The balloon’s flight path takes it over “a number of sensitive sites,” the senior [Pentagon] official said, but it appears it does not have the ability collect information that is “over and above” other tools at China’s disposal, like low-orbit satellites. Nevertheless, the Pentagon is taking undisclosed “mitigation steps” to prevent Beijing from gathering additional intelligence.

“We put some things on station in the event that a decision was made to bring this down,” the official said. “ So we wanted to make sure we were coordinating with civil authorities to empty out the airspace around that potential area. But even with those protective measures taken, it was the judgment of our military commanders that we didn’t drive the risk down low enough. So we didn’t take the shot.”

Will Mozilla follow Google with these changes? In the absence of a true standard for browser extensions, maintaining compatibility with Chrome is important for Firefox developers and users. Firefox is not, however, obligated to implement every part of v3, and our WebExtensions API already departs in several areas under v2 where we think it makes sense.