131–140 of 251 posts
Extensions are nice to have, but pointless as long as FF for Android doesn't render most pages correctly (HN, for example).
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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.
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Probably fear that bad extensions would tank performance, tarnishing the reputation of the overall browser. Now that such reputation is more or less established (i.e. people use FF on Android without big problems, it's not considered particularly slow etc), they can dare a bit more.
I believe it's that, and that with extensions living in their own processes, Android can at any moment decide to kill it (like it can do with any mobile app). With the changes required for Manifest V3, extensions are able to deal with that gracefully, rather than causing a deluge of bug reports.
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Probably fear that bad extensions would tank performance, tarnishing the reputation of the overall browser. Now that such reputation is more or less established (i.e. people use FF on Android without big problems, it's not considered particularly slow etc), they can dare a bit more.
That fear was obviously unjustified. Extensions that would tank performance would have gotten bad user ratings.
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(I used to work on this stuff) It was more complicated than that. Yes, GeckoView needed a separate WebExtension implementation, but that work was pretty much at parity with Fennec (the previous Firefox for Android that supported more extensions) when I left in 2021. It was a product management decision that held off on more complete WebExtension parity with desktop, as well as any artificial limits as to which extens…
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…
We essentially had that as part of pre-release builds. Same with about:config.
The argument we'd then hear from people is, "but I want the stable channel with the 'here be dragons'" stuff. The reality is, though, that the "here be dragons" stuff probably affects stability more than running beta does anyway; people who shat on us for that wanted to have their cake and eat it too, and it just doesn't work that way.
Firefox browser share is like 2-3%. Please consider using it, the internet will be a lot shittier without Firefox as an option, and it is the best option for privacy and ad-blocking.
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…
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…
Proud of the team to have finally gotten to this point. Miss you all.