(not the parent)
2) I'll concede the technical reasons. But it's been something like four years now, and you still haven't caught up with what the previous extensions could do. There's still no way to remap keys without waiting for the current tab to load, for example. This is a very important UX feature!
4) The problem is, when you force users to go through the Mozilla gatekeeper, it's all the more important to get this right and not have that gatekeeper sleeping on the job.
Second, the failure behavior was not fail-safe. Users had their previously-signed addons disabled when this struck. Many of these were necessary to protect their privacy, which was then compromised.
(Proper fail-safe behavior would have been to allow already-signed addons to keep working or put up a warning, so don't tell me it would have needed a huge investment of resources to avoid that catastrophe.)
How many other browsers have had a sudden global feature outage like that?
And, to make it worse, your leadership thought it was somehow reassuring to say, "Oh, don't worry, we broke the promises of the user experiments feature to push out a forced update that fixed this!"
>A decision to not sign addons would have consequences as well -- which we knew intimately, because they were very, very real and growing rapidly.
Mozillians keep insisting this but I have yet to see evidence. Has there been even one case of a user a) who is technically adept enough to enable unsigned add-ons, and b) sideloaded an extension, and c) suffered a security catastrophe that merited Mozilla intervention? Most of the naive users you're claiming to protect can't even get past a).
Chrome allows unsigned addons just by toggling developer mode. Where are their massive security breaches from that?
The original promise of Firefox was to give me back control of my machine. Having to go through Mozilla for my custom extension just feels like the days of getting software from shrinkwrap at Best Buy again.
My parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8