Mozilla and Microsoft are rebuilding their browsers’ foundations

That really wasn't the point of my post. The claim made by the parent post was that "Most user's don't use any extensions at all."

You're moving the goalposts.

Many AMO Editors are volunteers, and all are human. We've significantly adjusted the AMO review guidelines and processes to avoid that sort of mishap in the future, as acknowledged at the end of that post.

We're working hard on further changes to the process to reduce the stress and delays associated with manual review, including moving the review process to a post-publication check, instead of a pre-publication requirement. The heavy-handed review process was necessary with the old model of add-ons which had unrestricted access to the browser and to the host system. The new, permissions-based WebExtension model is dramatically easier to audit.

well, thousands of lines of changes nearly always additions sounds like it should be a code smell / integration smell.

I am not the product manager so I don't know for sure but this can go very wrong. Once you disable something and force a user to go somewhere else they will probably not come back. Especially since Chrome and Firefox and to some degree IE are in a race to almost look the same and have no distinguishable features. It used to be that Firefox's selling point were extensions. With that lost, what's the reason for Firefox? I don't think performance matters enough for most users to switch.

Mozilla has been committed to a lot of things. "The only browser built for people". "Freedom is personal".

Apparently, "people first" and "freedom" means "You can only install what we okay" (signing crap).

It also means "we will load the browser with utterly irrelevant add-ons whether or not you want them".

Apparently, "individuals can shape their own experience" means "we will outright prevent you from visiting sites configured a certain way" (see the dupe SSL cert handling bug that's been languishing for nearly a decade)

It also means "all that stuff you spent a decade getting used to gets thrown out, so sorry".

Mozilla, for all their talk of high-minded user-first ideals, sure doesn't treat their users like their time is valuable or their tasks are important. Perhaps I'd find this merely odious, rather than outright offensive if your company didn't continually talk like they wanted to be different and then behave in literally the opposite way.

Call this post gratuitously negative if you want to, but every time I give Firefox another try, I find another slap in the face. At least I know where I stand with Chrome.

I don't think it's logically possible to make Firefox as extensible as it is, and also "secure" as Chrome.

Chrome is crippled in many ways. Extensions are second class citizens, merely along for the ride. They can be removed remotely at Google's whim, and you can't rely on them to run reliably. They also don't have full access to the browser the way Firefox add-ons do.

Among my different profiles, I have profiles to slice and dice the web. I can do a ton of web scraping without having to write any scripts. I can do a ton of cool stuff, and customize Firefox the way I want. Firefox gives me cheatcodes to the web.

Who the hell said extensions had to be sandboxed? That's an overly cautious decision that makes sense for Google. It's a WEAKNESS. It's a COMPROMISE that Google had to make with Chrome. It is not a strength.

The iOS app store makes money for Apple. So does that mean we must copy the weaknesses of the iOS app store? That's cargo cult thinking.

Who exactly are you "competing" against? This isn't a competition. Linux is not inferior because it isn't Windows.

The early days of Firebird were not spent trying to match the features of Internet Explorer! Internet Explorer offered some superior features that Mozilla could never match. It even had awful custom CSS rules, that let websites do things like change the color of scrollbars.

Firebird focused on making a fully standards compliant browser, and then success found it, when the public got sick of Microsoft. And maybe that won't happen this time around, but so what?? This is just hubris on the part of Mozilla, at this point.

I'm horrified at what would have happened, if in 2006, everyone had rolled up their sleeves to bring ActiveX support to Firebird on par with IE6. Is that what you think would have worked?? Microsoft would always be several steps ahead of you.

This is tilting at windmills.

Because web browsers are the single largest and most common attack vector on every end-user device, and emacs and autocad aren't. I'm​ not in a position to say whether Mozilla's implementation of extension signing makes any sense, but it is practical to hold web browsers to higher standards.

I'm also not sure how extension signing makes Google any money?