Miskatonic University PressA quick pointer to Automated Scanning of Firefox Extensions is Security Theater (And Here’s Code to Prove It) by Dan Stillman, lead developer on Zotero, about how extension signing (meant to make Firefox more secure) could cause serious problems for Zotero.
A quote:
For the last few months, we’ve been asking on the Mozilla add-ons mailing list that Zotero be whitelisted for extension signing. If you haven’t been following that discussion, 1) lucky you, and 2) you can read my initial post about it, which gives some context. The upshot is that, if changes aren’t made to the signing process, we’ll have no choice but to discontinue Zotero for Firefox when Firefox 43 comes out, because, due to Zotero’s size and complexity, we’ll be stuck in manual review forever and unable to release timely updates to our users, who rely on Zotero for time-sensitive work and trust us to fix issues quickly. (Zotero users could continue to use our standalone app and one of our lightweight browser extensions, but many people prefer the tighter browser integration that the original Firefox version provides.)
Mozilla should give Zotero the special treatment it deserves. It’s a very important tool, and a crucial part of ongoing research all over the world. Mozilla needs to support it.