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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 in

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 to do that. Obviously this required some reimplementation time for extension support. But they then launched the rewrite of FF for Android with extension support... but hidden. Only a small set of recommended extensions were enabled, and a few were drip-fed over time (that is, added to the list). Thankfully, this included the single most important extension, uBlock Origin, from the very beginning. (The lack of uBO why Chrome for Android is borderline unusable for me!) But from almost the very beginning, we've also had the ability to activate custom extension collections in Nightly (and in Fennec F-Droid, which is a rebuild of stable Firefox). The vast majority of extensions worked fine for... well, years now. So why in the world was this delayed the whole time?

gruez 3y ago
AFAIK it was because firefox for android was on a slightly different codebase than desktop firefox, and thus had supported a different set of webextension apis. The user contexts api (container tabs) was missing entirely, for instance.
- dblohm7 3y ago
  (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 extensions were supported in release.
  - Zak 3y ago
    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 was pretty opaque about it.
    - toyg 3y ago
      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.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        That fear was obviously unjustified. Extensions that would tank performance would have gotten bad user ratings.
        dblohm7 3y ago
        That's assuming that you know that the extension is the cause. A bad extension doesn't always kill perf as soon as you install it.
        cubefox 3y ago
        Surely enough people would have figured it out to result in bad ratings.
      - Vinnl 3y ago
        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.
mvdtnz 3y ago
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.
- jraph 3y ago
  Yes, indeed, AMO means addons.mozilla.org
- vallode 3y ago
  I was also somehow aware of this acronym. Turns out the about page of Mozilla's add-ons page also uses it[1], so it's "official" so to speak. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/about https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/about
- zerocrates 3y ago
  The article currently does define it, but maybe that was changed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sedatk 3y ago
[flagged]
- jraph 3y ago
  > Few of them prevents me from switching to Firefox (I assume you meant "a few"). Which ones, by curiosity?
  - sedatk 3y ago
    Yes, I meant a few. The biggest blocker for me is font kerning on canvas elements being broken. That causes Google Docs to render terribly which makes it practically unusable. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596 Another one is favicons not being stored/synced across browsers. This causes me to have a bookmark toolbar with entirely the same default icon without any text. (I prefer them as icons, fits more stuff there). I don't have this problem with Chromium based browsers. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378
- 127361 3y ago
  And the rest of the money going to social-justice and DEI inclusion related projects, as the whole organization has been co-opted by social justice types.
- 127361 3y ago
  And a chunk of Mozilla's funding going towards social justice related projects, as much of the organization has been co-opted by social justice types. As was stated in the article[1], close to half a million dollars was spent on a social-justice related organization, the Mackenzie Mack Group. “[Mckensie Mack Group] is a change management firm redefining innovation in the white-dominant change management industry.” In the article it also says " While The Lunduke Journal does not like to delve too deeply into the Political Woods (tm), it should be questioned why so much money — possibly millions of dollars donated by individuals who thought they were supporting a web browser — is being funneled into highly political organizations that seem to have no involvement with the World Wide Web, Web Browsers, or any related standards. " 1. https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest... "
akdor1154 3y ago
My crank unevidenced theory is that 1. they wanted an Apple-level of verified review process for AMO, because the Chrome store and even Android app store have problems with malicious content. 2. This costs money. 3. They didn't want to open a free for all because they didn't know exactly how to go about solving 2. yet, and if they introduced some payment system then it would be easier to do from a clean slate, without an AMO full of existing extensions to somehow grandfather through. As said before, this is fully unfounded and probably unfair speculation. I like it more than the 'google conspiracy against adblockers' though because Mozilla's motivations in this case are quite reasonable and can be taken in good faith. Keeping credit card skimmers out of AMO at the cost of restricting access to 'Firefox Pro'/'AMO Pro'/author-pays would honestly be quite a good thing for Mozilla to consider imo. In any case it's great to see them allowing things now!
wolverine876 3y ago
> The baffling thing is why this took so damn long. I'm surprised it's baffling in a community of developers and other IT professionals. It's not baffling to me that two significantly (wholly?) different applications on different platforms and form factors would require quite a bit of work to both be generally compatible with the same third-party software via the same API - and all while maintaining the same compatibility with another application, made by another company, completely outside Mozilla's control. And it needs to work reliably enough to release to a world of developers - of every skill level, motivation, writing every kind of software (within the domain of browser add-ons) - with confidence that it will work for them and users. And you need a way to maintain all that over the long term. I'm impressed Mozilla!
- LeoNatan25 3y ago
  Did you read past that sentence you quoted?
- charcircuit 3y ago
  The extensions worked just fine on Android before an update a few years ago broke them. I can finally use extensions that I've been missing for years.
- dopa42365 3y ago
  Firefox android extension support went from "all" to like "5 chosen ones, but we'll enable all of them very soon" in mid 2019. How and why those were handpicked, who knows, clearly extensions weren't enabled by supported functions at the time. In the usual mozilla fashion that "very soon" turned out to be multiple years.
  - Groxx 3y ago
    Importantly, during this entire multi-year gap, nearly all of them worked just fine but it was gated behind an AMO account for... I don't know what reason. If it was just an experience issue because like 5% failed weirdly or had bad performance but they couldn't validate them all: that's basically fine! Hide it behind an about:config flag! The AMO requirement was a privacy-invading piece of nonsense that had no business existing.
st3fan 3y ago
I managed the team that did a lot of the integration of web extension support in Fenix, the new Firefox for Android. We were all on the brink of burnout. There was too much work. Unrealistic deadlines. And high expectations. So we decided to only support a limited set of APIs tuned for the most popular web extension. Which were basically all ad blockers if I remember correctly. Proud of the team to have finally gotten to this point. Miss you all.
- st3fan 3y ago
  Other people may remember this differently. Some things are a bit of a blur. My brain selectively blocks some of this - It was basically an exhausting two/three year crunch to rewrite Fennec as a modern Android app.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    That's how I remember it. I was on desktop projects but following closely and the rewrite was a death march and people working on it moved or left along the way too. We should have listened to Hyatt back in 2003-ish when he basically said of XUL, "it's never gonna be great on *nix or Mac but it's good enough on Windows." Because of solid desktop horsepower growth over the 2000s, we were able to make XUL go for the three desktop platforms pretty well but it should never have gone to mobile and replacing it with a native front end was absolutely the right thing to do, despite the pain.
    - glandium 3y ago
      XUL is not the whole story, though. There was an Android native Firefox before the current Fenix and after the XUL Fennec, and it had Web Extensions, IIRC. From that perspective, that people complained is understandable.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  It sounds like they intentionally under-provisioned you all to draw it out, which isn't surprising given their biggest source of funding is Google, and the last thing Google wants is ad/tracker blocking, privacy extensions, and, well, a major reason for people to set their default browser to 'not chrome'. Lord knows there's enough money floating around that place. What a shame - but thank you. Hopefully plugins come to Firefox for iOS some time.
SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago
Mozilla isn’t an independent entity and hasn’t been for some time now. Sorry, but if one company is responsible for 87% of your revenue and your CEO receives a $7 million salary, then they are a puppet and therefore so is the entity as a whole. I won’t be surprised if at some point in the future we learn that Google had a discreet veto over any aspect of Mozilla’s software roadmap, as a condition of the money faucet continuing to flow. Google is known to make underhanded deals (just Google “Epic v Google” for details); they provide the funding that allows Mozilla to exist; and a Firefox with a capable extension model is indeed a serious threat to Chrome’s marketability and Google’s strategic interests. Given all that, it’s difficult to believe that a key differentiating feature was legitimately starved of resources for a decade.
antman 3y ago
Use kiwi, is Chrome based and has full extension support
- neop1x 3y ago
  ... and even Developer tools. I have been using it as my daily driver since the Firefox mobile dropped extensions and about:config years ago

gruez 3y ago

AFAIK it was because firefox for android was on a slightly different codebase than desktop firefox, and thus had supported a different set of webextension apis. The user contexts api (container tabs) was missing entirely, for instance.

dblohm7 3y ago
(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 extensions were supported in release.
- Zak 3y ago
  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 was pretty opaque about it.
  - toyg 3y ago
    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.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      That fear was obviously unjustified. Extensions that would tank performance would have gotten bad user ratings.
      - dblohm7 3y ago
        That's assuming that you know that the extension is the cause. A bad extension doesn't always kill perf as soon as you install it.
        cubefox 3y ago
        Surely enough people would have figured it out to result in bad ratings.
    - Vinnl 3y ago
      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.

mvdtnz 3y ago

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.

jraph 3y ago
Yes, indeed, AMO means addons.mozilla.org
vallode 3y ago
I was also somehow aware of this acronym. Turns out the about page of Mozilla's add-ons page also uses it[1], so it's "official" so to speak. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/about https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/about
zerocrates 3y ago
The article currently does define it, but maybe that was changed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sedatk 3y ago

[flagged]

jraph 3y ago
> Few of them prevents me from switching to Firefox (I assume you meant "a few"). Which ones, by curiosity?
- sedatk 3y ago
  Yes, I meant a few. The biggest blocker for me is font kerning on canvas elements being broken. That causes Google Docs to render terribly which makes it practically unusable. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1445596 Another one is favicons not being stored/synced across browsers. This causes me to have a bookmark toolbar with entirely the same default icon without any text. (I prefer them as icons, fits more stuff there). I don't have this problem with Chromium based browsers. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378
127361 3y ago
And the rest of the money going to social-justice and DEI inclusion related projects, as the whole organization has been co-opted by social justice types.
127361 3y ago
And a chunk of Mozilla's funding going towards social justice related projects, as much of the organization has been co-opted by social justice types. As was stated in the article[1], close to half a million dollars was spent on a social-justice related organization, the Mackenzie Mack Group. “[Mckensie Mack Group] is a change management firm redefining innovation in the white-dominant change management industry.” In the article it also says " While The Lunduke Journal does not like to delve too deeply into the Political Woods (tm), it should be questioned why so much money — possibly millions of dollars donated by individuals who thought they were supporting a web browser — is being funneled into highly political organizations that seem to have no involvement with the World Wide Web, Web Browsers, or any related standards. " 1. https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest... "

akdor1154 3y ago

My crank unevidenced theory is that 1. they wanted an Apple-level of verified review process for AMO, because the Chrome store and even Android app store have problems with malicious content. 2. This costs money. 3. They didn't want to open a free for all because they didn't know exactly how to go about solving 2. yet, and if they introduced some payment system then it would be easier to do from a clean slate, without an AMO full of existing extensions to somehow grandfather through. As said before, this is fully unfounded and probably unfair speculation. I like it more than the 'google conspiracy against adblockers' though because Mozilla's motivations in this case are quite reasonable and can be taken in good faith. Keeping credit card skimmers out of AMO at the cost of restricting access to 'Firefox Pro'/'AMO Pro'/author-pays would honestly be quite a good thing for Mozilla to consider imo. In any case it's great to see them allowing things now!

wolverine876 3y ago

> The baffling thing is why this took so damn long. I'm surprised it's baffling in a community of developers and other IT professionals. It's not baffling to me that two significantly (wholly?) different applications on different platforms and form factors would require quite a bit of work to both be generally compatible with the same third-party software via the same API - and all while maintaining the same compatibility with another application, made by another company, completely outside Mozilla's control. And it needs to work reliably enough to release to a world of developers - of every skill level, motivation, writing every kind of software (within the domain of browser add-ons) - with confidence that it will work for them and users. And you need a way to maintain all that over the long term. I'm impressed Mozilla!

LeoNatan25 3y ago
Did you read past that sentence you quoted?
charcircuit 3y ago
The extensions worked just fine on Android before an update a few years ago broke them. I can finally use extensions that I've been missing for years.
dopa42365 3y ago
Firefox android extension support went from "all" to like "5 chosen ones, but we'll enable all of them very soon" in mid 2019. How and why those were handpicked, who knows, clearly extensions weren't enabled by supported functions at the time. In the usual mozilla fashion that "very soon" turned out to be multiple years.
- Groxx 3y ago
  Importantly, during this entire multi-year gap, nearly all of them worked just fine but it was gated behind an AMO account for... I don't know what reason. If it was just an experience issue because like 5% failed weirdly or had bad performance but they couldn't validate them all: that's basically fine! Hide it behind an about:config flag! The AMO requirement was a privacy-invading piece of nonsense that had no business existing.

st3fan 3y ago

I managed the team that did a lot of the integration of web extension support in Fenix, the new Firefox for Android. We were all on the brink of burnout. There was too much work. Unrealistic deadlines. And high expectations. So we decided to only support a limited set of APIs tuned for the most popular web extension. Which were basically all ad blockers if I remember correctly. Proud of the team to have finally gotten to this point. Miss you all.

st3fan 3y ago
Other people may remember this differently. Some things are a bit of a blur. My brain selectively blocks some of this - It was basically an exhausting two/three year crunch to rewrite Fennec as a modern Android app.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  That's how I remember it. I was on desktop projects but following closely and the rewrite was a death march and people working on it moved or left along the way too. We should have listened to Hyatt back in 2003-ish when he basically said of XUL, "it's never gonna be great on *nix or Mac but it's good enough on Windows." Because of solid desktop horsepower growth over the 2000s, we were able to make XUL go for the three desktop platforms pretty well but it should never have gone to mobile and replacing it with a native front end was absolutely the right thing to do, despite the pain.
  - glandium 3y ago
    XUL is not the whole story, though. There was an Android native Firefox before the current Fenix and after the XUL Fennec, and it had Web Extensions, IIRC. From that perspective, that people complained is understandable.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
KennyBlanken 3y ago
It sounds like they intentionally under-provisioned you all to draw it out, which isn't surprising given their biggest source of funding is Google, and the last thing Google wants is ad/tracker blocking, privacy extensions, and, well, a major reason for people to set their default browser to 'not chrome'. Lord knows there's enough money floating around that place. What a shame - but thank you. Hopefully plugins come to Firefox for iOS some time.

SheinhardtWigCo 3y ago

Mozilla isn’t an independent entity and hasn’t been for some time now. Sorry, but if one company is responsible for 87% of your revenue and your CEO receives a $7 million salary, then they are a puppet and therefore so is the entity as a whole. I won’t be surprised if at some point in the future we learn that Google had a discreet veto over any aspect of Mozilla’s software roadmap, as a condition of the money faucet continuing to flow. Google is known to make underhanded deals (just Google “Epic v Google” for details); they provide the funding that allows Mozilla to exist; and a Firefox with a capable extension model is indeed a serious threat to Chrome’s marketability and Google’s strategic interests. Given all that, it’s difficult to believe that a key differentiating feature was legitimately starved of resources for a decade.

antman 3y ago

Use kiwi, is Chrome based and has full extension support

neop1x 3y ago
... and even Developer tools. I have been using it as my daily driver since the Firefox mobile dropped extensions and about:config years ago