Firefox 42 will not allow unsigned extensions

Ad-blockers have finally reached a point that the financiers of the major browsers are setting the groundwork for tightening the screws on them. Not right now, but in a couple years when earnings start trending down. Google and Yahoo -- driven by ads -- fund Chrome and Firefox, over half the browser market.

Nobody innately wants to be evil; these are still * mostly * engineer driven companies. But when it comes to an extensential crisis of revenue vs freedom, there is no real choice.

So thanks guys. We had a good run with open browsers, but it is quickly drawing closed because you just couldn't stand the ANNOYANCE of seeing ads next to your content. It's been fun, and now back to the darkness we go.

I don't see what would prevent folks from switching to a fork if that happened.

Sure. It will be a fork that falls behind master without funding or support. Get enough momentum and push it far enough and Chromium and Firefox will stop being OSS altogether.

> Ad-blockers have finally reached a point that the financiers of the major browsers are setting the groundwork for tightening the screws on them.

You speak with such confidence about things you obviously have no idea about. This change is driven by the massive amount of malware that threatens users of all browser with a sufficiently strong add-on API.

Can you please point me to any evidence that would suggest that this change was made even just in parts at the request of Yahoo?

Also, Firefox is free software, the only thing that belongs to Mozilla is the name. If it ever became difficult to block ads with Firefox, that brand would lose its value pretty quickly and somebody else would offer Firefox+adblocking under a different name.

This is indistinguishable from the conspiracy theories people used to circulate about a magic carburetor design which got 85MPG and was killed by Detroit automakers for unknown reasons.

Just look at the chain of unsupported assertions which have to all come true for this to make any sense: Mozilla will prevent you from installing ad-blockers, and that this will bother enough users to matter but somehow that won't lead to enough volunteered developer time to maintain even an almost unmodified “fork” which changes only a build flag (or a signing key)?

Or that somehow if that proved popular enough to attract a large number of users they'd react not by reconsidering such policies but instead push everyone over to Edge/WebKit? Microsoft and Apple are not primarily advertising companies and at least Apple is marketing actively on the idea of respecting your privacy – it's hard to imagine anyone working at a browser vendor not realizing that such a move is simply going to push users to switch.