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Comment by zaarn | Hacker News Reader

Well, unsigned addons are banned in the branded release browser. If you use the developer edition, nightly or compile Firefox yourself then you can install unsigned addons into Firefox. The last option also enables you to turn of Pocket and a variety of other services.

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Does anyone maintain a branch with precompiled builds that has sideloading turned on + no Pocket / other services? Preferably with autoupdate still working?

Firefox is my primary browser on Windows, and I'd love to have this stuff removed, but I'm really not at a point where I can be compiling the code myself.

Icecat[0] might be the closest thing to what you are looking for. It's part of the GNU project.

0. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

No binary releases for Windows. :(

38.8.0 was the last one. https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/38.8.0/

That's exactly how it should be! The developer version isn't behind any barriers - it's trivially easy to find and install - and it keep the majority of people from installing some of the most malicious extensions.

I use to use nightly, then I found out they spy on you a lot more if you use nightly. I suspect the same applies to developer edition.

[0] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxNoNightl...

[1] https://lobste.rs/s/ri4kny/you_probably_don_t_want_run_firef...

When you first open a new Nightly install there's literally a banner across the entire browser telling you that it's collecting metrics, along with a button that displays more information and allows you to customize what data gets sent. The whole point of offering a Nightly build is so that they can have feedback on performance regressions and crashes. Characterizing it as "spying" is simply FUD.

And the event I'm linking to is a scenario where Mozilla updated nightly with no warning to share more data without telling me, against the policy stated about the setting in the browser. And a response by a Mozilla engineer saying that they thought this was perfectly acceptable behavior.

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