10 ms·

A grim outlook on the future of browser add-ons

112 points by gilrain 6y ago

AnonHP 6y ago
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24330983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24330983
godelski 6y ago
This just seems like slippery slope logic. Most addons previously did not actually work on mobile. All the major addons that people use are available. I'm not sure why we're putting Firefox down for still being far ahead of every other mobile browser which still offers 0 addons. To put this in perspective, I can see 12k people use uBlock origin and the next most popular addon is NoScript with 3k. This really doesn't affect a lot of people.
- acemarke 6y ago
  I'm still using FF68 on Android. At the moment, I've got three extensions installed, on a new profile: uBlock Origin, Stylerific, and Display Anchors. Granted, the latter two are for niche use cases. But, the point is they exist, and I want to use them. Losing that ability is going to be frustrating, which is one of several reasons why I do not intend to "upgrade" to the new FF Android version until they've actually fixed that and the other major issues from this release.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  > Most addons previously did not actually work on mobile. I beg your pardon? Literally hundreds if not thousands of add-ons worked flawlessly on Firefox Android until a few weeks ago. > All the major addons that people use are available You'll need to seriously find some source for that extraordinary claim. What does "major" even mean? Who cares about "major ones" if 50% of my add-ons are missing, crippling the functionality of my browser on mobile? This claims makes no sense at all.
  - lifthrasiir 6y ago
    > Literally hundreds if not thousands of add-ons worked flawlessly [...] This is actually a small portion of addons available in the desktop Firefox. Many of them somehow worked, but were never optimized for mobile. "Worked flawlessly" is in my opinion a great overestimation.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    > You'll need to seriously find some source for that extraordinary claim. What does "major" even mean? Who cares about "major ones" if 50% of my add-ons are missing, crippling the functionality of my browser on mobile? This claims makes no sense at all. Presumably, "major" means "used by most people", and even without checking I'm quite sure that if you looks at the install numbers of old Firefox for Android Add-ons, you'll find that a very large part of those installs were of extensions that are still available. Sure, I'd like my small Hacker News extension to be available as well, but I do care far more about uBlock and Privacy Badger being available - and judging by installs, so do loads of other people. (Again, which is not to say that I'd like the smaller extensions to be available as well. But "the major addons that people use are available" looks like a mostly accurate claim.)
- mastazi 6y ago
  > Most addons previously did not actually work on mobile. this is not true. I used to have many addons working perfectly on Android. > All the major addons that people use are available. Wow, all 9 of them? /s (from Mozilla's announcement: "We’re kicking it off with the top 9 add-ons")
  - jamienicol 6y ago
    > this is not true. I used to have many addons working perfectly on Android. That doesn't contradict the statement you're replying to at all. > Wow, all 9 of them? Yes, the major ones that people use. More are coming but I'd guess those 9 cover the vast majority of add-on installs
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mastazi 6y ago
      OK, let me rephrase my comment: The number of add-ons that used to work before, was exponentially bigger than 9. Can we agree on that? One example of add-ons that will stop working, is the Google container. Mozilla keeps making choices on behalf of its users by releasing an official Facebook container but not an official Google container (or an Amazon or a Twitter one) even though it would be trivial to fork the Fb container to achieve that [1]. This is problematic because we know that the largest share of Mozilla's revenue is from Google. That's like a smoking cessation products company that is funded by Philip Morris. So, you will excuse me if I think that some or recent Mozilla's choices are not in the interest of its users. [1] and no, the multi-account container is not the answer because it's non-trivial to set up for less technical users
- dafoex 6y ago
  If you're pointing out the slippery slope logical fallacy, allow me to say "argumentum ad populum" in rebuttal. Just because many or a majority of people have taken one opinion doesn't make it true or good, and just because many or a majority of people have decided to install one of nine add-ons doesn't make it a good selection of add-ons.
- iggldiggl 6y ago
  > To put this in perspective, I can see 12k people use uBlock origin and the next most popular addon is NoScript with 3k. This really doesn't affect a lot of people. Where are you getting these numbers from? Unfortunately it seems that addons.mozilla.org statistics have become private for all add-ons (it used to be the case that add-on authors could decide on making them public or keeping them private), so I can only look at my own current numbers, but something's definitively off there: Whereas general usage data goes back slightly more than one year, for me the Android data currently only starts in June (!) and with ridiculously low numbers at that (just a handful of users). Since August they have started to pick up a little, but they're still a far cry from what I remember – https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/video-background-pl... shows almost 1k Android users at the moment, which is less than the amount of Windows users being reported, even though installing the addon on desktop doesn't even make all that much sense due to desktop Youtube not blocking background playback anyway. Unfortunately I hadn't looked at that statistics for quite a while so my memory is a bit hazy, but according to the Wayback machine, a year ago that add-on had around 35,000 users, with a very clear majority (that I still remember for sure) of them having been on Android. Likewise, my memories of uBlock origin's statistics are somewhat fuzzy, but I think it had something on the order of a few 100,000 (maybe 300,000 to 400,000 users?) on Android. Adblock Plus had a similar amount, which I remember within the context of them having considerably more users on Desktop than uBlock Origin, but a relatively similar amount on Android.
pmontra 6y ago
> Particularly given that there appears to be no technical reason why none of the other add-ons are allowed any more, it being merely a policy decision. I already verified that my add-ons can still run on Firefox for Android but aren’t allowed to, same shouldq be true for the majority of other add-ons. I wonder how the author did that. If it was a custom build of FF, we could rely on a fork as long as FF is open source and it supports extensions. If it is a configuration, I'll be happy to apply it to my FF. Meanwhile I used ApkExtractor to save the APK of FF 68 on my phone (no root required) just in case I inadvertently upgrade FF on it. I already upgraded FF on my tablet and my old phone to test the UI. My take is that the new collections are good but the navigation UI is really bad. Opening new tabs, tapping the URL bar to go to a new site, forward button, they are all worse than in FF 68 and before. Hopefully they'll make them work as before. I understand that staying on version 68 is also bad because of no security fixes. Furthermore it's possible that extension authors kill the Android version of their software. The plan is to wait for a while and see what happens.
- ajayyy 6y ago
  This adds a lot more to the whitelist: https://github.com/interfect/fenix https://github.com/interfect/fenix
- palant 6y ago
  Unfortunately, it was neither. However, I'm being told that Firefox Nightly allows you to install any add-ons, so maybe running it would be an option. I actually used the debugging functionality to install a temporary add-on. This is a supported scenario, but it isn't exactly easy to set up.
  - iggldiggl 6y ago
    > However, I'm being told that Firefox Nightly allows you to install any add-ons, so maybe running it would be an option. It doesn't – it's still at the stage of only being thought about: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
stickfigure 6y ago
I just installed FF on my Android phone last week. Haven't started using it yet but I'm desperate for any mobile browser that supports the equivalent of Chrome's Quick Javascript Switcher extension - something that gives me one button "disable javascript for this domain". I like using well designed webapps and I generally prefer to leave Javascript enabled. Unfortunately most content sites have become so incredibly user-hostile that the only way to read them is without Javascript. I do not care about enhanced privacy yadda yadda whatever... I just need to be able to turn off the crazy that much of the modern web has become. I guess I'm too late? Sounds like FF is not my answer.
- bmurphy1976 6y ago
  Brave has this. You can toggle JavaScript in the Brave menu. You can even go into preferences and change it to disable JavaScript by default and use the Brave button as a whitelist. I ran this way for years. It was great! I recently switched to Kiwi+uBlock Origin because it has a proper night mode, but if you don't need that Brave is a good option (you can ignore/disable the crypto currency/advertisment nonsense).
  - anti-shill 6y ago
    you don't need an extension with brave to get rid of many ads ...i have no extensions on brave and yet i never see a youtube ad
- circularfoyers 6y ago
  Firefox on Android has this single button toggle option in the uBlock Origin add-on, which does exactly as you described wanting.
- godelski 6y ago
  Both uBlock and NoScript are available addons in mobile. Both of these addons are able to accomplish what you want, and more (and are highly popular). The full list of supported addons are: uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, Search by Image, Dark Reader, NoScript, YouTube High Definition, and Privacy Possum.
causality0 6y ago
no technical reason why none of the other add-ons are allowed any more, it being merely a policy decision. I already verified that my add-ons can still run on Firefox for Android but aren’t allowed to That makes me almost incoherently furious. I understand if you rebuild the foundation of a browser for better performance and that breaks all the extensions until the developers can rewrite them for the new model. I get it if one of my favorite extensions is no longer under active development and will never have a version released for the new model. But how fucking dare you gatekeep what I install on my own browser? Freedom from this walled-garden bullshit is the only reason I run Firefox instead of Chrome. Google's twice as good at UI as you. They're faster, look better, and miraculously I never have to swipe five times trying to dismiss a Chrome tab. I get that Mozilla is drowning, flailing around trying to create a future where they aren't irrelevant. This is just ugly, though.
- palant 6y ago
  According to some Mozilla people, this part is actually wrong and extension support is indeed not implemented completely. It's merely that I couldn't (and still cannot) find a list of outstanding issues, and everything I tried worked correctly.
  - causality0 6y ago
    I wouldn't put it past them to just be straight-up lying.
    - palant 6y ago
      They don't. Mozilla at this stage is still a very idealistically motivated organization. Most people are trying hard to do the right thing. It's merely that real-life constrains often lead to rather suboptimal results, despite all the good intentions.
      - causality0 6y ago
        They do lie. Mozilla claimed Quantum was fundamentally incompatible with XUL extensions, despite the fact people could simply build their own Firefox Quantum from source with XUL support turned back on.
cinquemb 6y ago
I know this might sound blasphemous (useds uber alles seems to be today's accepted philosophy)… but one can have all the addons one wants, one just has to run `./mach build`… Only grim for those who chose not to (for whatever reason short of missing hands or bashed in cranium), or cannot be bothered…
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Most people can't fork every project that does something they don't like.
- palant 6y ago
  I doesn't say “grim” because you personally cannot circumvent the restrictions, it says so because of the impact this is going to have on the add-on ecosystem. Your trick isn't going to do you any good if nobody is developing/maintaining add-ons any more.
freediver 6y ago
The web browser "situation" that is lasting for the past couple of years inspired us to start working on new macOS/iOS web browser with webextensions API support. We are looking for people to alpha test it. Please email if interested.
ChrisSD 6y ago
> What this text carefully avoids stating directly: that’s the only nine (as in: single-digit 9) add-ons which you will be able to install on Firefox for Android now. After being able to use thousands of add-ons before, this feels like a significant downgrade. Particularly given that there appears to be no technical reason why none of the other add-ons are allowed any more, it being merely a policy decision. I already verified that my add-ons can still run on Firefox for Android but aren’t allowed to, same should be true for the majority of other add-ons. There is a technical reason. They need to thoroughly test the new implementation of the APIs before they enable broader support. Just because the author did some (brief?) testing of a few more addons, it doesn't mean that the APIs themselves are production ready. The main issue is that the new Firefox was released too early so compromises had to be made. Thoroughly testing a handful of addons is easier than thoroughly testing the entire web extension surface area. This isn't a great situation to be in but there's no need to imagine nefarious plans to explain it.
- codys 6y ago
  The argument being presented would just as well support Microsoft releasing an automatic update to windows (automatically deployed to all their users) that only supported some tiny fraction of white listed applications. They then don't clearly make any promises about removing the white listing, or any timelines, but only vague statements about "ensuring a positive user experience" and "working with their application development partners". Most people would probably see this as a Very Bad Thing, for a few reasons. First of all, if we were to take the claim that it's "to ensure stability of APIs" at face value, it would indicate a staggering lack of maturity in their decision making process around releases. Next, we shouldn't take the "API" argument as being anything representative of reality: applications people develop (or browser extensions) have always been the responsibility of the developers developing them. If there were bugs in a browser, they'd discover and work around them, or they'd have a broken extension/application. There isn't a way around that. Perfect APIs don't fix it: people write bugs into their applications/extensions/platforms all the time. Things are broken all the time. Testing has never been Mozilla's responsibility. It's always been on extension authors. There are already ways to "declare" in an extension that support of a specific version exists. There is no competent technical reason to end up in this situation. We're only left with incompetence and malice. And it's _very_ difficult to think that the people running a popular mobile browser could be so incompetent. Though I'm sure we've all said that before about other Mozilla decisions.
jahabrewer 6y ago
Seems that autofill (for password managers) was broken, too. That and uBO were the reasons I used Firefox on Android.
- godelski 6y ago
  Both still work on my end. I am using nightly though. BTW, uBlockOrigin is one of the whitelisted apps.
superkuh 6y ago
Mozilla has made it very clear that they don't care about the add-on ecosystems and will throw away everything so they can be more chrome-like and provide a safe browser for users that cannot make decisions themselves. They did it to desktop, now they've done it to mobile.
- aembleton 6y ago
  Why did they add any extensions then? I remember that Fenix didn't allow any for a while whilst they built that part of it.
cft 6y ago
Just quit FF because of this. Mobile add-ons were the only reason I used it vs Chrome.
tomc1985 6y ago
Everything I love about tech is slowly being taken away, because technology is apparently too hard for the masses :(
- Shared404 6y ago
  r/unixporn and r/usabilityporn will welcome you. Probably a little too much customization to be totally honest. Edit: I guess this wasn't really related, but you may enjoy nonetheless. I personally found myself enjoying tech again by playing around with Linux/BSD and alternative software. YMMV
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    It's so much more than that though. All of these things seem to be under direct attack, mostly by businesses, wantrepreneurs, and security considerations brought about by them: Extensibility. Manipulating files. Open standards. Options dialogs and deep customization. Information density. Consensual updates. Privacy. Multiple code paths. Low-level/technical details. Backwards compatibility. Secrets and easter eggs. Platform-native applications. Ownership of the bits in your possession. And I've been a linux geek for a while. It is still a bastion of "the old way" of doing things but there are so many people trying to rewrite the rules, pulling the platform in their own direction and writing new code when they should be contributing to existing code. Mastering Linux seems to entail mastering several sub-platforms all at once. If only they'd agree on conventions newer than 30 years old. BSD looks interesting though.... if only it ran software I actually want to use As an increasingly old computer nerd, I am yelling at clouds and holding on to what I have for dear life. Too much of my identity is wrapped around this idea that computers and tech are personal brain-amplification devices, and not appliances like everyone else seems to want them to be.
    - donmcronald 6y ago
      They’ll sell all that back to us.
      - 6y ago
Santosh83 6y ago
Regarding browsers, I suspect the writing is on the wall. They have approached complexities rivalling full-fledged operating systems, and it seems to me that we're heading in the direction of the same few giant vendors authoring and maintaining both. Independent browsers that are not customizations of existing engines are probably on the way out. So we are going to end up with a few major browsers, tightly integrated with their maker's OS, and other broswer 'apps' are going to differentiate on niche features but employ the same few engines underneath, so they won't make a difference to the openness or lack of it for the web. This is already the case with the sole exception of Firefox, the only truly independent browser not backed by an OS/platform vendor, and it's struggling badly precisely because of that. But hopefully, it will still manage to nominally keep pace with the "living standards" and be ready to step into renewed prominence when the bigger players mess up or become too top-heavy for their own good.
- momokoko 6y ago
  Firefox is struggling due to the borderline legally liable gross mismanagement of their executive leadership. How are any of these people allowed to be in control of, sadly what was, such an important piece of the open web? Mind blowing all of them do not resign out of shame and humiliation.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    Can you give some examples of this mismanagement?
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      - spending funds donated for browser support on frivolous nonsense that nobody wanted - not allowing for earmarking of donations for specific projects - breaking user trust repeatedly - firing a large fraction of employees the evening prior to picking up funding (or because of, hard to see cause and effect separate here), almost ensuring that everybody else who is capable will jump ship or at a minimum work on polishing up their resume. - moving income derived from one project to support others that can't stand alone - allowing a vast gap to come into existence between how the outside world sees the company vs how the company sees itself - chasing lofty, highbrow future goals and vague missions at the expense of squandering market share and user goodwill for existing products - prioritizing new and shiny (but unproven) stuff over core and mission critical stuff Do you want me to go on?
IainIreland 6y ago
Mozilla employee here (albeit not on the mobile team): Relax, everybody. Fenix is a major rewrite. It takes time to reimplement all the WebExtension APIs. Nevertheless, the intent is to eventually add support for all the APIs that make sense on mobile. (See here, for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1632626#c1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1632626#c1, or just scroll through the list of bugs here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=GeckoView&component=Extensions&resolution=---&list_id=15396111 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=GeckoView&c...) If you go back and read old HN threads from the first public release of Fenix, people were afraid that the lack of extension support was a sign that Mozilla had given up on adblockers. I hope it's clear by now that's not true. (From what I recall of lunchtime conversations, back when those were a thing, the plan for extensions was "well, we're definitely not shipping without uBlock Origin, and we'll see what else we can get working from there".) Similarly, the fact that parts of the WebExtension API are not currently available doesn't mean Mozilla has given up on it. It just means that things take time. (If it were easy, other mobile browsers might support add-ons!) It takes a lot of resources to support two parallel codebases. At some point you have to rip off the band-aid. The sooner Fennec is cut loose, the more effort we can dedicate to Fenix improvements (like improving WebExtension support). The transition was always going to be a bit bumpy, but things should hopefully get better from here.
- diegocg 6y ago
  Well, it's not very relaxing when users like me were using addons on mobile perfectly fine, and then all of sudden there is a new stable version whose lack of support of addons was not considered a bug that should have been tackled before the release, and we are told that the regressed functionality will only be restored "eventually"
  - godzillabrennus 6y ago
    Mozilla has to try hard to keep losing market share. They are demonstrating they have a knack for it. I‘m a Firefox user on desktop but I see their poor choices around extensions haven’t ended. They’ve borked the extensions on desktop before as well.
dafoex 6y ago
I recall back in the XPI extension days it was possible to host your extension on your own website and have Firefox offer to automagically install it as if it were from the normal add-on site. I believe Chrome also did this for a short while in the early days, too. Surely even with the severely gutted and locked down WebExtensions they have now, it would still be possible to do this again and independently provide your own add-on, or even host an alternative add-on store along the lines of what F-Droid does for Android. You can put all the scary security warnings you want to scare off the unknowledgeable masses, but at least you'll provide some vector to allow niche users with niche requirements to add and trust a niche repository of their niche add-ons.
pabs3 6y ago
Anyone know how well desktop Firefox works on mobile devices? I'm thinking situations like Debian on PinePhone or Librem 5.
SergeAx 6y ago
> In the past, add-ons have done little to help Mozilla achieve a breakthrough on mobile Are you friggin' kidding me? uBlock Origin is the only reason I've switched to Firefox on my mobile. I pledged to do the same on desktop the moment Chrome disables ad blocking extensions, but cheeky bastards are only threating that for years yet.

112 points by gilrain 6y ago

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24330983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24330983

This just seems like slippery slope logic. Most addons previously did not actually work on mobile. All the major addons that people use are available. I'm not sure why we're putting Firefox down for still being far ahead of every other mobile browser which still offers 0 addons. To put this in perspective, I can see 12k people use uBlock origin and the next most popular addon is NoScript with 3k. This really doesn't affect a lot of people.

acemarke 6y ago
I'm still using FF68 on Android. At the moment, I've got three extensions installed, on a new profile: uBlock Origin, Stylerific, and Display Anchors. Granted, the latter two are for niche use cases. But, the point is they exist, and I want to use them. Losing that ability is going to be frustrating, which is one of several reasons why I do not intend to "upgrade" to the new FF Android version until they've actually fixed that and the other major issues from this release.
ekianjo 6y ago
> Most addons previously did not actually work on mobile. I beg your pardon? Literally hundreds if not thousands of add-ons worked flawlessly on Firefox Android until a few weeks ago. > All the major addons that people use are available You'll need to seriously find some source for that extraordinary claim. What does "major" even mean? Who cares about "major ones" if 50% of my add-ons are missing, crippling the functionality of my browser on mobile? This claims makes no sense at all.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  > Literally hundreds if not thousands of add-ons worked flawlessly [...] This is actually a small portion of addons available in the desktop Firefox. Many of them somehow worked, but were never optimized for mobile. "Worked flawlessly" is in my opinion a great overestimation.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Vinnl 6y ago
  > You'll need to seriously find some source for that extraordinary claim. What does "major" even mean? Who cares about "major ones" if 50% of my add-ons are missing, crippling the functionality of my browser on mobile? This claims makes no sense at all. Presumably, "major" means "used by most people", and even without checking I'm quite sure that if you looks at the install numbers of old Firefox for Android Add-ons, you'll find that a very large part of those installs were of extensions that are still available. Sure, I'd like my small Hacker News extension to be available as well, but I do care far more about uBlock and Privacy Badger being available - and judging by installs, so do loads of other people. (Again, which is not to say that I'd like the smaller extensions to be available as well. But "the major addons that people use are available" looks like a mostly accurate claim.)
mastazi 6y ago
> Most addons previously did not actually work on mobile. this is not true. I used to have many addons working perfectly on Android. > All the major addons that people use are available. Wow, all 9 of them? /s (from Mozilla's announcement: "We’re kicking it off with the top 9 add-ons")
- jamienicol 6y ago
  > this is not true. I used to have many addons working perfectly on Android. That doesn't contradict the statement you're replying to at all. > Wow, all 9 of them? Yes, the major ones that people use. More are coming but I'd guess those 9 cover the vast majority of add-on installs
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mastazi 6y ago
    OK, let me rephrase my comment: The number of add-ons that used to work before, was exponentially bigger than 9. Can we agree on that? One example of add-ons that will stop working, is the Google container. Mozilla keeps making choices on behalf of its users by releasing an official Facebook container but not an official Google container (or an Amazon or a Twitter one) even though it would be trivial to fork the Fb container to achieve that [1]. This is problematic because we know that the largest share of Mozilla's revenue is from Google. That's like a smoking cessation products company that is funded by Philip Morris. So, you will excuse me if I think that some or recent Mozilla's choices are not in the interest of its users. [1] and no, the multi-account container is not the answer because it's non-trivial to set up for less technical users
dafoex 6y ago
If you're pointing out the slippery slope logical fallacy, allow me to say "argumentum ad populum" in rebuttal. Just because many or a majority of people have taken one opinion doesn't make it true or good, and just because many or a majority of people have decided to install one of nine add-ons doesn't make it a good selection of add-ons.
iggldiggl 6y ago
> To put this in perspective, I can see 12k people use uBlock origin and the next most popular addon is NoScript with 3k. This really doesn't affect a lot of people. Where are you getting these numbers from? Unfortunately it seems that addons.mozilla.org statistics have become private for all add-ons (it used to be the case that add-on authors could decide on making them public or keeping them private), so I can only look at my own current numbers, but something's definitively off there: Whereas general usage data goes back slightly more than one year, for me the Android data currently only starts in June (!) and with ridiculously low numbers at that (just a handful of users). Since August they have started to pick up a little, but they're still a far cry from what I remember – https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/video-background-pl... shows almost 1k Android users at the moment, which is less than the amount of Windows users being reported, even though installing the addon on desktop doesn't even make all that much sense due to desktop Youtube not blocking background playback anyway. Unfortunately I hadn't looked at that statistics for quite a while so my memory is a bit hazy, but according to the Wayback machine, a year ago that add-on had around 35,000 users, with a very clear majority (that I still remember for sure) of them having been on Android. Likewise, my memories of uBlock origin's statistics are somewhat fuzzy, but I think it had something on the order of a few 100,000 (maybe 300,000 to 400,000 users?) on Android. Adblock Plus had a similar amount, which I remember within the context of them having considerably more users on Desktop than uBlock Origin, but a relatively similar amount on Android.

pmontra 6y ago

> Particularly given that there appears to be no technical reason why none of the other add-ons are allowed any more, it being merely a policy decision. I already verified that my add-ons can still run on Firefox for Android but aren’t allowed to, same shouldq be true for the majority of other add-ons. I wonder how the author did that. If it was a custom build of FF, we could rely on a fork as long as FF is open source and it supports extensions. If it is a configuration, I'll be happy to apply it to my FF. Meanwhile I used ApkExtractor to save the APK of FF 68 on my phone (no root required) just in case I inadvertently upgrade FF on it. I already upgraded FF on my tablet and my old phone to test the UI. My take is that the new collections are good but the navigation UI is really bad. Opening new tabs, tapping the URL bar to go to a new site, forward button, they are all worse than in FF 68 and before. Hopefully they'll make them work as before. I understand that staying on version 68 is also bad because of no security fixes. Furthermore it's possible that extension authors kill the Android version of their software. The plan is to wait for a while and see what happens.

ajayyy 6y ago
This adds a lot more to the whitelist: https://github.com/interfect/fenix https://github.com/interfect/fenix
palant 6y ago
Unfortunately, it was neither. However, I'm being told that Firefox Nightly allows you to install any add-ons, so maybe running it would be an option. I actually used the debugging functionality to install a temporary add-on. This is a supported scenario, but it isn't exactly easy to set up.
- iggldiggl 6y ago
  > However, I'm being told that Firefox Nightly allows you to install any add-ons, so maybe running it would be an option. It doesn't – it's still at the stage of only being thought about: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/14034

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

stickfigure 6y ago

I just installed FF on my Android phone last week. Haven't started using it yet but I'm desperate for any mobile browser that supports the equivalent of Chrome's Quick Javascript Switcher extension - something that gives me one button "disable javascript for this domain". I like using well designed webapps and I generally prefer to leave Javascript enabled. Unfortunately most content sites have become so incredibly user-hostile that the only way to read them is without Javascript. I do not care about enhanced privacy yadda yadda whatever... I just need to be able to turn off the crazy that much of the modern web has become. I guess I'm too late? Sounds like FF is not my answer.

bmurphy1976 6y ago
Brave has this. You can toggle JavaScript in the Brave menu. You can even go into preferences and change it to disable JavaScript by default and use the Brave button as a whitelist. I ran this way for years. It was great! I recently switched to Kiwi+uBlock Origin because it has a proper night mode, but if you don't need that Brave is a good option (you can ignore/disable the crypto currency/advertisment nonsense).
- anti-shill 6y ago
  you don't need an extension with brave to get rid of many ads ...i have no extensions on brave and yet i never see a youtube ad
circularfoyers 6y ago
Firefox on Android has this single button toggle option in the uBlock Origin add-on, which does exactly as you described wanting.
godelski 6y ago
Both uBlock and NoScript are available addons in mobile. Both of these addons are able to accomplish what you want, and more (and are highly popular). The full list of supported addons are: uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, Search by Image, Dark Reader, NoScript, YouTube High Definition, and Privacy Possum.

causality0 6y ago

no technical reason why none of the other add-ons are allowed any more, it being merely a policy decision. I already verified that my add-ons can still run on Firefox for Android but aren’t allowed to That makes me almost incoherently furious. I understand if you rebuild the foundation of a browser for better performance and that breaks all the extensions until the developers can rewrite them for the new model. I get it if one of my favorite extensions is no longer under active development and will never have a version released for the new model. But how fucking dare you gatekeep what I install on my own browser? Freedom from this walled-garden bullshit is the only reason I run Firefox instead of Chrome. Google's twice as good at UI as you. They're faster, look better, and miraculously I never have to swipe five times trying to dismiss a Chrome tab. I get that Mozilla is drowning, flailing around trying to create a future where they aren't irrelevant. This is just ugly, though.

palant 6y ago
According to some Mozilla people, this part is actually wrong and extension support is indeed not implemented completely. It's merely that I couldn't (and still cannot) find a list of outstanding issues, and everything I tried worked correctly.
- causality0 6y ago
  I wouldn't put it past them to just be straight-up lying.
  - palant 6y ago
    They don't. Mozilla at this stage is still a very idealistically motivated organization. Most people are trying hard to do the right thing. It's merely that real-life constrains often lead to rather suboptimal results, despite all the good intentions.
    - causality0 6y ago
      They do lie. Mozilla claimed Quantum was fundamentally incompatible with XUL extensions, despite the fact people could simply build their own Firefox Quantum from source with XUL support turned back on.

cinquemb 6y ago

I know this might sound blasphemous (useds uber alles seems to be today's accepted philosophy)… but one can have all the addons one wants, one just has to run `./mach build`… Only grim for those who chose not to (for whatever reason short of missing hands or bashed in cranium), or cannot be bothered…

saagarjha 6y ago
Most people can't fork every project that does something they don't like.
palant 6y ago
I doesn't say “grim” because you personally cannot circumvent the restrictions, it says so because of the impact this is going to have on the add-on ecosystem. Your trick isn't going to do you any good if nobody is developing/maintaining add-ons any more.

freediver 6y ago

The web browser "situation" that is lasting for the past couple of years inspired us to start working on new macOS/iOS web browser with webextensions API support. We are looking for people to alpha test it. Please email if interested.

ChrisSD 6y ago

> What this text carefully avoids stating directly: that’s the only nine (as in: single-digit 9) add-ons which you will be able to install on Firefox for Android now. After being able to use thousands of add-ons before, this feels like a significant downgrade. Particularly given that there appears to be no technical reason why none of the other add-ons are allowed any more, it being merely a policy decision. I already verified that my add-ons can still run on Firefox for Android but aren’t allowed to, same should be true for the majority of other add-ons. There is a technical reason. They need to thoroughly test the new implementation of the APIs before they enable broader support. Just because the author did some (brief?) testing of a few more addons, it doesn't mean that the APIs themselves are production ready. The main issue is that the new Firefox was released too early so compromises had to be made. Thoroughly testing a handful of addons is easier than thoroughly testing the entire web extension surface area. This isn't a great situation to be in but there's no need to imagine nefarious plans to explain it.

codys 6y ago
The argument being presented would just as well support Microsoft releasing an automatic update to windows (automatically deployed to all their users) that only supported some tiny fraction of white listed applications. They then don't clearly make any promises about removing the white listing, or any timelines, but only vague statements about "ensuring a positive user experience" and "working with their application development partners". Most people would probably see this as a Very Bad Thing, for a few reasons. First of all, if we were to take the claim that it's "to ensure stability of APIs" at face value, it would indicate a staggering lack of maturity in their decision making process around releases. Next, we shouldn't take the "API" argument as being anything representative of reality: applications people develop (or browser extensions) have always been the responsibility of the developers developing them. If there were bugs in a browser, they'd discover and work around them, or they'd have a broken extension/application. There isn't a way around that. Perfect APIs don't fix it: people write bugs into their applications/extensions/platforms all the time. Things are broken all the time. Testing has never been Mozilla's responsibility. It's always been on extension authors. There are already ways to "declare" in an extension that support of a specific version exists. There is no competent technical reason to end up in this situation. We're only left with incompetence and malice. And it's _very_ difficult to think that the people running a popular mobile browser could be so incompetent. Though I'm sure we've all said that before about other Mozilla decisions.

jahabrewer 6y ago

Seems that autofill (for password managers) was broken, too. That and uBO were the reasons I used Firefox on Android.

godelski 6y ago
Both still work on my end. I am using nightly though. BTW, uBlockOrigin is one of the whitelisted apps.

superkuh 6y ago

Mozilla has made it very clear that they don't care about the add-on ecosystems and will throw away everything so they can be more chrome-like and provide a safe browser for users that cannot make decisions themselves. They did it to desktop, now they've done it to mobile.

aembleton 6y ago
Why did they add any extensions then? I remember that Fenix didn't allow any for a while whilst they built that part of it.

cft 6y ago

Just quit FF because of this. Mobile add-ons were the only reason I used it vs Chrome.

tomc1985 6y ago

Everything I love about tech is slowly being taken away, because technology is apparently too hard for the masses :(

Shared404 6y ago
r/unixporn and r/usabilityporn will welcome you. Probably a little too much customization to be totally honest. Edit: I guess this wasn't really related, but you may enjoy nonetheless. I personally found myself enjoying tech again by playing around with Linux/BSD and alternative software. YMMV
- tomc1985 6y ago
  It's so much more than that though. All of these things seem to be under direct attack, mostly by businesses, wantrepreneurs, and security considerations brought about by them: Extensibility. Manipulating files. Open standards. Options dialogs and deep customization. Information density. Consensual updates. Privacy. Multiple code paths. Low-level/technical details. Backwards compatibility. Secrets and easter eggs. Platform-native applications. Ownership of the bits in your possession. And I've been a linux geek for a while. It is still a bastion of "the old way" of doing things but there are so many people trying to rewrite the rules, pulling the platform in their own direction and writing new code when they should be contributing to existing code. Mastering Linux seems to entail mastering several sub-platforms all at once. If only they'd agree on conventions newer than 30 years old. BSD looks interesting though.... if only it ran software I actually want to use As an increasingly old computer nerd, I am yelling at clouds and holding on to what I have for dear life. Too much of my identity is wrapped around this idea that computers and tech are personal brain-amplification devices, and not appliances like everyone else seems to want them to be.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    They’ll sell all that back to us.
    - 6y ago

Santosh83 6y ago

Regarding browsers, I suspect the writing is on the wall. They have approached complexities rivalling full-fledged operating systems, and it seems to me that we're heading in the direction of the same few giant vendors authoring and maintaining both. Independent browsers that are not customizations of existing engines are probably on the way out. So we are going to end up with a few major browsers, tightly integrated with their maker's OS, and other broswer 'apps' are going to differentiate on niche features but employ the same few engines underneath, so they won't make a difference to the openness or lack of it for the web. This is already the case with the sole exception of Firefox, the only truly independent browser not backed by an OS/platform vendor, and it's struggling badly precisely because of that. But hopefully, it will still manage to nominally keep pace with the "living standards" and be ready to step into renewed prominence when the bigger players mess up or become too top-heavy for their own good.

momokoko 6y ago
Firefox is struggling due to the borderline legally liable gross mismanagement of their executive leadership. How are any of these people allowed to be in control of, sadly what was, such an important piece of the open web? Mind blowing all of them do not resign out of shame and humiliation.
- mdoms 6y ago
  Can you give some examples of this mismanagement?
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    - spending funds donated for browser support on frivolous nonsense that nobody wanted - not allowing for earmarking of donations for specific projects - breaking user trust repeatedly - firing a large fraction of employees the evening prior to picking up funding (or because of, hard to see cause and effect separate here), almost ensuring that everybody else who is capable will jump ship or at a minimum work on polishing up their resume. - moving income derived from one project to support others that can't stand alone - allowing a vast gap to come into existence between how the outside world sees the company vs how the company sees itself - chasing lofty, highbrow future goals and vague missions at the expense of squandering market share and user goodwill for existing products - prioritizing new and shiny (but unproven) stuff over core and mission critical stuff Do you want me to go on?

IainIreland 6y ago

Mozilla employee here (albeit not on the mobile team): Relax, everybody. Fenix is a major rewrite. It takes time to reimplement all the WebExtension APIs. Nevertheless, the intent is to eventually add support for all the APIs that make sense on mobile. (See here, for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1632626#c1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1632626#c1, or just scroll through the list of bugs here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=GeckoView&component=Extensions&resolution=---&list_id=15396111 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=GeckoView&c...) If you go back and read old HN threads from the first public release of Fenix, people were afraid that the lack of extension support was a sign that Mozilla had given up on adblockers. I hope it's clear by now that's not true. (From what I recall of lunchtime conversations, back when those were a thing, the plan for extensions was "well, we're definitely not shipping without uBlock Origin, and we'll see what else we can get working from there".) Similarly, the fact that parts of the WebExtension API are not currently available doesn't mean Mozilla has given up on it. It just means that things take time. (If it were easy, other mobile browsers might support add-ons!) It takes a lot of resources to support two parallel codebases. At some point you have to rip off the band-aid. The sooner Fennec is cut loose, the more effort we can dedicate to Fenix improvements (like improving WebExtension support). The transition was always going to be a bit bumpy, but things should hopefully get better from here.

diegocg 6y ago
Well, it's not very relaxing when users like me were using addons on mobile perfectly fine, and then all of sudden there is a new stable version whose lack of support of addons was not considered a bug that should have been tackled before the release, and we are told that the regressed functionality will only be restored "eventually"
- godzillabrennus 6y ago
  Mozilla has to try hard to keep losing market share. They are demonstrating they have a knack for it. I‘m a Firefox user on desktop but I see their poor choices around extensions haven’t ended. They’ve borked the extensions on desktop before as well.

dafoex 6y ago

I recall back in the XPI extension days it was possible to host your extension on your own website and have Firefox offer to automagically install it as if it were from the normal add-on site. I believe Chrome also did this for a short while in the early days, too. Surely even with the severely gutted and locked down WebExtensions they have now, it would still be possible to do this again and independently provide your own add-on, or even host an alternative add-on store along the lines of what F-Droid does for Android. You can put all the scary security warnings you want to scare off the unknowledgeable masses, but at least you'll provide some vector to allow niche users with niche requirements to add and trust a niche repository of their niche add-ons.

pabs3 6y ago

Anyone know how well desktop Firefox works on mobile devices? I'm thinking situations like Debian on PinePhone or Librem 5.

SergeAx 6y ago

> In the past, add-ons have done little to help Mozilla achieve a breakthrough on mobile Are you friggin' kidding me? uBlock Origin is the only reason I've switched to Firefox on my mobile. I pledged to do the same on desktop the moment Chrome disables ad blocking extensions, but cheeky bastards are only threating that for years yet.