I currently use Debian stable. It has many problems. I’ve long planned to switch to Fedora, to get much newer versions of software and drivers. Ironically, this “updated software” philosophy now poses a serious problem for me.
I discovered that on Fedora, there is no such thing as “Firefox ESR”. There is only one “Firefox” dnf package, and that is the current version from Mozilla. The issue with this is that in the non-ESR version of Firefox, Mozilla has (sigh…) started ignoring the crucial xpinstall.signatures.required about:config option, which in Firefox ESR is respected.
That option has to be disabled (it’s true by default) in order for you to be able to run any “unsigned” extension, which means that if I were to switch to Fedora, I could not use any of my self-coded Firefox extensions which I use only for myself on my computer! There is no way that I would create a Mozilla account and (repeatedly, for each update) send my private code to Mozilla to look at, just for them to “sign” it. They have nothing to do with my private extensions which only I use.
It says on this page: Add-on signing in Firefox | Firefox Help
Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR), Firefox Developer Edition and Nightly versions of Firefox will allow you to override the setting to enforce the extension signing requirement
This makes me believe that it’s not simply that Firefox ESR is “a few versions old” and has not yet got the new crippling code; it seems like they treat these non-standard “editions” of Firefox specially for some reason.
Please note that I have no interest in a “Developer Edition” or “Nightly” (unstable) versions, but either way, Fedora doesn’t have those either.
I’ve read an existing discussion on Firefox ESR on Fedora, but they basically said that it’s “too much work” to support it, but it’s also “highly not recommended” to install it myself, manually, directly from Mozilla. Which I don’t want to do anyway. I have a gut feeling (based on experience) that it would not auto-update if I installed it that way, and also cause all kinds of other issues…
I also found some kind of “unofficial” package, but I don’t want to have to trust such obscure and unreliable things. Also, if there is a Flatpak for this, I’ve had quite a bit of issues with those in the past as well, so I’m not wild about “hacking” Firefox ESR onto my system by any means other than the “real” package system.
I’d probably be OK with “normal Firefox” if it only allowed the running of “unsigned” extensions. Can’t Fedora simply force that option to be possible to set even in the standard Firefox, if you won’t provide Firefox ESR as a separate package?
Not being able to run my own Firefox extensions ruins my plans to switch to Fedora. I’m surprised that this doesn’t seem to be a big deal to others, since you need it for any nontrivial fixes such as your custom context menu items.