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Firefox 68.0

mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 68.0

#141

Post by dralley »

Causality1 wrote: post #123
dmm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Then why can extensions still not customize the UI, even for something as simple as putting the tabs below the address and bookmarks bar?

That's what UserChrome.css is for.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#142

Post by callahad »

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…

Hi. I work for Mozilla. Firefox for Android is not dead. You are free to continue using it. It will continue to support add-ons, and it will receive regular security updates and bugfixes for at least the next year.

We are focusing all new feature development in Firefox Preview, but we're continuing to support Firefox for Android as an Extended Support Release while we build Preview.

And, for what it's worth, we do understand how important extensions are to folks, and we are taking that into account in our planning.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#143

Post by cosmojg »

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?

LineageOS[1] exists, and it may as well be a non-GNU mobile distribution of Linux with support for Android apps like Firefox.

[1] https://lineageos.org/

Re: Firefox 68.0

#144

Post by CWuestefeld »

StavrosK wrote: post #55
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…

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?

I've honestly looked, and while there are several versions of Firefox in the play store. None of those I've tried seem to support extensions. Can you tell me where to find one that does?

Re: Firefox 68.0

#145

Post by icebraining »

JeremyNT wrote: post #129
lol768 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

> This reads like FUD to me. The dev team know how important extensions are to their users. Just because they know how important it is doesn't mean they care . I'm sure Google also knew how important ad blocking was to many Chrome users when they decided to remove that functionality from their browser, too.

Chrome didn't remove ad-blocking.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#146

Post by wtallis »

jraph wrote: post #128
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…

"Fenix MVP will not replace Fennec" (MVP meaning "Minimum Viable Product"). https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/662#issuecomm... I'm sure Fennec users will not be migrated to Fenix until extensions are supported. This would be a big fuck up and Mozilla is aware of this. Linked bugs about the user agent seem irrelevant to this issue. Everything will be okay. You can sleep on both ears.

> Linked bugs about the user agent seem irrelevant to this issue.

They're relevant because that's what suggests that they aren't planning for a Fennec 69: addons.mozilla.org is currently interpreting version 69 to mean Fenix, so if Fennec gets updated to 69 they'll have broken extension support anyways. If Mozilla is abandoning Fennec at version 68 before Fenix is even close to having extension support, they probably can't be trusted to not push out Fenix to users prior to implementing extension support. Their messy transition to WebExtensions certainly provides precedent for Mozilla making this kind of fuck-up.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#147

Post by Forbo »

ulfw wrote: post #131
coldpie wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is. You just don't want to spend the money or use the phones/tablets from said competitor.

iOS doesn't allow you to use other browser engines.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#148

Post by gruez »

ProAm wrote: post #103
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.

Give Kiwi Browser a shot on Android. It's a fork of Chrome with all the google tracking removed and fully supports Chrome Add-ons. I love it and it's fast (I was a long time Firefox on Android user but it just got to slow to use).

Chromium fork with closed source patches? No thanks.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#149

Post by callahad »

wtallis wrote: post #146
jraph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fenix MVP will not replace Fennec" (MVP meaning "Minimum Viable Product"). https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/662#issuecomm... I'm sure Fennec users will not be migrated to Fenix until extensions are supported. This would be a big fuck up and Mozilla is aware of this. Linked bugs about the user agent seem irrelevant to this issue. Everything will be okay. You can sleep on both ears.

> Linked bugs about the user agent seem irrelevant to this issue. They're relevant because that's what suggests that they aren't planning for a Fennec 69: addons.mozilla.org is currently interpreting version 69 to mean Fenix, so if Fennec gets updated to 69 they'll have broken extension support anyways. If Mozilla is abandoning Fennec at version 68 before Fenix is even close to having extension support, they probably…

Fennec is moving to an Extended Support Release model so we can focus on Preview. This means that the engine will remain at major version 68 for the next year, but it will still receive security updates and bugfixes. And it will continue to support add-ons.

Re: Firefox 68.0

#150

Post by icebraining »

callahad wrote: post #142
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…

Hi. I work for Mozilla. Firefox for Android is not dead. You are free to continue using it. It will continue to support add-ons, and it will receive regular security updates and bugfixes for at least the next year. We are focusing all new feature development in Firefox Preview, but we're continuing to support Firefox for Android as an Extended Support Release while we build Preview. And, for what it's worth, we do un…

Will Preview be guaranteed to support extensions before Firefox for Android goes EOL?
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