4 ms·

My guess is they are afraid they might lose Google money if they enable too much freedom. But they have also been losing users, and without users they have no

My guess is they are afraid they might lose Google money if they enable too much freedom. But they have also been losing users, and without users they have no leverage.

jeroenhd 4y ago
I use some addons that weren't whitelisted trough the addon collection trick. Many addons plain don't work. The mobile browser doesn't have the UI these addons rely on and maybe there's some API coverage missing. I considered this a fair reason when the rewrite was released, you could still use the old Firefox for a while. But then time passed and nothing changed. It's clear the Fenix devs don't have the capacity or the interest to maintain addon support. There are many silly things about the browser rewrite. For instance, you can't enter an IPv6 address and navigate to it (i.e. http://[::1]/ http://[::1]/). Firefox will always Google it. You can click a link from another app and the page will load just fine, but the address bar just doesn't understand those addresses. Then there's the fact about:config is disabled in stable versions of Firefox. Or the fact that enabling user-installed certificate authorities requires you to go into debug settings. I don't think Mozilla has a clear idea what it wants with their browser, it feels so unfinished in so many ways.
- Zak 4y ago
  There's no incentive for addon developers to fix the experience because only a tiny fraction of Firefox users will jump through the hoops to run them. It seems to me like Mozilla is actively trying to prevent there from being an addon ecosystem for the mobile version, and I do not understand their motivation.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I don't think addon devs can be blamed. They're presented with an API that's supposed to be available in almost every browser available, and on Android (and probably eventually iOS) it's just not.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  > Many addons plain don't work. The mobile browser doesn't have the UI these addons rely on and maybe there's some API coverage missing. Even the old Fennec code base never fully supported all bits of the Webextension API, and yet there were no restrictions on add-on installation. Besides in any case it would have been up to add-on developers to decide whether they could sensibly get their add-on to work on Android (and therefore mark it as officially compatible with Android on AMO), or whether some crucial API was missing (or they simply didn't feel like re-designing the UI with small screens in mind) and therefore leave it as officially desktop-only. Simple page scripts don't require any APIs (and especially no UI!) beyond basic Webextension support at all, and yet e.g. the video-background-play-fix add-on was only whitelisted after comparatively ages and much user complaining. And even before Webextensions, when writing an Android add-on required quite a bit more separate code that couldn't directly be re-used from a desktop add-on (due to the UI and e.g. tab management being handled differently between Desktop Firefox and Fennec), AMO still had much more Android add-ons available than the current measly 22 add-ons that can officially be installed.

My guess is they are afraid they might lose Google money if they enable too much freedom. But they have also been losing users, and without users they have no leverage.

jeroenhd 4y ago

I use some addons that weren't whitelisted trough the addon collection trick. Many addons plain don't work. The mobile browser doesn't have the UI these addons rely on and maybe there's some API coverage missing. I considered this a fair reason when the rewrite was released, you could still use the old Firefox for a while. But then time passed and nothing changed. It's clear the Fenix devs don't have the capacity or the interest to maintain addon support. There are many silly things about the browser rewrite. For instance, you can't enter an IPv6 address and navigate to it (i.e. http://[::1]/ http://[::1]/). Firefox will always Google it. You can click a link from another app and the page will load just fine, but the address bar just doesn't understand those addresses. Then there's the fact about:config is disabled in stable versions of Firefox. Or the fact that enabling user-installed certificate authorities requires you to go into debug settings. I don't think Mozilla has a clear idea what it wants with their browser, it feels so unfinished in so many ways.

Zak 4y ago
There's no incentive for addon developers to fix the experience because only a tiny fraction of Firefox users will jump through the hoops to run them. It seems to me like Mozilla is actively trying to prevent there from being an addon ecosystem for the mobile version, and I do not understand their motivation.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I don't think addon devs can be blamed. They're presented with an API that's supposed to be available in almost every browser available, and on Android (and probably eventually iOS) it's just not.
iggldiggl 4y ago
> Many addons plain don't work. The mobile browser doesn't have the UI these addons rely on and maybe there's some API coverage missing. Even the old Fennec code base never fully supported all bits of the Webextension API, and yet there were no restrictions on add-on installation. Besides in any case it would have been up to add-on developers to decide whether they could sensibly get their add-on to work on Android (and therefore mark it as officially compatible with Android on AMO), or whether some crucial API was missing (or they simply didn't feel like re-designing the UI with small screens in mind) and therefore leave it as officially desktop-only. Simple page scripts don't require any APIs (and especially no UI!) beyond basic Webextension support at all, and yet e.g. the video-background-play-fix add-on was only whitelisted after comparatively ages and much user complaining. And even before Webextensions, when writing an Android add-on required quite a bit more separate code that couldn't directly be re-used from a desktop add-on (due to the UI and e.g. tab management being handled differently between Desktop Firefox and Fennec), AMO still had much more Android add-ons available than the current measly 22 add-ons that can officially be installed.