Not sure how true that is anymore. They seem to by trying hard to squander their reputation. First their MITI officially signaled they now consider themselves a political force, then the whole Cliqz debacle following shortly after showed their willingness to sacrifice their principles.
MITI is Mozilla trying to keep the internet credible as a source of news and information. This is in keeping with Mozilla's core principles. Give the blog post a careful read, as it might change your mind: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information...
Re: Cliqz, working with a search-oriented company might be a way that Mozilla can help avoid monopolies in search. The goal is to find new ways to keep the web open, so that new challengers have a level playing field vs. dominant companies.
Edited to add: Cliqz is a very privacy-conscious company, and I think that respect for the user was a major factor in Mozilla partnering with Cliqz. This is just to say that, AIUI, the partnership was evaluated, again, in keeping with Mozilla's principles.
How is Mozilla been ever anything but a political force? Like 12 years ago, when Firefox came out, it was accompanied by probably the largest marketing campaign for an open project barring Wikipedia.
They followed that up with some ten years of "web standards! web standards! open web standards!". This is the game Mozilla plays. That's why they won on the web: everyone does it their way now, even if their browser isn't dominant.
If I need to get Mozilla's approval before I can run code in the browser running on my machine then I see a wall. That they've automated it so much as to mitigate the protection a walled garden normally gives almost makes it worse.
You can install Firefox Beta or Nightly and have unrestricted extension installation options (or use a Linux distro's packages: most of such firefox packages do not require signed extensions).
It's a measure to prevent casual trojans, there are many ways around it for non-casuals and developers to employ.
Power users can use unsigned add-ons in Dev Edition. Regular users would be exploited by any middle ground solution in the main release. It's unfortunate the web is a dangerous place for the average user.
