Earlier quoted context omitted.
Killing the old extension API is a painful, but important, step. From a security standpoint, WebExtensions are a lot better, since they are sandboxed and require explicit permissions to be granted for many things. From a developer standpoint, they are easier to deal with, being JavaScript, and since Chrome and Edge support similar APIs, developers will no longer need multiple codebases to support their extensions on…
> From a security standpoint, WebExtensions are a lot better, since they are sandboxed In a sandbox even I, as the owner of the computer, can't let them out of. That's not cool. > From a developer standpoint, they are easier to deal with, being JavaScript, and since Chrome and Edge support similar APIs, developers will no longer need multiple codebases to support their extensions on multiple browsers. In the sense th…
If you want unsandboxed extensions, you can install Nightly or Dev Edition and flip the extensions.legacy.preference. The basic problem with providing a simpler escape hatch on release Firefox is that if you compare the number of users who are equipped to make an informed choice about allowing extension X arbitrary access to browser internals versus the number of users who will be tricked into letting malware do terrible things, the second number is multiple orders of magnitude larger than the first. I understand why folks are unsatisfied with the "use Nightly or Dev Edition with the preference flipped" solution but I am certain that it is the least bad option.