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It's a frustrating state of affairs that this extension review process even exists ... Of course we'll be called entitled whiners for demanding prompt customer

It's a frustrating state of affairs that this extension review process even exists ... Of course we'll be called entitled whiners for demanding prompt customer service from an open source foundation which does this completely for free. But then why does such an organization with such an offering lock it down with a mandatory capricious review process like Apple? What profit is in it for them? It's to prevent the bad publicity which results from malicious extensions affecting thousands of poor helpless users. How repugnantly negligent would mozilla be considered by news commentators, to allow so many of their users to be violated so badly by their extensions! But I can install any debian package I want from anywhere? Or download and compile a source tarball from anywhere? Use pip to install from pypi which is a free-for-all ... or from any tarball or git url? Even windows users can install arbitrary things! I do find it surprising that there is trend for shady companies to try to buy out popular Chrome extensions to slip adware and then malware into them, this has hardly been seen anywhere else (except mobile app stores maybe). Anyway, I would love a completely different solution: something easy and obvious in settings to disable extension lock-down, with whatever scary warning is needed to let the commoner know they will probably hurt themselves badly, if they can choose what software to run on their computer. Let this option be disabled by GPO for corporate-controlled workstations. Let third-parties provide "trusted extension registries", similar to adblock lists, with hashes of versions of extensions that have been checked by someone who is savvy enough to install debian packages, and can tell when a popular extension has changed ownership. Yeah I know this is unlikely, and again, I'm a whining entitled idiot for demanding anything from a benevolent organization providing open-source software at no monetary cost. I think we just need an "un-mozilla'd firefoxium" ...

marcosdumay 5y ago
> I do find it surprising that there is trend for shady companies to try to buy out popular Chrome extensions to slip adware and then malware into them, this has hardly been seen anywhere else (except mobile app stores maybe). Oh, it did happen a lot with Firefox before the extensions were locked-in and a heavy review process was put into place. But then, I agree that they should add the possibility of using alternative stores. There is no reason for Firefox to be this locked-in.
zksmk 5y ago
> I think we just need an "un-mozilla'd firefoxium" ... Isn't that what Librewolf is?
- ploxiln 5y ago
  Seems like it is - I wasn't aware of that project, thanks for the tip! (I was aware of Pale Moon, which forked from a much older version of firefox ...)

marcosdumay 5y ago

> I do find it surprising that there is trend for shady companies to try to buy out popular Chrome extensions to slip adware and then malware into them, this has hardly been seen anywhere else (except mobile app stores maybe). Oh, it did happen a lot with Firefox before the extensions were locked-in and a heavy review process was put into place. But then, I agree that they should add the possibility of using alternative stores. There is no reason for Firefox to be this locked-in.

zksmk 5y ago

> I think we just need an "un-mozilla'd firefoxium" ... Isn't that what Librewolf is?

ploxiln 5y ago
Seems like it is - I wasn't aware of that project, thanks for the tip! (I was aware of Pale Moon, which forked from a much older version of firefox ...)