> If you're making extensions and distributing them by hand to your friends you're so far outside the mainstream of Firefox users that you might as well not exist and they shouldn't be making decisions based on your usage patterns.
They should just release a Firefox preskool edition for Joe Average User.
But this is a great example of the rot in Mozilla. When Apple or Google sacrifice functionality to appeal to users that don't like computers, it is because they make more money by expanding their platform.
When Mozilla sacrifices functionality to try to attract new users, then what? They aren't really making any money off of it. They are just getting new users for the sake of it.
If Firefox has to remove so much functionality to become more popular, than why bother at all?
It is like if everyone is eating McDonalds, and you are selling healthy produce, but only 20% of the population ever wants your healthy food. So you start coating your healthy food in sugar and deep frying it. Even if you win, you lose.
> This is aimed at Joe Average User who maybe downloaded a program from sourceforge and suddenly every user on the computer has Myway Search installed, or something with serious privacy problems that's injecting itself into every web page they visit.
I think this is a lie. I mean, yes it does mitigate a specific kind of malware injection, sure. But if someone already can write to your filesystem, then it is game over. If Firefox actually had any marketshare and was a big enough target to care about, malware could simply inject malicious extensions some other way. Having the web browser trying to secure itself on a compromised system is a fool's errand. And it is not a justification for such a massive regression in functionality. It is not a rational decision.
I strongly suspect that it was a rational decision for Google to do this with Chrome; to put up roadblocks for users trying to have too much control of their browser, and justify it in the name of security. And then Mozilla irrationally copied them. Because they are a Google cargo cult.