Why unsigned extensions are not allowed to be shared

Talk about add-ons and extension development.
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Satok0
New Member
Posts: 1
Joined: February 8th, 2018, 10:48 pm

Why unsigned extensions are not allowed to be shared

Post by Satok0 »

Hi, MozillaZine community. I used to browse using Firefox and had tons of addons that modified the browser for convenience use but recently I came back from Chrome and realized most addons are now obsolete because they required mozilla to sign the extensions. Whats the reason for Mozilla to take this step?
dotnetnightmare
Posts: 1
Joined: July 11th, 2010, 7:21 pm

Re: Why unsigned extensions are not allowed to be shared

Post by dotnetnightmare »

Malicious extensions, malware, malvertising, hijacked addons, data mining, bitcoin mining, impact to browser performance, advertising, keyloggers, botnets, to name a few reasons. Chrome has a similar process for the same reasons. When a user installs an add-on hosted on a Mozilla server they have a reasonable expectation that some level of security is being implemented to minimize the risk of hostile code. There have been alot of extensions found to be hostile and removed from both Mozilla and Chrome stores. Now that were seeing cross browser extension evolve due to Quantum, it only makes sense to protect the servers and users alike. S3 Translator is an amazing add-on that now works in any Chrome based browser, but with it's origin being Mozilla only.
I think this is really the rebirth of Firefox.
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