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Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#111

Post by SSLy »

saagarjha wrote: post #107
jwells89 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to see how Mozilla approaches implementing Gecko on iOS, with how the engine stripped support for embedding years ago (prior to which they could’ve used an approach similar to that seen in Camino[0]). I guess they could take the approach of drawing the whole screen themselves but that’s going to make Gecko-based Firefox for iOS feel noticeably worse than the current WebKit/UIKit version in ter…

This would currently be against the App Store guidelines, which do not permit the use of a third party browser engine. Also, Firefox has ProMotion support.

Luckily that provision is going to be illegal under DMA within half a year.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#112

Post by wolverine876 »

dblohm7 wrote: post #23
emestifs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Firefox paradox: People b***h about Firefox's (lack of) market share, Mozilla doing stupid things (fair criticism), Firefox not having X (extension support on Mobile, moving from legacy extensions to standard manifest format) Then people will still bring up this baggage even when something good happens, will refuse to move away from the browser monoculture/monopoly, s**t on Firefox devs FFS, something good happen…

Former Firefox dev for both desktop and Android here: I can definitely confirm that being constantly shit on wore me down a lot.

Sorry. You did good things for everyone and deserve much better, but I hope you give yourself the recognition. Thanks for everything.

HN should have an annual Appreciation Day, with no enshittification of threads.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#113

Post by pcwalton »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #95
Zak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the product management motivations? It seems to me projects like Iceraven demonstrated years ago that a great many extensions were usable without any changes. Why not just slap a "here there be dragons" warning on untested extensions and let users have at it? To be clear, I'm not asking you to justify decisions you didn't make, just to provide some visibility into the process if you can. Mozilla…

This is speculation based only on press releases but: - Google pays Mozilla more than 400m per year. - Its in Google's interests to not have good Firefox add-ons. (For both Ads and Chrome's market share). Google's negotiator could easily added some incentive for Mozilla's management to set the focus somewhere else. In fact, given what Google's team is likely earning, they wouldn't be doing a good job if Firefox's mob…

The idea that Google has some secret underhanded deal with Mozilla to sabotage Firefox comes up here repeatedly and makes no sense. If Google wanted to prevent ad blocking on Android it would be much simpler to just ban ad blockers from the Play Store outright.

There is a much simpler potential explanation for such a product management decision. Suppose Mozilla determines that 90% (made-up number) of users want addons because they want uBlock Origin. It then seems sensible to prioritize that addon and not others when determining how to spend limited engineering resources. Reasonable people can of course disagree with that decision, but there's no need to bring conspiracies into it.

(NB: Even though I worked at Mozilla I have zero insight into this particular issue; it's entirely speculation.)

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#114

Post by wolverine876 »

Ridj48dhsnsh wrote: post #108
coldpie wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dishonest and incompetent managers Even if it is, that kind of language doesn't help. These are all people you're talking about, trying their best to do a job they care about. Nothing gets better by your being a jerk.

> trying their best to do a job they care about I would not take that as a given for Mozilla's upper management. Many of their decisions seem to ignore what users want in deference to Google or other motivations.

Comments like yours are exactly the problem. Do you have any real knowledge anyway? Have you worked there? It's just spreading toxic sludge.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#115

Post by jeffchien »

DistractionRect wrote: post #76
commoner wrote: post #59

This is progress, but Mozilla needs to do more. Firefox for Android still lacks the ability to sideload add-ons, a feature that works on the desktop version of Firefox. This means Android users aren't able to install extensions outside addons.mozilla.org (AMO) unless they switch to a Firefox alternative that supports it, such as Iceraven[1] or SmartCookieWeb-Preview.[2] For me, the most important add-on that has been…

AFAIK, it was available in nightly. You could curate your own add on list which you could then install on Firefox for Android Nightly, and I'm fairly certain you can still do that if you want something that isn't in this new, expanded list.

You can also directly sideload .xpi by tapping the Nightly logo in the About page a few times. I'm not sure when they added this back.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#116

Post by wolverine876 »

coldpie wrote: post #52
dblohm7 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Firefox dev for both desktop and Android here: I can definitely confirm that being constantly shit on wore me down a lot.

I'm sorry that happened. I wish there was some way to solve the "one jerk outweighs a thousand happy users" problem. I still vividly remember one guy being an asshole about my work on the Wine bug tracker a decade ago, regardless of how many happy users I know there were.

> I wish there was some way to solve the "one jerk outweighs a thousand happy users" problem.

We could downvote all that stuff to oblivion. Instead, comments like it are voted to the top comment on almost every page.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#118

Post by pcwalton »

wolverine876 wrote: post #116
coldpie wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry that happened. I wish there was some way to solve the "one jerk outweighs a thousand happy users" problem. I still vividly remember one guy being an asshole about my work on the Wine bug tracker a decade ago, regardless of how many happy users I know there were.

> I wish there was some way to solve the "one jerk outweighs a thousand happy users" problem. We could downvote all that stuff to oblivion. Instead, comments like it are voted to the top comment on almost every page.

It's human nature, unfortunately. Reality television producers have known this for ages: the episodes that feature people who come off as irredeemable jerks always garner the highest ratings.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#119

Post by LeoNatan25 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #110
mod50ack wrote: post #9

This is good. Now, all extensions marked by the developer as being compatible with Android are shown on AMO. (If you toggle to Desktop mode, you can actually install any other extension on AMO, too.) The baffling thing is why this took so damn long. FF for Android supported add-ons from the beginning. That's the best thing about Firefox for Android! They decided to rewrite the UI in 2020, and there were fair reasons…

> The baffling thing is why this took so damn long. I'm surprised it's baffling in a community of developers and other IT professionals. It's not baffling to me that two significantly (wholly?) different applications on different platforms and form factors would require quite a bit of work to both be generally compatible with the same third-party software via the same API - and all while maintaining the same compatib…

Did you read past that sentence you quoted?

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#120

Post by wolverine876 »

pcwalton wrote: post #118
wolverine876 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there was some way to solve the "one jerk outweighs a thousand happy users" problem. We could downvote all that stuff to oblivion. Instead, comments like it are voted to the top comment on almost every page.

It's human nature, unfortunately. Reality television producers have known this for ages: the episodes that feature people who come off as irredeemable jerks always garner the highest ratings.

> It's human nature, unfortunately.

If that ever really meant something, it has been so overused in the last few years that it's impossible to pick out any needles of serious use from the general default trendy grain silos of despair.

I'm not trying to get all of humanity to give up sex. I believe we can do better, here on HN, in this one regard. I am that insanely optimistic!

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