When you dig deeper, you will indeed find that the public reason for these kind of restrictions is "to keep the user safe".
They claim to be worried about malware installing their own extensions, so they lock everything down. As if that same malware wouldn't just patch the firefox binary to allow loading unsigned extensions.
It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.
> It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.
Check out Firefox for Android. It has a Walled Garden of extensions. There is a list of about 20 whitelisted extensions. All others are (falsely) claimed to be "incompatible".
They claim to be worried about malware installing their own extensions, so they lock everything down. As if that same malware wouldn't just patch the firefox binary to allow loading unsigned extensions.
It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.