[azinman2]

Seems petty. Mozilla is one of the most pure open source projects out there in mission, ethos, and product. Addons are user choices, and trying to limit that choice is self defeating in free speech.

[kkmickos]

Well, some things at Mozilla seem a bit odd.

A few weeks ago Nightly ended up having "Pocket" integrated, and rumour said it would replace Mozilla's own open source Sync plus the integrated Reader.

Addons will soon no longer be able to be installed unless approved by Mozilla. (Another walled garden. Sigh...)

[MacsHeadroom]

>Addons will soon no longer be able to be installed unless approved by Mozilla.

Bullshit. The add-on signing requirement will be able to be easily disabled. It's just as much of a "walled garden" as Debian's repos are (ie. nothing like a walled garden).

[pki]

This is very good, I hate having to constantly remove malware plugins off friends'/family stuff, hijacking new tab, hijacking search providers...

[gcb0]

So, pay apple and use the one browser. You already have that offering.

[pserwylo]

> Addons are user choices, and trying to limit that choice is self defeating in free speech.

I believe you are talking about the big red boxes that mention it has "Non Free Addons". This is what is known as an "AntiFeature" in F-Droid [0]. It is not a reason to exclude a project from the main repository. Rather, it is purely a piece of metadata that is shown on the website and in the client to let people know that it is a thing.

The goal is to provide as much information as possible to users, so that they can make educated choices about which software they choose to install on their device.

[0] - https://f-droid.org/manual/html_node/AntiFeatures.html

[ubernostrum]

While I appreciate that there are people who do this, I also end up wondering where it'll end up. Debian, for example, has had to go round and round on whether the GNU FDL is actually sufficiently Free for Debian's guidelines. As I understand it, the current status is the FDL is considered non-DFSG-compatible by default, and exceptions are only available when it can be demonstrated that the FDL is used in a way that doesn't bring certain clauses into play.

[gcb0]

it is not about addons. who said anything about addons?

you still can install ALL the same addons on fennec as you can on official firefox.

can you people, please, stop talking before reading anything official? the very own page for the new build warn about unsafe addons! https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=firefox&fdid...

now, here is the official list of what is removed [with my comments]:

    Removed: Tests [not sure about that]
    Removed: Crashreporter [tracking]
    Removed: Healthreporter (UI?)
    Removed: Mediastreaming (requires non-free library: play-services) [google's binary blobs]
    Removed: Updater [tracking]
    Removed: EME/DRM [adobe's binary blob]
    Added: MultiLocales [tracking. what is some 100kb of text when you now don't have to tell play store your locale?]