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!
I wouldn't say that far, maybe a month. It gets regular updates.
Historically, it's gotten much further behind, but they've gotten better recently.
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 fear that bad extensions would tank performance, tarnishing the reputation of the overall browser. Now that such reputation is more or less established (i.e. people use FF on Android without big problems, it's not considered particularly slow etc), they can dare a bit more.
That fear was obviously unjustified. Extensions that would tank performance would have gotten bad user ratings.
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…
For those who are wondering, I _think_ AMO is supposed to mean "addons.mozilla.org" although neither the author of the article nor this comment define the acronym.
The article currently does define it, but maybe that was changed.
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 fear that bad extensions would tank performance, tarnishing the reputation of the overall browser. Now that such reputation is more or less established (i.e. people use FF on Android without big problems, it's not considered particularly slow etc), they can dare a bit more.
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.
I think it's still against Apple's TOS, stating that every web browser must be based on WebKit.
That's incredible. Just write anti-competitive behavior directly into the contract. No one will care.
Actually, it has been mandated by the EU (and other regulators) that they have to allow other browser engines and AFAIK there are already teams at Mozilla/Google that are porting their respective engine to iOS.
Thanks to Firefox extensions I get an automatic dark mode on HN, and almost any other website, as soon as my device is switched to dark mode. Normally this would have to be supported explicitly in the website CSS.
This was a clincher for me that made me switch from Chrome/Chromium on my Pixel. Previously, I was using Kiwi Browser because it supported Chrome extensions however while it works it has a lot of annoying quirks. I just couldn't stomach the experience of browsing the web without an ad blocker though. Now Firefox and UBlock work on Android, Firefox has quickly become my preferred browser. Still using Chrome on desktop…
Give it a shot! It can import your bookmarks, passwords, etc. from Chrome, and it's great to be able to quickly send a tab from desktop to mobile, or vice versa.
Orion is built on webkit, both on desktop and mobile. It's possible to build WebExt support into a WebKit browser, as they've done. While I definitely prefer FF and Android, I can support the notion of Mozilla integrating extension support into WebKit on their iOS version of FF. But it would take a lot of effort to do that, and Firefox for iOS is ultimately just totally separate from any other Firefox (whereas Androi…
Interesting, I always thought the holdup was that third party things used in-app were expressly forbidden because they're not vetted by the app store onboarding process (in addition to the requirement of using webkit). Didn't occur to me that webkit could be extended to support webext either.
Historically, yes. Apple used to be a lot stricter about these things. But they have loosened up over the years.
Back in the day, they were removing stuff like scripting apps. They sent warnings to the devs of Pythonista, forcing them to do things like [remove file-opening support](https://mygeekdaddy.net/2014/06/17/working-around-apple/). And they infamously removed iDOS (a DOSBOX port).
Now they're much more loose and allow things like iSH and so on. It is still a little bit of a gray area for arbitrary decisions by Apple, though.
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?
Sensitive power users. I didn't say it was sh*t. I'm saying it's not newsworthy. Clap for the devs. And install all the extensions. But we don't need a hundred posts about it. This isn't the big story Firefox marketing might think it is.
You got downvoted and now you're original comment is greyed out. Now you're mocking people and calling them "sensitive".
The fact news about Firefox gets upvoted clearly indicates it is newsworthy. You don't get to decide. The users of HN and their votes do.