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For extensions that will never be publicly distributed and will never leave an internal network, there will be a third option. We’ll have more details available on this in the near future.
That sounds like admin installed certificates in the browser to verify the local signatures.
I don't believe that Mozilla has any innate desire to lock-down users and prevent them from customizing their browsers, but making a browser is now an expensive and complicated project, and both Firefox and Chrome are bankrolled by companies which make their revenue primarily via advertising (Google + Yahoo, Google).
It's clear that Google will never make the same mistake with mobile Chrome -- it will never be extensible, because they have no desire to sacrifice that advertising revenue. I doubt it will be more than a year or two before the Mozilla app store is purged of ad-blocking extensions, if they ever make it in.
I don't want to get in some flamewar about "oh but ads are so bad, I can't help but install adblock". They suck, and I'm not accusing anyone of acting in anything other than their personal best interests, but I think everyone should acknowledge that this is the natural end-game.
We have already seen malware that just replaces the Chrome binary to avoid add-on checks, but somehow this isn't seen as a big problem?
> That is possible, but I don’t expect the majority of malware developers to go through such trouble. [1]
I can totally understand where this idea is coming from, but trying to somehow secure Firefox on a system that is already busted is futile.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing...
IMO the rise of aggressive ad-blocking extensions has spoiled a good thing for everyone. I don't believe that Mozilla has any innate desire to lock-down users and prevent them from customizing their browsers, but making a browser is now an expensive and complicated project, and both Firefox and Chrome are bankrolled by companies which make their revenue primarily via advertising (Google + Yahoo, Google). It's clear t…
So besides the speed and the nuisance factors there is now also a security factor involved in ad-blocking.
I'm a bit skeptical of an automated security scan and approval process, but at least it provides a means to revoke a malicious plugin when complaints come in after the fact.
Malicious extensions are apparently the driver for this. So we're back to the problem that any sufficiently flexible platform is a vector for malware. The platform authority then institutes code signing as a checkpoint against this. Thus raising a big barrier to entry for non-malicious extensions. It's hard to see how to get back into this particular Eden.
Sorry for the rude question here, but is this speculation on your part or based on stuff said by folks at Mozilla (the corp, not just contributors/clients)? Some clearer sources would be helpful this early in the morning.
Extensions that change the homepage and search
settings without user consent have become very
common, just like extensions that inject
advertisements into Web pages or even inject
malicious scripts into social media sites. To combat
this, we created a set of add-on guidelines all
add-on makers must follow, and we have been
enforcing them via blocklisting (remote disabling of
misbehaving extensions). However, extensions that
violate these guidelines are distributed almost
exclusively outside of AMO and tracking them all
down has become increasingly impractical.
Furthermore, malicious developers have devised ways
to make their extensions harder to discover and
harder to blocklist, making our jobs more difficult.
We’re responsible for our add-ons ecosystem and we
can’t sit idle as our users suffer due to bad
add-ons. An easy solution would be to force all
developers to distribute their extensions through
AMO, like what Google does for Chrome extensions.
However, we believe that forcing all installs
through our distribution channel is an unnecessary
constraint. To keep this balance, we have come up
with extension signing, which will give us better
oversight on the add-ons ecosystem while not forcing
AMO to be the only add-on distribution channel."That makes it vaguely more egalitarian than a complex and bureaucratic mechanism that tends to favour bigger, more established software makers, who themselves have the staff and bureaucracy to match." This is FUD. Even Apple's App Store doesn't require huge amount of bureaucracy let alone what they seem to be talking about.
Agreed. Cryptographic signing of extensions in this context doesn't seem to me to be significantly different from the signing done by your other package management systems. One of my professors said "the browser is the new OS" about a decade ago. This seems like more proof of that to me — if we want fast, low power JavaScript in browsers, we have to have a reasonable chain of trust imo.
If you're too stubborn to let Mozilla sign it AND too lazy to do it yourself then that's your problem - you have no inalienable right to demand that people run your code if you can't be bother to secure it. However you are never locked out of providing mozilla addons, you can still supply whatever you like.
Also, Why did this piece bother to quote the random verbal vomit of some internet commenters? What is that supposed to show? That some people online are rude and ignorant? Frankly there's quite a bit of FUD in this thing, like asking if devs can trust that moving from Dev versions to production will break their code - pretty much the whole point of Mozilla's development model in iterating and providing developer editions is to ensure that doesn't happen.
I know that people love to reflexively bash anything that Mozilla does (and I'm critical more often than not myself), but this seems positive overall. As a savvy user, I can always manually install a plugin just as I can side-load an Android app that isn't on Google Play. However, my mom and other casual users who probably shouldn't be installing plugins at all have a somewhat more curated experience. I'm a bit skept…
There are exceptions - something about "in house, corporate" (whatever that means), developer editions of Firefox and nightly builds. But if I read correctly users of the current, stock Firefox will not be able to suppress the signature check when installing addons.