[HN Gopher] Firefox for Android is adding support for 400 add-ons
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox for Android is adding support for 400 add-ons
Author : nfriedly
Score : 110 points
Date : 2023-11-30 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (liliputing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (liliputing.com)
| nfriedly wrote:
| I've been running Iceraven for a while, which is just Firefox for
| Android with more addons enabled and some other annoyances fixed.
| I'll probably switch back to the official Firefox after this
| ships.
| chikenf00t wrote:
| I also use Iceraven and Mull as well. Both have served me great
| over the years. They're much better than Vanadium that comes by
| default with GrapheneOS.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| The title is rather diplomatic.
|
| I guess:
|
| "Firefox for Android voluntary broke add-on support in 2020 and
| has now fixed it after 3 years of users and developers
| complaining about it"
|
| Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
|
| I mean as a user I get the rationale for the rewrite and one step
| back two steps forward but it genuinely feels like Mozilla has
| prioritized just about everything else instead of this.
| cedilla wrote:
| You should really ask for your money back.
| IshKebab wrote:
| You mean switch to Chrome? Yeah lots of people have so
| Mozilla isn't doing too well.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| That'll teach them! Show your contempt for the browser
| vendor who is staggering add-on support by switching to a
| browser with _no_ add-on support.
| Zuiii wrote:
| I've switched to kiwi on android ever since mozila
| dropped the ball. It's chrome with _all_ addons. No
| complaints whatsoever :-)
|
| It's not about teaching anyone anything. All I want is a
| browser that supports any addons I want. Mozilla decided
| they didn't want to provide what I want when they
| blacklisted most addons and required their wierd signing
| requirements, so I simply switched to a browser that
| does.
| joak wrote:
| I moved to kiwi as well. Same reasons.
| starttoaster wrote:
| > Mozilla decided they didn't want to provide what I want
| when they blacklisted most addons and required their
| wierd signing requirements, so I simply switched to a
| browser that does.
|
| You're free, of course, to be a patron of whatever
| software you want. However, they only instituted "weird"
| signing requirements to help dramatically slow down or
| stop the influx of addons that were maliciously changing
| browser settings among other hazards. If that doesn't
| sound like some good utility to you, then I think we'll
| just have to agree to disagree. Online security has never
| been a priority for a large subset of internet users.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Chrome, the browser with no mobile extensions at all.
| switch007 wrote:
| You know they've accepted donations for quite a while now?
| For all you know they could have donated considerable amounts
| jdiff wrote:
| Sure, they could also secretly be the Mozilla CEO.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| Your comment is incredibly dismissive, especially given
| that the "OP" is in fact a donor.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| I actually was a donor until 2020.
|
| Not because of add-ons obviously but because of the Mozilla
| foundation mass layoffs with the MDN, Servo, Rust team,
| etc. The contrast of C-levels (of an open-source
| _foundation_) like Mitchell raking in +3M a year and the
| layoffs felt too hypocritical. The suits have taken over
| and they lost their mission.
|
| I will not be donating to them until there is a clear way
| to make donations specifically for Developer payroll only.
| dugite-code wrote:
| In fairness Firefox for android got essentially a full re-write
| so it wasn't JUST add-on support that was changing
| arsome wrote:
| How about all add-ons as specified by developers instead of this
| trashfire?
|
| Restricting add-ons in this way seems more like a Google move
| than a Mozilla one.
| Sakos wrote:
| > Not all Firefox add-ons available from addons.mozilla.org
| will work with the mobile browser. But any extension marked as
| Android compatible should work, and if you want to browse a
| subset of compatible extensions, there's a new page for that.
|
| If a developer marks their addon as compatible with the mobile
| version, you can install it. Mozilla isn't adding any of these
| addons themselves, it's all up to the devs now.
| Zuiii wrote:
| So if I take the source code and change the manifest to
| indicate that it is compatible, then it should work out of
| the box?
|
| I still don't understand why they don't do what kiwi does. It
| supports all the chrome addons without modification.
| joak wrote:
| I'm sticking with kiwi: Firefox is still missing the must
| needed "I don't mind about cookies" extension.
|
| In Europe, by law, each time you open a page you get a
| weird and annoying popup saying something like: "the
| website uses cookies, are you ok with that?". The extension
| just nix the nonsense popup.
| shitlord wrote:
| Hopefully, SponsorBlock is included. The official YouTube app and
| the website are both plagued with sponsored segments. FOSS
| alternatives don't seem to support personalized feeds (although I
| may be mistaken).
| joelthelion wrote:
| I've been using Firefox for Android with ublock and sponsor
| block for a few months. Works great!
| rey0927 wrote:
| use Youtube Revanced
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I wish content creators would just briefly mention that sponsor
| links are in the video info and not spend minutes talking about
| it. I just double-tap-right/skip over that and it only serves
| to make me annoyed. I would actually be much more likely to at
| least glance at a written list of sponsors and info for a video
| that I liked.
| frfl wrote:
| Lex Fridman does that basically, in the first 30 seconds, and
| mentions video info has full list. I mention Lex because
| that's the only example I can think of right now.
|
| Other's seem to go out of their way to embed sponsor reads
| within the video at random times.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the "browser", for lack of a better term... sucks.
|
| It was released as a preview in 2019 and has barely made
| appreciable strides since.
|
| The team is so semi-competent that they have added and broken and
| disabled pull to refresh more than once now.
|
| Add-ons have been on life support ever since they were
| introduced.
|
| If I fullscreen a video, my browser minimizes.
|
| Battery usage is abysmal.
|
| Speed is noticably worse than any chromium fork.
|
| Of course, I don't think I could do any better, but I'm not
| producing a browser, nor have I fired any engineers despite not
| having particularly reknown engineering chops as a company in
| recent memory.
|
| This software is just terrible, especially because this failure
| isn't in a vacuum, it actually cements chromium as a monopoly of
| engineering competence.
| anonymousab wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is that sticky divs of most kinds (e.g.
| the bar at the bottom of Twitter.com, sidebars on news sites,
| etc.) horrendously crush the performance.
|
| But if you kill them, by zapping with ublock or using another
| extension or bookmarklet, the performance is instantly a lot
| closer to something like the Chrome or Brave apps
|
| It has been like this since Fenix launched, so at this point it
| makes me need to assume that it's some sort of fundamental
| limitation of their architecture. It is rather unfortunate.
| OneDonOne wrote:
| There was no need for that "redesign". None. There is a
| distinct possibility that older Firefox could be in use today
| without issue. People must learn when to just leave certaon
| features alone.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| As somebody who worked on the Gecko side on this, there
| absolutely was a need for a rewrite.
| dralley wrote:
| It wasn't just a "redesign", they replaced a significant
| chunk of the internals. And the new version is much faster
| and more responsive than the old version.
| Pxtl wrote:
| That has not been my experience. I was trying Firefox and their
| various preview products on my Android once in a while for
| years. Every time I would bounce because of painful performance
| and bad scrolling.
|
| The latest incarnation... well it can choke on YouTube videos
| once in a while and you have to force kill it. And it does eat
| more battery than Chromium browsers.
|
| But the current state is the first time I've found Firefox
| mobile version usable as a daily driver.
|
| Maybe it's just phones have caught up - I'm on a Pixel 7.
|
| But the point stands: vanilla FF mobile is now good-enough-for-
| me, and extensions make it wonderful.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| I can't get over the bugs and slowness when I can just load
| up Brave that has a great ad blocker and dark mode setting.
|
| Nothing else is really relevant to me on mobile.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Yes one aspect seems for sure to be that it requires a lot
| more memory than Chrome, so on old budget phones it's likely
| to remain unviable to use it
| Foolishdev wrote:
| When I read comments like this, it really blows me away. I
| don't have anything near the experience you are describing.
| I've used Firefox on Android for a while now with UBlock origin
| doing it's job as it should. It doesn't kill my battery or run
| sluggishly. I use it for YouTube and browser-based YouTube is
| missing some live stream features, but that is by Google's
| design.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| This is clearly someone who is not a user. Probably gave it a
| try 4 years ago made a list of dislikes, uninstalled, and
| stuck with the criticism.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I haven't used chrome in years, because while all those things
| are partially true, ublock origin makes them pale into
| insignificance compared to the eye sore I am otherwise
| subjected to.
|
| What I really want is to use chrome for PWAs and something that
| is essentially Firefox reader mode for actual web documents.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| I love Firefox reader mode! It's genuinely really helpful,
| especially on sites that 'optimise' for mobile by making it
| nearly unusable with their fancy font scaling that, without
| fail, always overflows off the page.
| tpm wrote:
| I'm using Firefox on Android daily as my only mobile browser
| since Google tried to force tab groups on me. It could be
| faster, but other than that I don't really have any issues.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I've been using Firefox android since I got my android phone
| (6mo ago) and it's been just fine. Maybe I don't know what I'm
| missing?
|
| It was the easiest browser option with adblock, which pretty
| much sealed the deal for me
| unethical_ban wrote:
| My experience is mostly positive.
|
| I have not tested battery life, but it is acceptable to me, as
| is most of the performance.
|
| I can confirm the full-screen video bug - I just tried watching
| a video on the New York Times site, and full-screening with
| Firefox is completely hosed, where Chrome works fine. I have
| Decentraleyes and uBlock installed as addons.
| blackbeans wrote:
| I use Firefox Beta daily on Android. Works without complaints.
|
| I have used add-ons with it for the past years. The ones you
| really need, like uBlock Origin, have always been there.
| madars wrote:
| >Speed is noticably worse than any chromium fork.
|
| My experience is decidedly the opposite, and the single reason
| for that is uBlock Origin. The principal way to make websites
| load fast is to make them load less garbage. Fast browser
| engine is nice but not even close to proper content blocking
| (e.g. uBlock's JS defusers or DOM rules).
|
| But extension capability is great overall. For example, you
| don't like how HN styles downvoted comments in unreadable light
| grey on light grey? Just add a user CSS extension and use this
| filter: .c5a, .c73, .c82, .c88, .c9c, .cae,
| .cbe, .cce, .cdd { color: #222; font-style: italic; }
| rewmie wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the "browser", for lack of a better term...
| sucks.
|
| I have no idea what you are talking about. I've been using
| Firefox and Firefox Focus for years and if anything it's always
| been fast and ultra reliable.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| I've used Firefox on Android for many years, and while I don't
| agree that it's _terrible_ I do think it 's worse than it used
| to be.
|
| Around the same time as the extensions support was disabled,
| they removed a lot of features I liked and added some features
| and UI changes that still annoy me. It's a bit sad.
| poisonborz wrote:
| > If I fullscreen a video, my browser minimizes
|
| Man I have this, I have a very popular phone model, how can
| this not be fixed in years.
| akomtu wrote:
| Still no support for side-loading?
| xrd wrote:
| I did some side loading using a crazy wireguard, adb and CLI
| OCR hack:
|
| https://blog.plzat.me/2023-05-23-android-in-wireguardland-pu...
|
| It worked great! But, I'm glad I don't need to use it anymore.
| von_lohengramm wrote:
| Can you not create an add-on collection to install arbitrary
| extensions anymore?
| sebtron wrote:
| Good to hear, unfortunately my favorite add-on Multi-Account
| Containers is not in the list :/
|
| I guess it is one of the more complex to port from a technical
| point of view. Hopefully soon!
| beebeepka wrote:
| Firefox mobile is the only reason I barely use my laptop for
| browsing anymore. I only need noscript and ublock origin keeping
| the modern web bearable.
|
| Now, if only there was a powerful computer device with the
| physical dimensions of my Kobo Libra 2. Almost got a Lenovo
| Legion Go but it's 3x the weight of my reader - more than 600
| grams without the joypads
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-30 23:02 UTC)