I work for a company that publishes an AddOn/Extension in 3 different web stores - Chrome, Edge and Firefox. We have had our extension in these stores for over 3 years.
I regularly push updates to our extension to the Chrome/Edge store and the extension is reviewed and approved generally within a day. The longest I have waited on these two shops for approval has been a little over 24 hours.
The bulk of our users are using these two browsers, and most of our extension downloads are thru these 2 stores.
Our experience with having our Add On in the Mozilla repository has been abysmal.
First, you required us to bake in a privacy policy and an opt out option (for our analytics tracking) that neither of the other shops required. It took us months to comply with this request, but we did it and got listed back in AOM.
Now, we’re getting flagged for ‘obfucscated code’ in our extension, even though this same code has been there since the extension was first submitted years ago, and there is clearly nothing nefarious about the code that is (according to your reviewer) “obfuscated” - Just a bunch of key value pairs for CSS that webpack generates when the extension is built.
And neither Chrome or Edge stores require us to submit our source code on EACH submission update, no matter how small. But Mozilla does.
It’s almost like you don’t want people to build and publish extensions for your browser. The declining market share absolutely supports this hypothesis.
As a company, we’re at the point where we don’t think can continue to invest in building for your platform because you have made the process so difficult and nebulous. We avoided building for Safari for many years because the review process Apple puts you thru is also difficult and nebulous. But at least their browser has 3x the share that Firefox does. The ROI at least would justify the hassle. With Mozilla, I’m afraid there is no justification left to carry on.