[gnicholas]

At least it’s possible to side load extensions in Chrome. I’ve been more disappointed in Firefox, which doesn’t allow this at all, even in the developer release. The only thing similar to side loading that is allowed is a temporary debug process, which loads an addon but only until the browser is restarted.

[coffeefirst]

You can! It's far more annoying, but I've been running a few that I've made for myself

In `about:config`, set `xpinstall.signatures.required` to false, and then you can an unsigned bundled extension locally and they'll persist like normal extensions.

[tacotime]

If this is not in the MDN refs anywhere yet, it really should be. I’ve been battling with web-ext for a week now after something mysterious broke that I’ve not yet been able to fix. I’m so glad you posted!

[gnicholas]

It looks like that doesn’t work in the regular version of Firefox – only Nightly, Developer, or one of the unbranded versions. Is that true in your experience?

[fireattack]

You're correct, this doesn't work on stable or beta releases.

[coffeefirst]

Yes, I forgot about this but I'm using the Developer version as my main browser because of that.

[riedel]

There is an unbranded build of Firefox that allows this even provided by Mozilla.

[riedel]

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...