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Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

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Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

#211

Post by mackrevinack »

int_19h wrote: post #182
criddell wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to think that maybe browsers on Android and iOS just don't matter much anymore, other than as the foundation for in-app web views. I have a fairly new phone on a 5G network and the browser is soooo much better than it was even ten years ago yet I use it far, far less than I did back then. Part of it is that my phone just didn't do as much back then and so I spent more time in the browser, but I think the…

If you use any kind of browser sync, that alone makes the choice of browser important, since you need the same one on all devices that you use for it to work seamlessly across all of them. (I wish we had standardized sync protocols for this stuff. But we couldn't even standardize IM, so that's just futile dreaming on my part.)

i havnt got around to trying floccus out fully but i hope its good because i switch between firefox and vivaldi every few years so it would be nice to have something that would work on both

https://floccus.org/

Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

#212

Post by sbernecchia »

xthrowawayxx wrote: post #120

I exclusively use Firefox on Android because of the addons. For me it's the killer feature. Dark mode, ad blocks, YouTube while screen is off. It's made android so much more enjoyable.

all three features are also awailable on brave browser.

Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

#214

Post by athrowaway3z »

grigory wrote: post #95
dblohm7 wrote: post #29

(Former Mozilla developer here, who worked on GeckoView[1], the modern way to embed Gecko into Android apps, including all currently shipped Mozilla browsers on Android) From an engineering perspective, the sad thing about this is that the work to finish extensions in GeckoView was essentially completed in the months after the initial Fenix release. When GeckoView was still being rolled out into release, we understan…

(Also a former Mozilla developer, worked Fennec and Fenix) I think a more nuanced perspective here is that roughly 80% of the work was done, and the remaining 20% require significant effort and organizational energy. Not all of the WebExtension API surface is currently supported; there's a long tail of infrequently used extensions that require non-trivial engineering effort and often cross-team coordination to implem…

I'm on Firefox nightly on Android and it annoys me to no end that I can't at least try to enable the add-ons i use on my desktop

Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

#215

Post by noisem4ker »

gaius_baltar wrote: post #164
capitainenemo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does require creating a Firefox account and creating a "collection" so it's definitely not out of the box.

Didn't know about this before. While reading about the process, does this expose publicly what extensions a person uses?

It does. The resulting URL is public and the page shows the creator's username.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/{Collec...

Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

#217

Post by dblohm7 »

tristor wrote: post #209
dblohm7 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.

> My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told. Ex-Mozilla PM here, I completely understand what you mean by this and I generally agree. I'll go a step further and say that as a PM I ofte…

> A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering.

I feel this hard. On the occasions that I tried to reach out to product management about things that, for important technical reasons, weren't going to work, I was more or less blocked by director-level management and told that I was being mean to my colleagues for wanting to provide that kind of feedback.

Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

#218

Post by soundnote »

amanzi wrote: post #175
dblohm7 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but what's the tablet market for Android these days?

I just bought a Galaxy Tab S8 after continually being disappointed with the iPad and lack of user-friendly multi-tasking capability. I was disappointed to find that Firefox's tablet interface is just a blown-up phone interface. I have switched to using Edge instead because it looks like a proper desktop browser with a tab bar, and has integrated ad-blocking. For me, the two biggest pain points I experience with Firef…

Please, pleasepleaseplease use anything but Edge. Edge is a complete privacy disaster, see for example link below. Microsoft does run their own sync backend, but they don't allow end to end encryption for all kinds of content, browser history being one. They do a lot of good things on UI, but would sadly have to be among the last Chromium browsers I'd recommend people.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=937...

Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

#219

Post by capitainenemo »

commoner wrote: post #187
xigoi wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I used Fennec, it had the same extension whitelist as Firefox. Did that change?

Fennec F-Droid does have the same extension whitelist by default, but it also supports the Collections workaround that adds access to all add-ons on addons.mozilla.org: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... Since Firefox Nightly is unstable, some users prefer to use Firefox forks like Fennec F-Droid and Mull that are based on the stable release channel, yet also offer expanded add-on support…

Regrettably collections that try to enable everything are cut off at 25 or 50 in Firefox, so it's still not a practical way to recover your disabled addons unless you register with a custom collection.

Unless someone out there made an anonymous collection autogenerator. That'd be nice.

Re: Add-on support in new Firefox for Android (2021)

#220

Post by TingPing »

sph wrote: post #197
TingPing wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox Sync is somewhat open. The service is foss and third-party browsers implement it.

Which third party browsers? Epiphany does, but it's not a very good browser, sad to say, and pretty much noone uses it.

Epiphany and Eolie.

I guess your point is Mozilla would care if they were bigger. Nobody can say. The service documents you are allowed to use it as long as you don't use Firefox/Mozilla branding.

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