Sure. Most adults can learn lots of things. Most of us only care enough and have time enough to educate ourselves on a very small subset of the tools we use and tasks we perform on a daily basis. By and large, I trust the tools I use out of the box to be safe (subject to what common sense typical functional adults would be expected to have).

It is often reasonable to provide the option to use tools in ways that are less safe. Sometimes that's unavoidable. You can certainly use a chainsaw unsafely although I also think it's perfectly reasonable for chainsaw manufacturers to not provide easy ways to defeat the various safety mechanisms that are built in.

So you'd only buy a chainsaw with a codepad entry where you have to contact the manufacturer and ask them 'can I cut this log'; ooh, so much safer! But where does that leave the people who been buying that brand of chainsaw for a decade or more and don't want the restrictions?

Just remove the codepad, well yes, so long as the manufacturer doesn't weld it on ... oh, and they just decided to weld it on. Such safety, much wow.

How many topics do you have time and energy to be “educated properly” on? What are the odds that learning about the issue would lead to a different outcome than what Mozilla is doing? Firefox's openness means it attracts a lot of attention from people who have relatively uncommon preferences but believe they speak for a large group of users and that group tends to portray every disagreement as a betrayal rather than reasoned decisions.

I can properly educate myself on many, many things, especially over time. A major issue is correctly utilizing available time. In developed countries today, many "adults" would rather direct their time at very low-value activities, like having children and / or pet slaves, watching disgusting amounts of Netflix, wasting countless hours on Facebook ranting about personal issues or envying others, taking unnecessary and unproductive trips, etc.

While lots of readers will dislike this comment, are not ready to digest it, and will claim that I am wasting my time writing this comment, I think as a society we should prioritize creating competent humans who can appropriately use technology, whereas this move by Mozilla is just more of the same, prioritizing mindless consumers who have no idea how any of the things that their lives increasingly rely on function.

I think such consumers should be left to fend for themselves, as that is the only way a majority of people actually learn. This is especially true for Firefox, which has never been a "consumer" browser, and has always been a browser for people who wish to understand how it works and be able to modify it in a straightforward manner. If someone desires a browser that does whatever it wants without asking, Chrome is a perfectly fine option.