[commoner]

> What may have been missing from it is the ideological bit - for a platform to be truly open - and to be a viable platform!, it can't have a restricted "whitelist".

> What's probably needed for full webextension support is a strong, perhaps not purely rational leader that will rally folks and actually push the teams to do the work that may be useless, or useful to a tiny percentage of the user base, in a belief that it'll produce a better future. Which may or may not pan out!

While I appreciate the development work you and other Mozilla engineers have done on Firefox, this kind of attitude is causing Firefox to bleed users. This argument dismisses honest feedback from users as "ideological" and "not purely rational" because it doesn't align with Mozilla's product decisions. Desiring access to more add-ons is a utilitarian position to take, not an irrational one. On the other hand, continuously ignoring your users is a surefire way to lose them as soon as they find a viable alternative to your product, and that's what I would call irrational.

Allowing users to opt out of the extension whitelist on the stable channel of Firefox for Android is a low-effort, high-impact change that would greatly benefit users who use add-ons other than the 18 whitelisted ones, while not harming the users who choose to stay with the whitelist (enabled by default) in any way. By refusing to make the whitelist optional, Mozilla is making Firefox for Android significantly less useful to users who want to use non-whitelisted add-ons, while not improving the experience for the users who choose not to opt out.