>Are there numbers about large amounts of sideloaded extensions causing the reputation of firefox for android to drop? I'm not aware of any, but that could be

>Are there numbers about large amounts of sideloaded extensions causing the reputation of firefox for android to drop? I'm not aware of any, but that could be because alternative browsers are not that popular on mobile in general. The reputation of Android itself has definitely suffered due to sub-par apps (battery draining, slowdowns etc.) and downright malware (sometimes promoted via Google's own ad network). >And even your earlier example was concerned with malicious extensions in Mozillas own extension store. It seems they disabled sideloading on their desktop browser some time ago, so that was the only way it could've happened anyway. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/31/firefox-to-discontinue-sideloaded-extensions/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/31/firefox-to-discon... https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/03/10/support-for-extension-sideloading-has-ended/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/03/10/support-for-exten... I don't know whether they currently do any review for extensions in the store (even automated one), or just manually ban bad actors. (There is an additional reason to disable sideloading on desktop that I mentioned in a previous comment - other destkop apps installing shit without user action/approval, which cannot happen on mobile due to app isolation). >I don't see how trusting users to recompile an unrestricted firefox fork goes well together with not trusting users to sideload a browser extension. - Their name wouldn't be on it. To publish in Play Store, a fork would have to scrub all Firefox branding from the app (see Iceweasel), and would then assume all responsibility. - Let's be honest, in practice, such a fork would be mostly used by highly technical users who are more likely to know what they're doing. Non-technical users would be far less likely to install it than some random 3rd party extension they come across. The Firefox name is fairly well known outside of tech circles. The name of some random fork would not be. >In the future this might very well interfere with peoples ability to avoid censorship. I agree that there is a risk that their official binary distribution could gain exclusive abilities in the future which are not part of the open source version (at which point Firefox would technically no longer be open source, e.g. Chrome vs. Chromium). Care should be taken that that doesn't happen. Anyway, at the moment I'm far less concerned about extensions that they specifically want to ban/censor, and far more about 3rd party developers potentially losing the ability to innovate, if the review process is only practically available to popular established players (who got popular while the ecosystem was still open) - because then how would a new project even get to that phase? That may or may not be an issue though, we'll see how it turns out.