[epoch1970]

It was the extension signing that caused me to move on. I had written several small, but useful, extensions for my own personal use. I knew they were harmless, yet Firefox made it difficult for me to actually use them.

If I'm remembering this right, I think there was initially an about:config option for disabling the signature checks. But that was eventually removed from the stable releases. The workarounds were to waste my time getting the extensions signed, or to use some special unbranded build, or to use the Nightly or Developer Edition releases. None of those were acceptable to me. Then I learned about the planned WebExtensions changes, and knew it was time to move on.

I'm aware of the security-related reasons that were used to justify such changes. But for me they ended up taking away the main benefits that Firefox offered, namely being easy to extend, and giving me the freedom to use the browser as I see fit.

[dallamaneni]

Firefox developer edition allows using unsigned webextensions by toggling xpinstall.signatures.required to false in about:config

[bigbugbag]

waterfox allows unsigned extensions.

It seems to me disabling the xpinstall.signatures.required setting has no effect anymore, at least the last time I tried using it, it had no effect.

[vetinari]

Firefox developer edition is the former Aurora (development) channel. It is not the stable release channel.

[johnny22]

You could use the unbranded builds. They build them specifically for your use case. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...

[dblohm7]

FWIW, developer edition is now the Beta channel.

[the8472]

It's not labeled as stable, that does not mean it is unstable.

[qovv]

IMO it is really shortsighted to treat your best users and evangelists so poorly. This is the absolute creme de la creme of your user base- they should be pandered to, not locked out.

[digi_owl]

Mozilla seems to have gotten infected by the same paternalism that is riding the likes of Gnome into the ground.