[Mozilla Enterprise] Mozilla To Stop Supporting Sideloaded Extensions In Firefox

[James Pearson]

Marco Gaiarin wrote:
> 
>> The thing that is going away is the concept of sideloading where you put
>> extensions in a central location and they get loaded into Firefox and the user
>> can't remove them (they can only disable them).
>> You will still be able to put extensions into distribution/extensions because
>> they simply get installed into Firefox as normal extensions.
> 
> Things get newer, anche change. It is normal.
> 
> 
> But still i'm lost trying to understand *why* of that change. Looking
> at:
>          https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/10/31/firefox-to-discontinue-sideloaded-extensions/
> 
> seems to me that the trouble came from the fact that some 'threat' have
> hijacked 'sideloading' to have their extensions loaded and locked.
> 
> This mean to me that the 'threat' had to be executed as 'administrator'
> (to copy extension in 'extensions' and to put some 'js' files in
> 'defaults\preferences', to use Autoconfig to prevent extension
> disabling or uninstallation.
> 
> But if users have administrator right on the local machine, can also hijack
> the new 'policy' settings, probably doing nastier things!
> 
> So, really i don't understand the benefit of new 'policy' method of
> installing extensions versus the 'sideloading+Autoconfig' old one.
> 
> 
> Still i prefere sideloading (why duplicate all extensions for all
> users, when i can install only one time?), but if we have to change,
> what are really the benefit?
> If is only a 'preferences mess cleanup', why not simply add a policy
> 'SideloadExtensions = true'?

I agree - I don't want thousands of copies of the same extension in each 
user's home directory - I just want a single copy to be loaded from a 
central location along with Firefox itself

If there are already Policies to control what extensions are enabled by 
default, then why not allow those extensions to be sideloaded ???

Thanks

James Pearson

P.S. I'm still a bit confused about 'sideloading' - as the Blog post 
says the change will be with Firefox 73/74 - but I can't seem to enable 
'sideloading' with ESR 68 - i.e. want to be able to load named 
extensions from a central location without copying them to each profile 
with the current ESR 68 ...