Theres also been quite heated discussions (and hostility from Mozilla devs, to be frank) around the Zotero plugin, see e.g. Dan Stillman's 2015 blog post and email-list-threads linked there.

https://danstillman.com/2015/11/23/firefox-extension-scannin...

Edit: for those who don't want to dig, a random quote:

"Shortly before we left AMO [Firefox's integrated addon channel], an AMO editor publicly told someone asking a technical question about Zotero that Zotero was “evil”, adding, “They submit a new version every week, with thousands of lines of changes, nearly always additions. Every time I review it I hope they’ll go bankrupt”"

It seems (from many signals) very much like Mozilla would prefer it if most Firefox addons were tiny 200 line hobby projects that got updated once a blue moon.

Many AMO Editors are volunteers, and all are human. We've significantly adjusted the AMO review guidelines and processes to avoid that sort of mishap in the future, as acknowledged at the end of that post.

We're working hard on further changes to the process to reduce the stress and delays associated with manual review, including moving the review process to a post-publication check, instead of a pre-publication requirement. The heavy-handed review process was necessary with the old model of add-ons which had unrestricted access to the browser and to the host system. The new, permissions-based WebExtension model is dramatically easier to audit.

Well, maybe this failure should be taken as a signal that you're doing something wrong.

Google will always beat you at this, always. They can afford to pay far more people than you have volunteering for you, ever.

There is no justification for Mozilla's extension policy. Mozilla is just LARPing as Google. They are superficially copying some features of Google's platform, in the hopes that they will magically inherit Google's success.

Microsoft still sells their software in boxes in retails stores. Perhaps Mozilla should spend money pressing discs, but instead of selling it, they should give away Firefox discs in stores. That's a good analogue to what Mozilla is doing.

This is a colossal waste of time that nobody asked for and nobody wants.

well, thousands of lines of changes nearly always additions sounds like it should be a code smell / integration smell.

that's not the topic though.

As someone who hasn't followed the actual specifics here, do you happen to have any links to those discussions/issues or other places these things happened? I'd really like to see their reasoning.