Also from the official announcement (https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/28/open-extensions-on-firefox-for-android-debut-december-14-but-you-can-get-a-sneak-peek-today/ ):
Starting December 14, 2023, extensions marked as Android compatible on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) will be openly available to Firefox for Android users.
“We’ve been so impressed with developer enthusiasm and preparation,” said Giorgio Natili, Firefox Director of Engineering. “Just a few weeks ago it looked like we might have a couple hundred Android extensions for launch, but now we can safely say AMO will have 400+ new Firefox for Android extensions available on December 14. We couldn’t be more thankful to our developer community for embracing this exciting moment.”
This is nuts but desktop firefox is already like that. Imagine /usr/bin/sudo getting 400 new extensions. Browsers are a security nightmare even without extensions. That said, we can’t live without ad blockers any more.
What kind of comparison is that? sudo is setuid while Firefox and its extensions run as the user you started it as.
Also sudo has just one very specific and limited use case, while Firefox is more of a platform for web content. I could argue that sudo itself is an ‘extension’ to a Linux system, like every application.
You also don’t have to install all of those extension, you can choose which you trust, similar to a Linux system, you don’t have to install every application in the repository.
If you say that the Firefox add-on repo should be more managed like a repository of a Linux distribution, where developers cannot simply upload their own software, but need to find a trusted maintainer first, I could agree to that. But that would mean more work and overhead.
For most people, firefox touches a lot more private information than sudo does. For example, once the malware extension gets your email password, it can reset your passwords to everything else, and take over all your accounts on everything everywhere, rather than just one machine like sudo.