Does anyone maintain a branch with precompiled builds that has sideloading turned on + no Pocket / other services? Preferably with autoupdate still working?

Firefox is my primary browser on Windows, and I'd love to have this stuff removed, but I'm really not at a point where I can be compiling the code myself.

Icecat[0] might be the closest thing to what you are looking for. It's part of the GNU project.

0. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

No binary releases for Windows. :(

38.8.0 was the last one. https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/38.8.0/

That's exactly how it should be! The developer version isn't behind any barriers - it's trivially easy to find and install - and it keep the majority of people from installing some of the most malicious extensions.

I use to use nightly, then I found out they spy on you a lot more if you use nightly. I suspect the same applies to developer edition.

[0] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxNoNightl...

[1] https://lobste.rs/s/ri4kny/you_probably_don_t_want_run_firef...

When you first open a new Nightly install there's literally a banner across the entire browser telling you that it's collecting metrics, along with a button that displays more information and allows you to customize what data gets sent. The whole point of offering a Nightly build is so that they can have feedback on performance regressions and crashes. Characterizing it as "spying" is simply FUD.

And the event I'm linking to is a scenario where Mozilla updated nightly with no warning to share more data without telling me, against the policy stated about the setting in the browser. And a response by a Mozilla engineer saying that they thought this was perfectly acceptable behavior.