From reading the actual messages, the "to prevent UI customization" in the HN headlines seems to be editorialization. They explain in the comments that it was to reduce bundle size and it produced a measurable improvement in load times.
We are doing this to save bandwidth and startup time. Mangling allowed us reduce the size of our renderer JS bundles by ~13% (-1.5MB). This yields in ~5% faster code loading. Similar numbers apply to the main and extension host bundles.
These were private properties, not part of the exposed API. Plugins that depended on these were prone to breakage anyway, as is the case with using any private API.
No reasonable developer would expect these extensions to not eventually break, and yet, because Microsoft is being implicated, the outrage will continue.
Maybe no reasonable developer would (depending on how you define reasonable), but any software project with a non-trivial user base would have unreasonable users. That’s why xkcd 1172 is popular and Hyrum coined it as a Law.
Comments
From reading the actual messages, the "to prevent UI customization" in the HN headlines seems to be editorialization. They explain in the comments that it was to reduce bundle size and it produced a measurable improvement in load times.
These were private properties, not part of the exposed API. Plugins that depended on these were prone to breakage anyway, as is the case with using any private API.
No reasonable developer would expect these extensions to not eventually break, and yet, because Microsoft is being implicated, the outrage will continue.
Maybe no reasonable developer would (depending on how you define reasonable), but any software project with a non-trivial user base would have unreasonable users. That’s why xkcd 1172 is popular and Hyrum coined it as a Law.