I’m looking to create an add-on that will be used only within our company, and I’m considering getting it registered with a digital certificate. I wanted to know if there’s a possibility that this process could incur any costs. Has anyone gone through this before? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
( I apologize for any unnatural English, as this was generated by ChatGPT.)
Before I address your questions, I first want to go over your options when distributing an add-on internally.
If you only want to install the extension on devices managed by your company, your system administrators can use policies to configure Firefox on those devices. The policy used to install an extension on managed devices is ExtensionSettings. For each add-on you want to install, you will need to set the installation_mode property to force_installed. See Enterprise distribution, Distributing an add-on yourself, and Package your extension for more information.
Okay, back to your question.
Firefox doesn’t provide a way for developers to sign their own extensions. If you choose to distribute an add-on that is not signed by Mozilla, you will distributed a plain zip file.
Chrome allows developers to sign self-distributed extensions. When you package your extension using Chrome, it will request a .pem file that contains your private key. If you don’t provide one, Chrome will generate one for you. This private key is indirectly used to assign the extension a unique ID. This means that if you lose the PEM file, you also lose the ability to distribute that extension.