[tommi]

"That makes it vaguely more egalitarian than a complex and bureaucratic mechanism that tends to favour bigger, more established software makers, who themselves have the staff and bureaucracy to match."

This is FUD. Even Apple's App Store doesn't require huge amount of bureaucracy let alone what they seem to be talking about.

[Trombone41]

I think this refers to the apple practice of having vague rules and arbitrarily classify apps one way or another with no reliable explanation reaching the outside. So not bureaucratic in a literal sense, but rather in the sense of an opaque apparently rule-driven organization that produces incomprehensible decisions.

Sometimes apps containing things like pictures of old paintings with nude ladies are fine, sometimes not.

Often updates to something published will get stuck because some rule is supposedly being broken by the update, but of course the original, accepted, app contained the exact same thing.

[peri]

Agreed. Cryptographic signing of extensions in this context doesn't seem to me to be significantly different from the signing done by your other package management systems.

One of my professors said "the browser is the new OS" about a decade ago. This seems like more proof of that to me — if we want fast, low power JavaScript in browsers, we have to have a reasonable chain of trust imo.

[Trombone41]

I tried renaming some files with "the new OS", but all I got was a 404. I had to use the one the browser was running in instead.