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Firefox 68.0

mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 68.0

#111

Post by dmm »

Causality1 wrote: post #106
johnbrodie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand Mozilla's position regarding extensions. First, they released a new desktop version with way less extension support, gimping the largest reason I use FF for - vimperator and it's successors. Now they are going to kill extensions in Android FF, which will kill the only non-ideological reason my family is using it - for the adblocking extensions.

To me the writing has been on the wall ever since the community said "Hey these webextensions can't do nearly as many things as the old ones" and Mozilla's response to that was "Go fuck yourselves." So now I have to do what I do on my desktop: Chromium for casual browsing and an old non-crippled version of Firefox for getting things done. Thankfully I only buy phones I can root and block ads system-wide. From Firefox…

> Mozilla's response to that was "Go fuck yourselves."

Do you have a source for that or are you just making things up?

My observation was that Mozilla consistently responded to complaints from extension authors by implemented new apis for their webextension implementation to allow extensions to be ported. That's pretty far away from "Go Fuck Yourselves."

> Mozilla introduced many new WebExtensions APIs in Firefox 57 [Quantum], such as the openerTabId property for tabs. The opener information is highly relevant for Tree Style Tab. [0]

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/12/webextension-tree-style-ta...

Re: Firefox 68.0

#112

Post by [deleted] »

rat9988 wrote: post #82
kevin_b_er wrote: post #47

This marks the last Android release with extensions/add-on support. There will not be a 69 release of this edition of Firefox for Android ("Fennec"). The new remake of the mobile browser ("Fenix") does not have extensions support and it is on an indefinite and easily ignorable backlog. It is explicitly not being worked on this quarter. At the end of this quarter is the scheduled release of Firefox 69. Unless there's…

The only add-on I need on y phone is an adblocker. This is why I've been using samsung browser for a long time. It does what I want and does it well. (I'm not paid by samsung, just trying to help fellow readers)

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 68.0

#113

Post by swinglock »

coldpie wrote: post #105
swinglock wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extensions is the ONLY reason to use Firefox on Android. It's not good browser compared to Chrome on slower Android phones, apart from being customizable. To me it's even the single biggest reason to use Android over iOS as there's no full featured browser on iOS.

> Extensions is the ONLY reason to use Firefox on Android. Well, no. I don't want to use a browser that is developed by an advertising company, and I want to encourage the development of more than one web rendering engine. But yes, killing extensions would be a major regression in Firefox's usability.

True, me neither. But politics aside, it's the only technical reason, for me. I'd rather switch to iOS and Safari than Android and Chrome, which I will consider.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#114

Post by skrause »

coldpie wrote: post #105
swinglock wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extensions is the ONLY reason to use Firefox on Android. It's not good browser compared to Chrome on slower Android phones, apart from being customizable. To me it's even the single biggest reason to use Android over iOS as there's no full featured browser on iOS.

> Extensions is the ONLY reason to use Firefox on Android. Well, no. I don't want to use a browser that is developed by an advertising company, and I want to encourage the development of more than one web rendering engine. But yes, killing extensions would be a major regression in Firefox's usability.

> Well, no. I don't want to use a browser that is developed by an advertising company

... on an operating system developed by the exact same advertising company?

Re: Firefox 68.0

#115

Post by snek »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #47

This marks the last Android release with extensions/add-on support. There will not be a 69 release of this edition of Firefox for Android ("Fennec"). The new remake of the mobile browser ("Fenix") does not have extensions support and it is on an indefinite and easily ignorable backlog. It is explicitly not being worked on this quarter. At the end of this quarter is the scheduled release of Firefox 69. Unless there's…

This is a lot of FUD. Making a browser is hard, and making a modular browser is harder. It's clearly on their list of things to do, but it's behind all the other "making a browser" things.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#116

Post by bzbarsky »

iamnotacrook wrote: post #92
StavrosK wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what? Extensions are the biggest reason I'm using Firefox on my mobile and the only way I got people to switch to it. How can they just be removing them for any period of time?

Hopefully the ESR version of Firefox will support add-ons on Linux/Android and will be supported (security fixes, I don't care about other changes) until any replacement browser supports add-ons on Linux/Android.

That is the idea, yes.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#117

Post by coldpie »

skrause wrote: post #114
coldpie wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Extensions is the ONLY reason to use Firefox on Android. Well, no. I don't want to use a browser that is developed by an advertising company, and I want to encourage the development of more than one web rendering engine. But yes, killing extensions would be a major regression in Firefox's usability.

> Well, no. I don't want to use a browser that is developed by an advertising company ... on an operating system developed by the exact same advertising company?

If there was a viable competitor, I would consider using it. There isn't.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#118

Post by pard68 »

Wish there was a log in Firefox to determine how/why uBlock Origin keeps getting uninstalled across all my machines which are synced with my Firefox account.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#119

Post by palisade »

option_greek wrote: post #28
mooreds wrote: post #4

I love Firefox. First thing I install on any new computer. Super happy they keep pushing the web forward. Not a fan of the chromium quasi monopoly (not that the folks behind it are bad, just that any monoculture is problematic). Thanks for pushing the web forward!

The whole chromium project gives out the 'death star' vibe for me. I'm sure the engineers who are working on it are good people but the end result seem lead to destruction of open web as we know it by the Gempire.

You can actually grab non-google Chromium. This site keeps track of the latest stable and nightly builds and how to download them directly: https://chromium.woolyss.com/ You won't receive automatic updates, or be able to login to your google chrome account, etc. The theme is slightly different in color but it works exactly like normal Chrome. Chromium is the open source project that Chrome is based on, originally it was a web browser built by the KDE team for Linux.

I disagree that Chromium is evil. Personally, I use Firefox because I like it better. Though, on Android I use Brave which is based on Chromium and has ad blocking, privacy, and anti-fingerprinting built-in. Just a really quick easy way to get all of that in a simple no fuss package.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#120

Post by lol768 »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #47

This marks the last Android release with extensions/add-on support. There will not be a 69 release of this edition of Firefox for Android ("Fennec"). The new remake of the mobile browser ("Fenix") does not have extensions support and it is on an indefinite and easily ignorable backlog. It is explicitly not being worked on this quarter. At the end of this quarter is the scheduled release of Firefox 69. Unless there's…

And the other point of view:

> We're certainly aware of how significant ad blocking extensions are. This release required a great quantity of features with only a six month timeline until now.

> We already support a very limited set of the WebExtensions API to offer features like Reader Mode. Rest assured that more features will land in the coming months.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20298143

This reads like FUD to me. The dev team know how important extensions are to their users.

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