Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

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The most surprising development on this front has been Firefox's limiting user's ability to install addons that have not been blessed by them. I understand that if you run an app store, you get to review code and refuse to distribute apps/addons that don't meet your standards.

The surprising thing is that Firefox does not let you install a non-blessed addon, even if you are downloading it from the developer's website (i.e., not from Mozilla). They don't give you a warning about installing software from un-vetted sources — they straight up don't let you install. I understand this is the case even if you're running the developer version of Firefox, which is obviously not meant for mainstream users.

AFAIK, the only way to install a Firefox addon that has not been blessed is to get your hands on the XPI and install it in debug mode, which means that it automatically uninstalls itself every time you restart your browser.

I would have expected MS Edge, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari to have done something like this before Mozilla Firefox. What happened to the open web?

It is possible to load unvetted extensions, but it's inconvenient. If you go to this url in Firefox:

   about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox

You can install a "Temporary Add-On", which is any add-on/extension you have stored on your local disk[1]. So you can download an extension from a third party, rename the .xpi to a .zip (Firefox extensions are just zip files with a different extension), unzip it, and use the "Load Temporary Add-on" button to point to the manifest.json file in the unzipped extension.

Add-ons installed this way will work as though you installed it via normal means, with the caveat that it will not automatically reload when you restart Firefox, it must be added manually again.

I have developed a few extensions, and this is the standard process for testing extensions during development. There is a similar process in Chrome, etc.

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Chrome is much easier (Load Unpacked Extension), and persists across restarts, IIRC.

> I understand that if you run an app store, you get to review code and refuse to distribute apps/addons that don't meet your standards.

I think that you lose the moral right to curate your app store when you make it impossible for users to switch to alternative app stores.

Curation or no-sideloading: there should be a law that says a company should get to choose only one.

It's the reason I decided not to switch back to Firefox. I want to run my own extensions without anyone else's approval.

You can sideload relatively easily even on stable, and I'm fine with the UX being slightly arcane because the average user shouldn't need to do it

Is there a way to permanently side-load? In my experience you can only do it via the debug functionality, which uninstalls with every restart. I believe you can side-load approved addons permanently, but I've not seen this for non-approved addons.

On Linux, many distributions build Firefox with a magic directory where extensions can be placed without needing a signature, if you have root access.

E.g. this is how Arch builds and installs Tridactyl https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/...

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