So I think running the Developer Edition (which I expect to be much more stable than Nightly) is probably your best bet.
FWIW, the Developer Edition feels pretty lean and mean. I haven't tried since I am a web developer, but it looks like you can remove most or all of the parts that make it web developer-y if you are so inclined.
Mozilla's business model needs users who can't figure out how to turn off Yahoo search. That pays for their new Firefox offices on the waterfront in San Francisco.[1]
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7895991,-122.3883498,3a,36y,...
1) Firefox without DRM, without lockdown
2) Firefox without DRM, with lockdown
3) Firefox with DRM, without lockdown
4) Firefox with DRM, with lockdown
...for every language?
In any case, if the specific combination of features you want is missing, the option to build from source is always there. (At least on Linux, building Firefox is also pretty easy.)
However, "without lockdown" is going to be an "unbranded browser."
So likely you will see two folders, something like this:
/browser/release/
1) Browser with DRM (no lockdown)
2) Browser without DRM (no lockdown)
/firefox/release/
1) Firefox without DRM
2) Firefox with DRM
Keeping things working is not solely the task of mozilla devs, extension developers have to do their part too.
Sometimes it's easy easy as toggling off some experimental feature or installing a beta build of that extension.
At other times you'll have to report a bug yourself.
And sometimes extensions just die because they're unmaintained. It happens eventually.
That's nothing unique to developer edition. You're just more likely to see something that'll trickle down to release builds soon anyway.
Personally I've managed to live with some annoyances on nightly for a few weeks until they got fixed.
e: cmd+shift+e assumes a Mac. Not sure what other systems use.
Losing tree style tabs in 42 has made me nervous, it was the primary reason I love firefox. Without that most of the why in using firefox goes away for me.
https://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml#features
As I understand, the author's opinion is that Adobe Reader is more secure than pdf.js. I'm not sure I would trust them with maintaining a secure browser in light of that.
Their monetization model is also questionable (I understand it injects ads / referral links).
Any source for that? A quick search didn't turn up anything and seeing as Pale Moon is now on my shortlist of Firefox alternatives I'd be interested.
That is overall fine but I like to keep my browsers portable across all of my primary operating systems.
Still, it is just a forked Firefox so it uses the same extensions etc for now, maybe using FF on Mac and PM on the other platforms would be possible?
Whether add-on signing is part of a power trip at Mozilla to enforce a walled garden with Mozilla-favorable policies remains to be seen. When Mozilla blocks an add-on which disables Pocket or Sync or Hello, we'll know that AMO has turned to the dark side.
Unfortunately hoops aren't enough to fix this problem, because hoops generally involve some flag that you've gone through the hoop, and the installer can easily fake that.
Relatedly I did notice when putting my own addon through the signing process that there was a checkbox specifically for sideloaded addons, with the implication that the checks would be even more stringent. I'm not sure if that's enforced or not, or how.
I truly don’t understand why Mozilla is trying to do Microsoft’s job.
Never mind the entire idea of antivirus software is completely ridiculous from security PoV and basically a scam to have people pay for a false sense of security.
And... would Mozilla agree to sign it?
(Since, you know, the standard response over the years to users complaining about removed functionality in Firefox has been, "use an extension")
now you say release/sign your extensions.... well they mostly contain internal data and URLs. no way I'm publishing any of those.
this doesn't really change the situation for enterprise users though.
then with everyone developing exclusively in chrome, any bug in firefox will be ignored as everyone adds a note to their support staff to 'just tell users to use chrome'
This is very bad news for me. I'm a power user that prefers the balance of new features/chance of breakage that the Beta channel offers and I take full responsibility for the addons I install and the security decisions I make. I don't need Mozilla to be "defending" me in this case.