Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 251 posts

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#141

Post by st3fan »

st3fan wrote: post #139
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…

I managed the team that did a lot of the integration of web extension support in Fenix, the new Firefox for Android. We were all on the brink of burnout. There was too much work. Unrealistic deadlines. And high expectations. So we decided to only support a limited set of APIs tuned for the most popular web extension. Which were basically all ad blockers if I remember correctly. Proud of the team to have finally gotte…

Other people may remember this differently. Some things are a bit of a blur. My brain selectively blocks some of this - It was basically an exhausting two/three year crunch to rewrite Fennec as a modern Android app.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#143

Post by codethief »

Can anyone recommend an extension that can be used to limit the total number of tabs in Firefox for Android? "Limit Tabs"[0] works great on the desktop and I was hoping it would become available on mobile now, but sadly it didn't.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rudolf-fernan...

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#144

Post by secretforest »

emestifs wrote: post #11
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #7

We've had lots of news about this coming for months, but with Mozilla's quite low market share, and the share of those users that use extensions - who's really caring about this other than some power users?

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…

FF gets crapped on all the time, BUT... it's still the best mainstream browser out there IMHO. I've been using FF since day one, when it was code named Phoenix. As the spiritual successor to Netscape Navigator, I have super fond memories of using NN, as it was the only decent browser we could install on the Sun Sparc workstations we had in college before I could afford my own computer. I still toy around with SeaMonkey once or twice a year for the memories.

Sadly, the browser world has almost become something of a mono culture with the majority of offerings using Chromium as their base. I liked Opera for years. Original engine. Tabbed. Now Vivaldi is the Opera successor, but sadly uses Chromium as the base. Vivaldi have said they are not going to allow the changes to affect them.

Again, sadly, I doubt that in the near term, anyone will try and offer up a new browser. Even Edge is nothing more than Chromium with MS's tech-nasty Kabuki makeup and overly-complicated proprietary plumbing. Is it too much to ask for a browser that just browses the web without all the garbage tie-ins? Tabs, ad blocking that I control, not add-ins. Like a Pi-hole, where I can add lists. I realize some browsers do this, but the tie-ins, notes, skins, email, political activism, it's all too much.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#145

Post by mccr8 »

autoexec wrote: post #122
yoavm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

curious, what do you want to do with about:config on FF for Android?

Mostly, basic security things like disabling prefetch, disabling WebRTC, disabling redirects, preventing sites from reading my battery level, preventing firefox from changing what I type in the address bar (fixup), etc

Battery status was disabled in Firefox in 2016.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/01/firefox-d...

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#147

Post by asadotzler »

st3fan wrote: post #141
st3fan wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I managed the team that did a lot of the integration of web extension support in Fenix, the new Firefox for Android. We were all on the brink of burnout. There was too much work. Unrealistic deadlines. And high expectations. So we decided to only support a limited set of APIs tuned for the most popular web extension. Which were basically all ad blockers if I remember correctly. Proud of the team to have finally gotte…

Other people may remember this differently. Some things are a bit of a blur. My brain selectively blocks some of this - It was basically an exhausting two/three year crunch to rewrite Fennec as a modern Android app.

That's how I remember it. I was on desktop projects but following closely and the rewrite was a death march and people working on it moved or left along the way too.

We should have listened to Hyatt back in 2003-ish when he basically said of XUL, "it's never gonna be great on *nix or Mac but it's good enough on Windows." Because of solid desktop horsepower growth over the 2000s, we were able to make XUL go for the three desktop platforms pretty well but it should never have gone to mobile and replacing it with a native front end was absolutely the right thing to do, despite the pain.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#148

Post by rvba »

Zak wrote: post #28
dblohm7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Probably wanted help chrome keep its market share while keeping firefox insignificant.

Also I wonder where do those decision makers work now.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#149

Post by commoner »

mdaniel wrote: post #101
DistractionRect wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can confirm that sideloading .xpi does not work in Nightly (at least the one from the Play store -- I've never worked up the energy to build the apk from source and don't feel like using the F-Droid because reasons) I even tried creating my own collection to include Violentmonkey and it didn't work but I don't this second recall why

Give it another try. The current version of Nightly (v122.0a1) from the Play Store has functional sideloading for me after I unlock the "secret menu" in the settings by going to "About Nightly" and tapping the Nightly icon several times.

Before Bypass Paywalls Clean (D) existed, I was able to install Violentmonkey on Firefox for Android through the add-on collections workaround to use the Bypass Paywalls Clean userscript. You need to enable desktop mode when assembling the add-on collection (or do it from a computer) for Violentmonkey to show up as an option in the search.

Re: Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

#150

Post by Night_Thastus »

mike31fr wrote: post #129
Night_Thastus wrote: post #38

I'm so grateful that FF for Android exists with addon support. Using it with uBlock is the only way to make mobile not an awful experience for me.

Have you never heard of NextDNS?

I use PiHole, but DNS options don't catch everything. uBlock catches a LOT that it doesn't, and allows for lots of custom stuff I can't do otherwise.
Post reply on HN