <i>very</i> early days of the project, back when releases were named M1, M2 and so on, will remember the many fights over various aspects of the browser that ended with &quot;We must do this because Internet Explorer does it&quot; or &quot;We can&#x27;t do that because Internet Explorer doesn&#x27;t do that.&quot;<p>Now, in 2015, it&#x27;s more of the same, following Google Chrome instead of having a vision, sticking to it, and just implementing it.<p><i>Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users.</i><p>They&#x27;re also a source of cutting-edge and&#x2F;or specialized functionality that isn&#x27;t part of the browser and may never be.<p><i>Websites and publishers which currently use plugins such as Silverlight or Java should accelerate their transition to Web technologies</i><p>I&#x27;m having a hard time coming up with a definition of &quot;web technology&quot; that doesn&#x27;t include Java, outside of &quot;things that are baked into the browser out the box&quot; which is awfully narrow.<p><i>The Web platform is powerful and can usually do everything that a plugin can do. In the rare cases where a site needs to extend Web technologies, the recommended solution is to develop the additional features as a Firefox add-on.</i><p>Why should it be rare?  Innovation will always outrace the ability (or willingness) of browser vendors to incorporate new technologies.  I mean, there&#x27;s a reason plugins exist and I don&#x27;t see that anything has changed to negate that.  They&#x27;re a place to try out new stuff, or things that aren&#x27;t widely used enough (or supported by a company with enough money) to get incorporated into the browsers.<p>OTOH, maybe this is a win.  We need to get away from this whole &quot;The browser is a poor man&#x27;s operating system&quot; model anyway.  Let the browser do a great job of browsing hypermedia and then hand off to specialized programs when we want to do something outside that paradigm.  In this regard, JWS is a great approach that should probably be more widely used.