I see large problems here.
For extensions that will never be publicly distributed and will never leave an internal network, there will be a third option. We’ll have more details available on this in the near future.
First, noting the above, we have a number of extensions developed for the exclusive use of our employees. This will have to be in place before restrictive signing is in place. I don't have a great deal of faith that it will.
Second, we have a number of our sales, support and customer folks who are outside of our internal network but still need to use a couple of these extensions. From the sound if it, we will need to get these extensions ok'd by AMO. Unless Mozilla is willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement this won't happen. In the case of the outside sales and customers, a VPN is out of the question and, even if it wasn't, it appears that our customers would have to create a profile specifically for use on our system. We can tell the outside sales folks to do this or quit selling our product. Our customers, reasonably, will tell us to go to hell.
Third, and this will affect even the regular extensions, it will make it impossible to make small changes to an extensions and have them tested by the person having the problem before it is placed in production. Unless the process is going to be easily defeated, this means that we will have to make a change, get it signed, have the person test it and, if unsuccessful, repeat the process. At least two of these extensions do things that I doubt automated testing will approve so this will increased delay between development, testing and release.
Firefox should simply not allow an extension to change a home page or be installed from external installation. In the first case, there is not legit reason to do so,.In the second an email can be sent after installation registration suggesting that they install it from AMO which would allow review. They should have black listed such sinners as BrandThunder long ago.
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Question: Since this does not seem likely to be coming to SeaMonkey, would it be a good idea to move this to Extension Dev?