I hope Mozilla is able to roll out full extension support sooner rather than later in FF Preview, but I do appreciate that they take it seriously enough to work with developers this closely.
I hope Mozilla is able to roll out full extension support sooner rather than later in FF Preview, but I do appreciate that they take it seriously enough to work with developers this closely.
I suspect there is a level of curation/testing going on here. As a non-release product I can understand the need to allow/test extensions in a controlled manner.
As extensions those are fine, as core browser features, they sound a bit iffy.
Google being the main revenue source for Firefox is often cited and is true, but if you look at Brave, its competition, what they do is to block a publisher's ads, replacing them with their own, being essentially racketeering and I'm surprised how they weren't declared illegal already.
Fact of the matter is, if people don't pay money for browser licenses, and they don't, and if ads don't fund those browsers, and they currently do, then alternatives to Chrome cannot exist, if not funded by another mega corporation that can burn money just so Google can't be the only player, like what Apple does.
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But back to decision making — we are talking about AMP pages being served by searching on Google.com, because that's the major source of these links.
Given the search engine is Google's property and not some public utility, they can destroy any browser maker if they wanted to.
Speaking of which, if you're so bothered with Google.com serving AMP pages, well, why not choose an alternative instead?
It's racketeering because they piggyback on publishers for serving their ads contextually, while not allowing publishers to run their own ads, forcing publishers to join if they want any revenue from Brave users. Brave wants to be a gate keeper, coercing publishers in the process.
Again, I don't see how this isn't illegal. It's one thing to be a non-profit browser extension developed by a community on GitHub, it's quite another to do build ad blocking products for profit, because the later is clearly copyright infringement at the very least.
https://searchengineland.com/report-google-to-pay-apple-9-bi...
Given Google's reach with their search engine, with YouTube, with Gmail, starting a war with Google would be a death sentence for a browser maker, no matter the supposed source of funding, which is basically ads across the board anyway, an industry also controlled by Google and Facebook.
That said analytics software and publishers will simply adapt to using other names.
Also I highly doubt Google will ever change the utm parameter name. There’s thousands of JS libraries that extract it and use it for various additional analytics, hosted blog/wordpress hackery. and e-commerce/payment plugins that inject it across iframes and other stuff.
Plus tons of server side apps that pattern match on utm_ or simply injects them into urls and views.
It’d be a nightmare for tons of businesses which have complicated setups which reuse or inject the token for conversion tracking alone, not including all the other stuff.
Oh, what Agi says below :-)
Have Mozilla broken the extension landscape _again_ or am I misunderstanding?
It's also worth putting into perspective that most of the "hysteria" is people posting their disapproval in HN/Reddit threads or putting thumbs down reactions on github comments. It's not like people were picketing Mozilla HQ.
I'm sure you can find examples of crazy people on Twitter, it's a group of over 100 dissatisified people, but that's certainly not the majority.
As I said, given the history they should have had a clear communication of what they intend to do about extensions when they premiered Firefox Preview. Of course that also implies that they would have had to have a clear idea of what they are going to do about them at the time.
The world is so large, you can find examples of just about anything if you go searching for it.
Perhaps you forgot to paste the [1] source in your post, but the point was well made.
I've read that you can sideload any extension you want (although I've not tried this personally), it'll just be coin flip whether it actually works or not.
That's amazing news! Do you have a source on that?
I can't seem to find anything on it yet.
So developers can now test for Fenix but there's no permanent solution yet, unless there was something else and I just can't for the life of me find it anywhere. Sorry for getting your hopes up!
Now I see that several other plugins are on the Firefox Preview add-on list including noscript and some others so I have the feeling that they're just being cautious about enabling them in the store but it's possible that they mostly will just work after a testing period.
That's not correct; the "regular" Firefox on Android also allows extensions and syncs bookmarks.
...however, it might help to add the "I don't care about cookies" and "easylist cookie" filter lists to ublock origin.
The 9 month old issue you linked is not evidence of an early commitment to extension support.
Here's a comment from myself on HN from 11 months ago where I highlighted that their extension commitment was - at that point - vague at best.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20138655
Notice that there's someone from Mozilla reassuring me that there won't be a update from Fennec to Fenix prior to feature parity.
That's false by now. Apparently they changed their minds and absolutely will update from Fennec to Fenix without feature parity.
The play store beta is already restricted, an update removed all non-approved extensions.
Even now we don't know whether non-store extension support will ever come back.
Reality is much simpler: we have a small team and we want to do all the things, but we simply can't because it is a lot of work. So what you are seeing is incremental updates that get closer and closer to a fantastic product that we hope you will love and use on a daily basis. Great Web Extensions support is part of that. It always was. We just never had working code until recently.
(Disclosure: Engineering Manager of the Fenix 1.0 team)
honestly only benefit of firefox over these two browsers for me were Collections
and you have built in sync with desktop if you care about it (I don't)