I'm confused by this. Yesterday there was an article about how Apple only lets browsers use WebKit for rendering, and that was considered bad because it means that mobile browsers can't support add-ons. But it looks like Firefox doesn't support them anyway, so what's the problem again?
Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
101–110 of 220 posts
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#102I use ff almost exlusively both on my laptop and the phone.
The existing gap between even the core features has been puzzling for a while.
On mobile I can add a current page to home screen, collections and the top sites. Neither is available on desktop (with the same profile).
WTF mozilla? What kind of usability is this? I am totally not looking forward switching to another browser but it looks inevitable...
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhere in a parallel universe, Mozilla just let all the plugins claim compatability, and vaguely fascist users who dont like their politics are complaining that the instability of Mozilla on Android is the reason they hate them. And further along, in a universe where they poured a lot of time energy and money into fixing the whole plugin ecosystem and succeeded, they're complaining about something that didn't get…
So, Mozilla makes decisions to win over vaguely fascist users, or at least prevent them from having something negative to say? Or because in other universes there aren't perfect solutions? Do they have any desire to just.. make a good browser that fulfills peoples needs?
The point is, if you don't like an organisation for reason A, you'll easily find reason X, Y and Z why you don't like them.
Ask someone who grew up supporting a certain sports team or religion why they don't like the rival team or religion, and they'll happily give you answers why. They may even believe some of them themselves. Some of them might even be valid criticisms, but they are almost certainly not why someone chose their home team or religion over another.
This never ending drama seems to mostly stem from Mozilla ditching a potential CEO because his religious beliefs meant he felt he had to fund anti-equal marriage organisations. It all seems like echoes of that to me. 8 years of boring whiney echoes.
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This pretty much feels to me what is happening to Mozilla as an organization from an outsider perspective. Engineering is no longer as important as the evangelism and management is making strange decisions that lack focus on what the target audience really is.
My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.
Can anyone defend product management to me? Shouldn't this basically be UX/UI designers working together with developers based on user input acquired in some scientific way (either quantitative or qualitative)? How do product managers provide additional value?
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#105Fenix is basically a whole new browser, and that means that all features need to be implemented again (which takes a lot of time, and I don't think Firefox developers have much of it). Lots of Fennec features are still missing (view source code, save as pdf, install general addons, the whole about:config...). Why they changed is a mystery, maybe the old browser had a core privacy bug or something that couldn't be fix…
> Fenix is basically a whole new browser The web (HTML/CSS/JS/JIT/WebAssembly/Audio/WebGL/WebRTC/etc) engine is exactly the same, the rendering engine (WebRender) is the same, synchronization is the same. The UI is completely new - that's it. This is not a wholly new browser, this is a wholly new UI.
I though that fennec was a monolithic implementation for android of the Gecko engine, while fenix has the ui part and the geckoview part separated (so you could create a different app with the same rendering engine, like webview of android).
I have read that geckoview takes the old gecko implementation, probably copied and adapted, but other than that it's a new project with a different development path. That's why I say it's a different browser.
I may be wrong though,I tried to search for sources but unfortunately couldn't find any.
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The evangelism is even bad. It was more coherent and convincing back when the browser was better.
The evangelism is mostly about stuff that nobody outside the USA cares about. It just looks like the browser is made by crazy people.
The evangelism was about web standards, web privacy, and user control. They deferred on standards to Google, and became positively hostile to the latter two subjects.
I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it because I'm not the kind of guy who thinks an interracial couple in a tv commercial is commie globalist mind control. My problem is that:
1) their messages on standards are incoherent and not backed by taking firm stands. The only reason I'm confident that they won't break uBlock (i.e. will hold the line on a portion of manifest v3) any time soon is because they would drop from 4% market share to 0.5% market share in a month. This is not a good reason to be confident, because they lost a similar proportion of market share to get to where they're at now, and they didn't seem bothered.
2) Other than uBlock, they've taken away or left to languish things like javascript enable/disable whitelist/blacklists etc. and fine cookie control, and murdered their extension ecosystem that was filled with privacy protecting extensions, and 4/5ths of the ones that are there now look scary and I wouldn't install them. Too bad they lost the community that would have vetted those extensions in moments in favor of the technical solutions of nerfed webextension APIs formulated by a company whose entire business model is exfiltrating data from unsuspecting users. So much for user privacy.
3) Firefox started putting things into the browser that couldn't be turned off, removing configuration options, and pushing a "wrecker" or "overly-vocal minority" narrative at their users who objected to that. So much for user control.
Also, and I have no inside knowledge, it always seems like the people that write the website copy for whatever their latest PR effort is weren't even at the company for their last PR effort, and don't know anyone who was. I'm getting the impression that firefox is a place you go to burnish your resume/portfolio before getting a real job, which is the reason for the constant stupid tiny UI changes. Do people stay there for more than a year or two?
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a decade-long user and am perfectly fine with modern Firefox (plus uBlock), both on the desktop and on Android. In fact, I don't want to go back to the before-times. Speak for yourself.
Don't worry, he's speaking for the majority of long term firefox users. You're the exception. I started using Firefox when it was Gecko/Phoenix in 2002, then Firebird, then Firefox. I started using it because it was so customizable. I stopped using it at version 37 in 2015 because that was when Mozilla destroyed the browser by removing user freedoms to install their own add-ons without Mozilla's approval. And no, usi…
FWIW my distro's firefox package allows installing my own extensions. I wouldn't be using it if it didn't.
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#108To this day Firefox for Android still does not have a tab bar on tablets. Which is double ridiculous since the previous two rewrites both did have one (in fact I contributed to the former...).
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#109I was writing an extension for Firefox mobile to improve HN a bit to make it work nicer on mobile. Then whoops Firefox no longer does extensions really. * Such a wasted missed opportunity for the mobile web. FF could and still might be able to recognise the utility. (* Yes I can install it via developer mode I think, but it was for you too)
FWIW, people that want to run extensions can either use Fennec (the F-Droid fork, not the old Firefox for Android) or Nightly versions. There are developers targeting this stuff - I wrote about some here: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2022/01/26/most-wanted-add-on...
It does require creating a Firefox account and creating a "collection" so it's definitely not out of the box.
Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> vaguely fascist users I've seen this one before, a GNOME apologist insinuating that anybody who wants thumbnails in the GTK filepicker is probably a 4chan user. Is this the new trendy way to dismiss criticism of software? Insinuate that anybody making specific concrete complaints about software has invalid political beliefs completely tangential to the feature/bug being criticized? What fun!
Or you can just wait two sentences into their comment when they simply can't stop thenselves saying something about progressive politics. Which you really don't need to mention, and common sense suggests you shouldn't, when criticizing a bit of software or a charity foundation on unrelated matters. Unless of course that is the point.
One person who criticizes Mozilla mentioning politics is not a legitimate excuse for you to paint the entire class of people who complain about Mozilla with that brush. Ironically, doing so is vaguely fascist, in the sense that fascists love to spread the blame for individual crimes across entire classes of people they oppose.
Incidentally, who's comment are you even talking about? I don't see any mention of politics in the comment you responded to.