If you’re a fan of Firefox and Chrome, Mozilla has some very good news for you.

Mozilla announced significant changes to how Firefox will use add-ons in the future, with the most important change being a new extension API that will be compatible with Blink-based browsers, which includes Google’s Chrome, according to a Tech Crunch report.

It’s called WebExtensions API, and will enable developers to make only small changes in order to get their add-ons to work on Firefox. Conversely, it also allows Chrome and Opera add-ons to work on Firefox.

Kev Needham of Mozilla said in the announcement that the company wants add-on development to be much like web development where the same code works in any browser, with comprehensive documentation available.

But in the past, writing extensions for the Firefox browser had been fairly complex, especially when compared to writing something for Chrome, mostly because Firefox uses XPCOM and XUL to build interfaces, which gave developers access to Firefox’s features but also increased complexity.

Instead, Mozilla is phasing out add-ons that rely on XUL and XPCOM over the next year or so.

Beginning with Firefox 42, developers will also need to have Mozilla review and sign off on extensions before it will deploy them. This will have to be done manually, and will begin with an initial submission that has to pass a full review to ensure it meets guidelines. This may take anywhere from weeks to months, a much longer process than in the past.

But the payoff could be big and the company is hoping to speed up the review by moving to the WebExtensions API, which would allow quicker reviews of add-ons. Also, there are plans to automate the review process, or at least part of it, which might help in hopefully reducing the review time to five days.

How will this change affect the Firefox add-on environment? That remains to be seen, but clearly Mozilla is trying to make a big shift toward being more flexible in terms of add-ons and giving users much more choice in what kind of extensions they can run. However, some wonder whether this move will eliminate what made Firefox unique in the first place.