It is horribly paternalistic to advocate for keeping users ignorant, unlearning, and --- dare I say it --- easily manipulated.
I will refrain from mentioning again that infamous Franklin quote. I am frankly very fucking pissed off by this authoritarian walled-garden trend, and vehemently oppose anyone who helps this industry put the nooses around the necks of others as well as their own.
I still don’t want to have to understand everything I ever touch, even if I could.
If you don't understand it, don't touch it. The default settings should work for most users. There can even be a warning against touching without understanding, like with Firefox's about:config. The offensive thing is preventing users from touching even if they do understand.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but the right mechanism is not straightforward to figure out, and you'll always be in a game of cat and mouse. One that sucks resources from whatever other useful stuff you might be spending your (or Mozilla's) time on.
I do think that in the future, it will be imperative for everyone to have some level of technological literacy above what is currently the average. And I'd like to work to get to that point, instead of taking all the tools away because they're too dangerous.
Also, sensible defaults are good! Hiding dangerous settings is also good! What's not okay is making those settings completely unavailable. At least in Firefox's case you have the option to recompile the source code, but that should not be the only recourse...
If we're going to be authoritarian I would rather ban anyone who doesn't understand that from connecting to the internet then have a broken walled garden.
That is absolutely complicated for the vast majority of the world's internet users. No one else is my family would understand what the hell "privileged code" means and shouldn't have to.
Adjust the qualifier at the end depending on your platform. On Windows, it might be apps that present a UAC dialogue—or maybe just remove the qualifier, since Windows doesn't do much sandboxing by default.
If you want your freedom from reviewed extensions: fine, get an unbranded Firefox, or Developer edition, and you get that.
If you can recommend an fork that allows extension sideloading but is kept up to date, please do so, I’ve been looking...
Unbranded Firefox is actually a specific version of Firefox distributed by Mozilla, which allows you to disable extension signing requirements. I am very glad to see that they offer this, and I will be using it from now on.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...