4 ms·

Probably fear that bad extensions would tank performance, tarnishing the reputation of the overall browser. Now that such reputation is more or less established

by 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.
- dblohm7 3y ago
  That's part of it, for sure... at the time I was still there, Gecko's extension process did not have the capability of recovering from termination. But that just meant that we couldn't run them in a child process, not that we couldn't run them at all. Of course, then you have security considerations, which no doubt could have factored into the product decision.
  - gitaarik 3y ago
    It's common practice these days in Android apps to request the user to turn allow the app to run on the background, opening the necessary Android settings page if you want to grant the app access to this. If an addon needs that feature, the app could request this for the addon at moment of installation.
    - dblohm7 3y ago
      I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. Modern browsers try to host their extensions in a special sandboxed subprocess. At the time I was there, the code in Gecko that hosts sandboxed child processes was completely unable to deal with that host process being terminated; ie Gecko could not recover from that. It has nothing to do with Android settings.
gitaarik 3y ago
You can fix that in other ways that doesn't block access to all extensions. Like yeah even just a checkbox to enable experimental extension support like "[] I understand Firefox can become slower from unsupported extensions I install".
JustinGoldberg9 3y ago
afaik this is why android chrome never supported extensions.

by toyg 3y ago

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.

dblohm7 3y ago
That's part of it, for sure... at the time I was still there, Gecko's extension process did not have the capability of recovering from termination. But that just meant that we couldn't run them in a child process, not that we couldn't run them at all. Of course, then you have security considerations, which no doubt could have factored into the product decision.
- gitaarik 3y ago
  It's common practice these days in Android apps to request the user to turn allow the app to run on the background, opening the necessary Android settings page if you want to grant the app access to this. If an addon needs that feature, the app could request this for the addon at moment of installation.
  - dblohm7 3y ago
    I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. Modern browsers try to host their extensions in a special sandboxed subprocess. At the time I was there, the code in Gecko that hosts sandboxed child processes was completely unable to deal with that host process being terminated; ie Gecko could not recover from that. It has nothing to do with Android settings.

gitaarik 3y ago

You can fix that in other ways that doesn't block access to all extensions. Like yeah even just a checkbox to enable experimental extension support like "[] I understand Firefox can become slower from unsupported extensions I install".

JustinGoldberg9 3y ago

afaik this is why android chrome never supported extensions.