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Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

blog.mozilla.org

141–150 of 482 posts

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#141
post #112

> the only major Android browser So Chrome and Firefox? I already have extensions. It's too little too late Mozilla, you burned me by removing them years ago.

kiwi =/= chrome

That's why I find it funny firefox is saying "only major browser" as if it's some club. Users who do not keep themselves in pens have had extensions in mobile browsers for years now. Firefox brings nothing distinguishing with this announcement, I don't have to use a "major browser".

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#142
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, why didn't you try Iceraven this whole time?

Here's a good reason not to install Iceraven: > No warranties or guarantees of security or updates In general it's fine for users to fork software to scratch their own itches. But browsers are super security sensitive.

That's just their way of saying "we don't have to build this for you". They merge upstream changes, as long as the project is maintained you'll get those updates as they're released. Last I checked you can't sue Mozilla for a security vulnerability and the open source license has a clause about no warrant of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. They don't guarantee security either.

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#143
post #16
post #3

Better late than never!

While true, Mozilla unfortunately had already forfeited the Android browser market to other competitors by not enabling this day one (contrary to their claims, most extensions worked fine). I would be really interested in reading the rationale behind their decision. The real one.

Disabling extensions had nothing to do with their market share. We have extensions on desktop and they are still being squeezed out there. And judging by some other comments here there is apparently a fork of Firefox for Android that allows extensions - which even I had never heard of until now.

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#144
post #137
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly has Firefox “screwed you over”? I’ve used Firefox since it was called Phoenix… although I don’t like the governance of the project, I would hardly say I’ve been screwed over. Firefox has been an amazing product since day one. Meanwhile, Chrome has literally been developed to probe your ass for data they can sell to advertisers.

Last time it was 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360 In that thread there are a few more examples, most of them somewhat recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077683

I have never seen these myself, being on FF for most of it's life, but I also fail to see how these "screw you over." Oh my god an ad! I better instead use a browser that has a built in keylogger and created the ad based internet! That'll show those assholes!

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

- They lost focus with just about every other project other than Firefox & Thunderbird which were the actual products I donated money for - They are (recently) very top heavy for a non-profit foundation and are spending non-negligible amounts of money on C-level and execs - Ideologically I disagree with them taking money with strings attached from Alphabet - (Personally) their recent trends of UX with 'dummyfication'…

> money with strings attached from Alphabet

What are those strings, apart from being default search engine?

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#146
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just put up a warning for extensions that dont work well and let the user decide? I've used several unsupported extensions in iceraven for years and had no problems, which leaves me feeling suspicious about their stated motivation.

> Why not just put up a warning for extensions that dont work well and let the user decide? Because the typical user will ignore the warning and install the extension. Then down the line Firefox will be slow and they forget why. Then they uninstall Firefox. Sure, you can avoid this trap personally. But the statistical behaviour is harmful to a healthy Firefox userbase.

But the typical user doesn't use Firefox. People who (claim to) want to empower themselves do. It doesn't have a healthy userbase, they keep screaming from the rooftops every time someone mentions that they've switched for brave or something.

If you want the typical user to use Firefox, setting yourself apart as the mobile browser that has extensions for example, or keeping features that people use and like as they used to do when they had dominant market share would be good ways to do it. They used to understand their selling point.

And beyond that, as I have personally seen using iceraven and others have noted in here, tons of extensions that firefox blacklisted work fine and have for years. They still blacklisted them. Even if we agreed that disempowering the user so that they have a good experience made sense, which I don't, the actual number they would've needed to blacklist would've been much lower than the ones they actually blacklisted. In at least one of those instances the stated reason was a blatant lie.

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#147
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you didn't know, you can have full extension support on Android with Kiwi Browser, which is based on Chromium.

I did not like the look of Kiwi Browser one bit, lots of weird permissions and dodgy ad-tech smells. Plus it's not Firefox, I'd rather use the same browser on both desktop and Android. This is great news. Can't wait to have a no-fuss paywall bypass on mobile again.

The permissions are the Chromium ones.

There is literally no ads nor external SDK or ad-tech or whatever you are referring to (before there was AdMob, but it didn't make much money anyway).

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.kiwibro...

The way Kiwi makes money is by partnering with Bing / Yahoo.

You launch the browser, it starts with Bing or Yahoo (depending on your country), and... that's it.

Bing then pays back a revenue-share to the browser each time the user uses the search engine.

The same way that DuckDuckGo gets a revenue-share from Yahoo and Bing too when you use DuckDuckGo.

So, if you prefer Firefox and Google, or Kiwi and Bing, this is just a matter of choice.

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#148
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Firefox's publicity is based on the fact that they are "on your side". That means that they are held to a much higher standard. Pretending to be on the side of the user and then screwing users up over and over seems like wanting their cake and eating it too? It's funny because, you know, I expect chrome to screw me over while I expect firefox not to screw me over but chrome has screwed me over fewer times tha…

I've yet to notice any event where firefox "screw users over" that was not vastly overblown, especially compared to the competitors. People tend to just judge Mozilla way more harshly. It's very unfair: they do good, and we ask even more of them.

[flagged]

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Declarative blocking is the weakest, it barely removes the simplest ads. uBlock doesn't exist for iOS because it is made impossible by apple, their extension API is not a "full" API.

I haven’t seen ads on mobile Safari for as long as I can remember. Whether you choose to believe that is up to you. Can you point to an example where an extension like AdGuard would let an ad slip through? Precompiled declarative blocking is more performant and power efficient than running a content script in a JS VM at page load, which matters on a CPU and battery constrained device. I was responding to a comment cl…

> Can you point to an example where an extension like AdGuard would let an ad slip through?

Yes, see Twitter.

I have AdGuard installed on iOS and I do see ads. I do not see them when opening on Firefox desktop with uBlock Origin. If I disable uBlock then I do see them like on Safari.

As I said, precompiled declarative blocking only works for the weakest of blatant ads. Of course it's "more performant and power efficient" because it only runs on the bare HTTP requests. That's not what I want.

> I was responding to a comment claiming that mobile Safari doesn’t support add-ons. Which is simply not true!

Fair enough. But personally I don't count Safari's extensions as real extension, just like I don't count Firefox' previous approach of a handful of "blessed" extensions for Android as real extensions.

Re: Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

#150
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's popular to hate on Firefox, I don't hate Firefox, I hate Mozilla.

I'll always love Mozilla, or at least some fictional idealized version of it, so I'm stuck being increasingly disappointed in Mozilla while holding out for the times they do something right. Giving add-on support back to firefox users is a good thing so here's hoping it won't be done in a way that disappoints me. I hope they bring back about:config next.

> or at least some fictional idealized version of it

This might be the most real comment here. All our perceptions are some fictionalized version of . Doesn't matter if it is Apple, Google, Mozilla, or whatever. Our judgements are based on narrow experiences and highly affected by the PR generated around them.

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