Mozilla expands extension support for Firefox for Android

Post by bad_user » Fri, Dec 15, 2023, 7:11 AM UTC

sedatk wrote: post #98

bad_user wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article actually shows that Mozilla spends most on software development. It does have a lot of administrative overhead that it could do without, instead of laying off engineers, like they did. But the article itself is trash, due to complaining of $892,000 worth of expenses that seem dubious, in an organization that makes 500 million per year, which paints a certain kind of picture that's disingenuous.

The article may be trash as you said, but Firefox doesn't disclose how much they spend on developing Firefox web browser. Everything is lumped under "software development", and that's only half of their annual budget, Firefox certainly doesn't get the most of the budget. If they spend most of that $200 million on Firefox annually and we have abhorrent text rendering on canvas elements for YEARS, something's seriously…

Post by gitaarik » Fri, Dec 15, 2023, 8:17 AM UTC

sgift wrote: post #159

Zak wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My follow-up question then is why treat mobile significantly differently from desktop? Stable desktop Firefox has about:config and access to horribly broken extensions. Perhaps some would argue that it should not.

I cannot speak for Mozilla, but just from my gut feeling: That probably got grandfathered in and since people are used to it for a "long time" no one would change it. But if Firefox was rereleased today I wouldn't bet on it being there. Expectations have changed.

Post by gitaarik » Fri, Dec 15, 2023, 8:34 AM UTC

dblohm7 wrote: post #134

Vinnl wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's part of it, for sure... at the time I was still there, Gecko's extension process did not have the capability of recovering from termination. But that just meant that we couldn't run them in a child process, not that we couldn't run them at all. Of course, then you have security considerations, which no doubt could have factored into the product decision.

Post by shiroiuma » Fri, Dec 15, 2023, 10:07 AM UTC

dopa42365 wrote: post #138

wolverine876 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Firefox android extension support went from "all" to like "5 chosen ones, but we'll enable all of them very soon" in mid 2019. How and why those were handpicked, who knows, clearly extensions weren't enabled by supported functions at the time. In the usual mozilla fashion that "very soon" turned out to be multiple years.

Post by rightbyte » Fri, Dec 15, 2023, 10:28 AM UTC

figmert wrote: post #168

KennyBlanken wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they intentionally under-provisioned you all to draw it out, which isn't surprising given their biggest source of funding is Google, and the last thing Google wants is ad/tracker blocking, privacy extensions, and, well, a major reason for people to set their default browser to 'not chrome'. Lord knows there's enough money floating around that place. What a shame - but thank you. Hopefully plugins come…

Considering uBlock Origin was the first extension to work (and, from what I understand, they worked extra hard to ensure it works), I doubt that's the reason.