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> The (alleged?) policy makes no sense to me The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that they want to avoid confusion attacks on their reviewers

> The (alleged?) policy makes no sense to me The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that they want to avoid confusion attacks on their reviewers. But then again they already have a list of hashes for trusted libs, so clearly they could just diff the modified library against the canonical version when a hash doesn't match. > but they've assured me that users can't even install off our website unless Mozilla signs off. That seems very un-Mozilla-ish to me. What happened to the open web? I have clashed with their addons staff over similar issues. Their argument is basically security absolutism, motivated by (some) users easily being tricked. Any inch of rope you give the user they will use to hang themselves. So any security-related decisions they make are based on this dumbest possible user. Additionally they consider it a reputational issue, if an extension screws up firefox then firefox is blamed, or so they say. Firefox stable basically means nannying. If you want more control you're supposed to use developer edition or (on linux) the distribution builds. They don't say it quite that directly, but that's what their answers boil down to.

gnicholas 7y ago
> Their argument is basically security absolutism, motivated by (some) users easily being tricked. Honestly, most of the people I know who use FF these days are pretty tech-savvy. This wasn't always the case — my mom used to use Firefox. But Chrome/Safari/Edge are the default browsers these days, and they're pretty good. The only people installing other browsers are either pretty savvy, or being helped out by people who are savvy. I realize that Mozilla perhaps yearns of the days when they had much larger market share (and therefore many more easily-tricked users). But those days seem to have passed. Likewise, they may be trying to position themselves to become the go-to browser for the unwise masses. And perhaps someday they will retake that crown. But in the meantime, these nanny-state restrictions piss of their developer-heavy base.

gnicholas 7y ago

> Their argument is basically security absolutism, motivated by (some) users easily being tricked. Honestly, most of the people I know who use FF these days are pretty tech-savvy. This wasn't always the case — my mom used to use Firefox. But Chrome/Safari/Edge are the default browsers these days, and they're pretty good. The only people installing other browsers are either pretty savvy, or being helped out by people who are savvy. I realize that Mozilla perhaps yearns of the days when they had much larger market share (and therefore many more easily-tricked users). But those days seem to have passed. Likewise, they may be trying to position themselves to become the go-to browser for the unwise masses. And perhaps someday they will retake that crown. But in the meantime, these nanny-state restrictions piss of their developer-heavy base.