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"Everything is open source" does not contradict "hermetically sealed product".

I built myself an extension. Just for myself, nobody else. It worked great, then in one of these "policy changes" I couldn't use it anymore. Just for myself. That is a betrayal of trust. If I could use it before, and now I need to hack/mod Firefox by building it on a machine with umpteen hundreds of gigabytes of storage, that is a betrayal of trust. Firefox is "demonstrably" a hermetically sealed product. As demonstrated by my lived experience.



You can use private extensions; you just need to use web-ext to sign it. Doesn't need to be published.

Also the "developer edition" allows installing unsigned extensions. No need to build your own.


Hmm, I'm not familiar with web-ext. I'm not sure it existed 10 years ago, back when Firefox went through their Quantum transition.

Looks like web-ext came out in 2016: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-.... My extension is at https://github.com/akkartik/spew, and it looks like there might have been a period of a year when I wasn't able to use it.

When software auto-updates and stops working, we consider that breakage. When software auto-updates and code I wrote stops working, we say "oh, it affects just 0.01% of users." For me, the inescapable lesson is to not write code for extension eco-systems, because they're all too immature for serious use. At least as of the year 2015.




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