Hacker News Reader

Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

Can you tell us which browser apart from mobile firefox allows extensions? Safari no, Edge no. I use firefox mobile for extensions, but browser vendors might want to make different tradeoffs since mobile has different requirements, and it is used by far too many people for far too much personal tasks and allowing access to browser data may not be as desirable as on Desktop. 99% of mobile users don't have the technical skills required to understand what data extensions will have access to.

Off course, Apple doesn't even allow other browsers on iOS, so firefox iOS can't support extensions even if it wanted to. If you look at a single policy and decide that you know all you need to know, then maybe you should first ask for apple to change.

View on HN

You can develop extensions for the browser on iOS — they just have to use JavaScript inside the page or the share sheet to work. An example of an iOS browser with such extension support would be iCab, though natively in Safari the share sheet is supported too. I commonly load translation apps that way, and once upon a time it was the only way to load LastPass/1Password, etc. And Safari supports content blocker apps natively as well. Not that I don’t support greater choice of defaults and fewer “Reader” apps on iOS, but the situation isn’t actually that dire if you look into it a bit.

Brave browser allows you to default disable JavaScript which for 90% of sites means to block adverts (and 10% of sites will break the site)

Firefox Focus will at least destroy everything the moment you leave a site

Firefox allows ad-blockers

These are what I use for all sites that aren't owned by Google... Google sites I open in Chrome, but only Google sites do I open in Chrome

I have no default browser on my Android, I pick a browser when I click a link, with Brave being my default in most cases, Firefox Focus for "must have JavaScript but please scorch the Earth afterwards" and Firefox for somewhere inbetween

Brave makes different trade offs. I use brave with javascript disabled, and find a lot of sites not working. Specifically, any links I open from email mostly don't work due to JS. If you don't know why your fav site isn't working due to JS, brave might not be your cup of tea. And that is 99% of mobile users.

On my Nexus I've made Firefox Focus my default browser.

Not that I use it the most — I have standard Firefox for hitting my everyday fave sites — but when I follow a link from another app (email, etc.) I know I'll get a fast experience w/o cookie persistence and the other upsides of a stealth browser.

For me, it's been a successful pattern.

It's been a long time since I used it, but Dolphin Browser used to support them. Chromium or webkit based, to the extent that early versions also had "Jetpack" available to distribute a newer build of the browser engine than was natively available.

Edit: still has an ad blocker add-on based on the Adblock Plus rules, and the browser has been updated within the past month. I believe it was the first tabbed browser on Android, and supports some useful features like definable gestures.

On OSX, there are Safari App Extensions. They’re not as user customizable as extensions on Chrome but they do exist. In fact I recently release my own Safari Ad-tracking blocker on the Mac App Store.

Came here to mention this, so thanks for bringing it up.

Safari has definitely come a long way, and the app extensions tend to get underrated.

Are they 100% up to par with Chrome's? Probably not, but when shopping around for reasonable competitors, you need to account for the trajectory, rather than just the current state.

Kiwi Browser [1] does, it's a fork of Chrome for Android and allows all extensions.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...

Yandex. Kiwi. (both Android)

I think there are more. But I don't remember which ones.

But all of them are Chromium based, so are either going to be crippled by the Google proposal in the article, or they're going to diverge more significantly.

True, both points.

But if they added extensions (which mobile Chromium doesn't support at all), they're not shy about divergence.

Not meant as a comment on the proposal or FF vs Chromium.

This (v3) proposal, and the slick rewrite of Mozilla's stuff probably means I will be off of Chromium for mobile and desktop some time in the hazy future.

Samsung's browser has an adblocker.

It drains battery too fast, and seems to load pages slower than Firefox.

Safari allows ad blocking extensions on mobile

Ad blocking, not any way to run "browser extensions". The parent is saying "all you need to do is look at Chrome on Android & the fact that it does not allow extensions at all." iOS doesn't allow any browser vendor to let run extensions too, let alone run them in Safari.

Safari's content blockers are third-party extensions. It's not Turing-complete code execution yes, but it's still a meaningful kind of extension compared to Chrome's complete lack of them.

This is incorrect. iOS Safari does have the ability to run extensions on a page via the "Share extensions" feature.

See detailed comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20050936

Reply on news.ycombinator.com