[the8472]

> if they provide a way to easily enable extensions that they haven't tested they will be flooded with reports about extensions that don't work.

Well, it used to be the case that extension had to explicitly declare which applications they support (e.g. thunderbird, seamonkey, firefox). That's not the case anymore with the webext manifest format, but at least temporarily mozilla could have introduced some sort of opt-in by extension developers to avoid this scenario without gatekeeping. The assumption would then be that the developers tested that the available api subset on android is sufficient for their extension.

> The developer community seemed to take Mozilla's intention to expand extensions' capabilities as a promise to have Mozilla employees do all that work

I was interested in that, but when I looked into it it turned out that it was limited to developer edition and required two separate extensions to be installed it's a lot of work that only a handful of users could ever test and after going 2 migrations (XUL -> jetpack -> webext) it felt like yet another temporary thing with uncertain future. It seems to have changed a bit since then, so maybe it's worth looking into it again.

[aswan]

> at least temporarily mozilla could have introduced some sort of opt-in by extension developers to avoid this scenario without gatekeeping

Yep, I agree completely. In the mean time, there is https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034

As for experiments, the days of two separate extensions are long gone :) The point about multiple migrations (you didn't even mention e10s!) is a fair one...