51–60 of 251 posts
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?
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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…
Former Firefox dev for both desktop and Android here: I can definitely confirm that being constantly shit on wore me down a lot.
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While I respect Kiwi for implementing extension support, they've often fell far behind the upstream Chromium codebase and they're significantly smaller than even Firefox for Android. So I don't think they'd really be a "major" Android browser. Then again, Firefox could easily be said to not be a major Android browser either!
> they've often fell far behind the upstream Chromium codebase I don't pay consistent attention, but these are the version numbers I currently see: Kiwi: 120.0.6099.26 Chrome: 120.0.6099.110
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…
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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'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…
The nerd rage is targeted at Mozilla's dishonest and incompetent managers, no? The actual dev work is top notch.
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According to their github repo, it was last rebased with chromium version 105.0.5195.24, which was from August 2022. Using a 15 month old browser seems hilariously insecure. https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next
Mine states 120.0.6099.26, which was released a month ago, https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2023/11/chrome-beta-fo...
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Indeed. Mozilla can complain about it (and they have) but blaming them for the situation serves little purpose. It's entirely in Apple's court.
There are probably laws in some country they can use to fight this, but that is a hard legal battle.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/23994174/epic-google-trial-jury-ver...
For me, the most important add-on that has been removed from AMO is Bypass Paywalls Clean, which is the easiest way to bypass paywalls on popular news sites. In April of this year, a French website filed a DMCA copyright takedown notice, causing Mozilla to remove the extension from AMO.[3] The add-on developer (magnolia1234) did not want to challenge the DMCA notice, probably because it would require them to break anonymity and be subject to legal liability.[4]
Fortunately, in September, another developer (dbmiller) was willing to reupload the add-on to AMO as "Bypass Paywalls Clean (D)" with no changes.[5] The hope is that dbmiller will keep this add-on up to date with the source and challenge any DMCA notices filed against this new upload.
However, the fact remains that Bypass Paywalls Clean was unavailable on Firefox for Android for 5 months because the browser did not allow sideloading. In the announcement, Mozilla says their mission is to maintain "an open and accessible internet for all" and that extensions are meant to help users obtain "more personal agency out of their online experience". To achieve this mission and better distinguish Firefox from browsers that gate add-ons through app stores (Safari on iOS), Mozilla should allow users to enable sideloading on Firefox for Android as an option.
[1] Iceraven: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
[2] SmartCookieWeb-Preview: https://github.com/CookieJarApps/SmartCookieWeb-preview
[3] https://www.ghacks.net/2023/04/20/mozilla-removes-bypass-pay...
[4] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...
[5] Bypass Paywalls Clean (D): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...
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…
Trolling used to be an amateur sport, but these days it's largely a professional endeavour. Astroturfing is an everyday occurrence on any decently-sized social media site, including this very one.