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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

Does the removal of the extension from the extension gallery prevent people from using the extension or just limit its exposure? If the latter then there is not censorship but simply Mozilla deciding the cost is not worth the bother. No one has any particular right to be promoted by Mozilla.

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So if Verizon would block certain websites for its customers it will not be censorship? Well, it will be. You seem to believe that censorship implies denying legal rights, and only is real when it's total. But censorship can be perfectly legal, and it's never total (albeit it requires either efforts, or money, you can reach forbidden websites in China). I'm not arguing about legality of Mozilla's decision at all. Nevertheless, it is censorship, and as long as it's motivated by ideological differences it's ideological censorship. And as Mozilla pretends to be just browser (not some party's browser) it looks weird, and no exactly smart. My question is why anybody who's not fanatically partisan would support it? Does it mean one feels a lot of pain using Mozilla just because political adversaries use it too? Consequently, do we need a separate fork of every browser for every faction nowadays (apparently, with separate sets of ideologically proven extensions)?

Mozilla are directly violating their own manifesto, where they claim "We are committed to an internet that promotes civil discourse"[0]. Have you even read the article?

When they were asked to clarify what exactly was violating their ToS, they replied with the most standard bureaucratic non-answer, the kind you might receive from an auto-response email service, full of corporate-speak.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

EDIT: According to this[1], Mozilla supposedly cares enough about this free speech, free platform issue to donate $100,000 to "a coordination platform used by activists across the political spectrum, to improve the security of their email service". Do you still believe it's a stretch to hold them to a much higher standard than a for-profit corporation? Note the "activists across the political spectrum" part in their own words.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/03/mozilla-awards-half...

As far as i can see from the article, Mozilla is still agreeing to sign the addon, just not to list it in the AMO site.

The article lists an 8 step process and claims users would have to follow that on each restart of Firefox to enable the addon. I’m not sure if that’s true, as the guidelines I can see on other websites seem to suggest self hosting addons shouldn’t have that problem.

If Mozilla won't sign it, you have to install it manually. [0]

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Dis...

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