It almost seems like that and extension signing are designed to break extensions. I was going to ask who will use Firefox when the extension writing community is destroyed. But maybe they only want the ingenue neophyte blissfully unaware of being caged. IOW people who only know internet through phones and tablets.
They cannot possibly not know the effect. I was toying with the idea of trying my hand at writing an extension until I started reading the thread on the Firefox extension forum about signing. The handwriting is in the wall.
We need someone to create AnarchistFox. The browser that lets you do whatever the hell you want whenever you want to do it. 
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-MilesAhead
Your comments here would seem to be ironic, in retrospect, given that Mozilla Firefox rather started out with a vision representing a white night championing the freeing of the Internet experience from the death-like grip of the corporate ad-merchants' and MS Windows/IE fascists' control, or something, and incorporated deliberate design principles so that anyone could make FF "their own" with whatever extensions/add-ons/scripts one wanted. The many Internet serfs amongst us who strongly identified with and shared such a vision could stride into the future with heads held high, their fists raised in firm defiance, secure in the knowledge that, in FF, they had a White Night - a champion and an ally. This champion offered a means and an
opportunity for the serfs to secure and control their unique personal Internet experience - their Internet independence and
freedom - and even to help them to "stick it to the Man" - if they so wished (and some no doubt fervently did and may still do to this day).
/Rant ON.
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The FF browser was a mascot, a logo, and - for some - an idol. It was
A Just Cause in a
Golden Age for Internet User
Anarchy. So it became a sort of idolatrous Religion to fight the Crusade of Internet Anarchy, and it was going to make the world
"a better place" - that is, if we all conformed and became FF users just like everybody else.
So, there were FF logos of all sorts, and FF banners for websites proudly proclaiming the FF "brand" and our
lurve for FF, and there were FF parties, love-fests and conferences, and FF love-ins, wife-swapping parties and orgies, and FF discussion forums, and FF Doctorates became popular in universities, and people made FF cakes. Across the world, the parents of boy and sometimes girl children conceived by FF developers and fans during those heady times would often be christened with FF-redolent Christian names, including (for example):
- "Firefox", "Fox" or "Foxy" (in English-speaking countries),
- "Renard" (in French-speaking countries),
- or the more masculine "Wulf" (as a matter of preference in Teutonic areas, or out of a misunderstanding in places where they either didn't have foxes or didn't know what foxes were),
- or "Vulpo" (for native speakers of Esperanto).
Whatever happened to that vision? Hmm, let's see:
- 1. Gone are the encouraging but childishly amusing marketing logos of mighty Mozilla Firefox robots with rocket-drives built into their their feet, or something, conquering the Internet. Mozilla has now "come of age" and is toeing the party line and clearly not being allowed to continue its anarchistic and disruptive technology development.
- 2. Gone is the flow of encouragement/motivation directed at the Faithful - the FF supporter community - exhorting them to greater efforts to proselytizye and to "spread the Firefox word", or to put FF banners on their websites, or whatever. That would all be pointless, idealistic nonsense now.
- 3. Gone is the independent, anarchic uniqueness of FF, which seems to have become a semi-ubiquitous and increasingly iron-fisted vanilla product in an apparently pseudo-competitive market where all the other browsers have the same iron fist and taste, including IE, Chromium, Google Chrome, and FF's several forks. Yet MS is apparently declaring that it will be pulling IE out of the browser market? Yeah, right.
- 4. Gone is the sense of direction from Mozilla about "how many millions of downloads of Firefox" there have been, or what the browser market share looks like. So who at Mozilla cares who is using FF and why they are using it? The answer may well be that no-one is interested since it is irrelevant. The so-called "browser wars" (possibly a feel-good mythical invention?) have now ostensibly ended, with browser development apparently being controlled in the background via cartels - manipulative groups of corporate/commercial and political and spying interests.
The Old Media of the newspapers and TV news channels (i.e., MSM - MainStream Media) were/are similarly controlled by these cartels, and obligingly regurgitate the same indoctrination - often word-for-word. Nowhere else does this seem to be more apparent than in the USA. Old Media are now being forced to transform into the New Media of the Internet, and there has been an ongoing struggle by the old cartel(s) to establish a pre-eminent position of control over the New Media and the technologies enabling the Internet.
The prevailing/pre-eminent cartel(s) in each area of territorial sovereignty will slowly tighten the noose around users' necks so that users will be be forced to ONLY have the collective experience, utility and financial intermediation of the Internet that the cartels choose to allow and enable. Anything else will be defined as being "illegal". This is apparently being and likely to continue to be governed mostly through State intervention/decree and regulatory bodies appointed within areas of territorial sovereignty. This is already becoming a fait accompli in many instances, having resulted from covert and overt action and collaboration between States - e,g, including Pan-European, Pan-American, Pan-Australasian and Pan-Asian efforts on SOPA, TPP, etc.
- 5.Gone is the freedom to make and choose extensions/scripts.
- We saw userscripts.org mysteriously taken off the air, and, as if to make certain, at about the same time as Greasemonkey was forcibly updated to a version that was apparently not backwards compatible with "older" userscripts.
- Recently Read It Later (aka "Pocket") was silently made a mandatory component in FF. What the heck is that about if it isn't that prior FF policy and standards excluding such actions haven't been turned on their heads due to corruption for financial gain? I used to have the RIL extension anyway, but now that it has been made mandatory I am deleting the thing altogether (the extension and within about:config).
- Recently, compulsory "Registration" was introduced unilaterally by Mozilla, which prohibited Add-Ons/Extensions which were not "Registered" by Mozilla - read "Licenced" - so all of our extensions slowly disappeared, to be belatedly brought back with "Registered" labels, and said labels being deliberately removed now so that we won't be able to tell which are which, and that will confuse us so that we won't be able to figure out which extensions have never been allowed back. This market manipulation is redolent of the Greasemonkey script called Facebook Unfriendfinder, which provided information about your account as to who had unfriended you and re-friended you, but Facebook lawyers apparently may have leaned heavily on the author and he withdrew it. It still, works, with a bit of tweaking to work around subsequent and ongoing Facebook changes.
- 6. Gone is Mozilla's apparent political independence, with Mozilla apparently succumbing to fascism, with the man who was a primary founder and architect of the Mozilla vision being mercilessly hounded out of his newly-Board-assigned position as Mozilla's CEO', within days of taking up the position, because a minority group apparently did not want him there and so picked on his personal and long-known views against homosexual "marriage", or something, as making him out to be unfit to be in what had become a politically correct organisation - where even certain thoughts or opinions that might differ from the official collective view were apparently no longer to be allowed and indeed were a crime to be punished by being put in the stocks for public humiliation as an example of what was to be done to heretics, followed by excommunication or professional lynching, or both. Shades of The Royal Society and Prof. Eric Laithwaite.
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/Rant OFF.
