why? why can't they let people install addons from the store and see what breaks and only fix those things? by this rate and how nightly can run addons, why not the regular folk?
Because (1) add-ons are known to have performance and compatibility issues (e.g. breaking websites - I recall hearing that the vast majority of website breakage reports for FF were just due to addons) on desktop, (2) these problems would almost certainly be worse on mobile, (3) even though it'll be the addon's fault that'll still result in a bad reputation for Firefox, and (4) Mozilla cares more about the reputation of Firefox than user freedom.
I think that #4 is bad, but I believe it to be true, with moderate certainty. I believe 1-3 to be true with high certainty.
I believe bureaucratic organizations to be incapable of this in general. See the Signal Foundation and its recent braindead decision to remove SMS from Signal instead of putting it behind an advanced setting or using a warning message.
Definitely among the tech-savvy - but, unfortunately, I believe that it still ends up being a net positive for them for the average non-tech savvy users. Think of how many people switched from Firefox to Chrome when Chrome started being faster and more stable - despite how much less customizable it was, and how many fewer addons it had.
I believe that this is a problem that should be fixed with tech education - but until then, the above hold, as sucky as it is.
I know 2 non-technical users who use Firefox on Android and they use it because I recommended it.
Their reputation with technical users is almost everything they have left and they're doing their best to destroy it further and further. This decision looks to be a rare exception, but if you still need their dumb account effectively nothing will have changed...
There are rumours that Google told them running arbitrary code in Firefox is forbidden, because they can't audit that. I have never been able to find a confirmation for that though.
Which is a ridiculous opinion, of course, since the whole point of a browser is to run arbitrary code.
Never heard that before. Sure you're not thinking of iOS, where that is indeed the (stated) reason for not allowing alternative browser engines and requiring the use of the system webkit.
If that's the reasoning, then hiding add-ons not ratified for mobile behind a flag that normal users won't ever touch should be an acceptable solution.
why are they making this difficult?