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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, there's barely a reason for Firefox to exist anywhere outside of the desktop after they eliminated extensions one more time for every other platform.

The "Firefox anywhere but desktop" package nowadays is "Here's a sub-par, slower, poorly-optimized browser without an ad-blocker; you'll be happy to know we have Pocket and Ads built-in! Why even bother with those icky websites? Just click our links! Addons? I mean, we have four. We no longer allow you to use the rest of the AMO addons."

Firefox on desktop is nice, except for their most recent design update (coming in a month or two, already on Nightly), which makes compact mode massive and normal mode gigantic. But you can get around that by simply going out of your way to write CSS to eliminate tabs entirely, and replace them with an extension.

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I honestly have no idea what are you talking about. I really enjoy uBlock Origin on my phone, and that's the primary reason I use Firefox for Android. On iOS Firefox is just an UI to Apple WebView, but that's a matter for antitrust courts and not a fault of Mozilla.

They recently limited the Android (and derivatives', like FR) build's access to AMO; there are less than fifty there, now. uBO is one, but there's very few other than that. Kind of defeats a major selling-point of WebExtensions.

Yup!

I'm still using the old version of Firefox on Android because I need the extensions I have.

Which really sucks

You can install all extensions available on desktops on new Firefox for quite some time, it's just clunky: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Might convince you to upgrade, I generally would never run an outdated browser.

I've been able to use any extension so far on the Nightly version - at least, any that previously worked in Fennec.

But it's an unintuitive process. You need to create an add-on site account, then create a Collection, then add the extensions you want to the collection. Each add-on page has an Add to Collection option, and the collection page itself has a search option but it's a limited subset and so it's kinda useless.

Then you enable some dev mode option in the app, and (manually) copy some account and collection ids into a setting. Then the collection and the add-ons will appear and let you download and install them.

It does feel like a "placate power users while adding as much friction as is reasonably possible" approach, and Mozilla certainly seems to be heading for a greatly restricted add-on experience for all users in the future. There is an abundant feeling of "a PM wants to see the metrics say X" all over this experience, as with most modern Firefox degradations. But at least this is an option for now.

Edit: having to use nightly does suck as well, as I've seen a new different annoying bug every version or two (e.g. broken menus, tap targets not working any more, etc.) that I wouldn't have seen in the main release candidates. But you can at least try to avoid updating whenever you feel the current nightly is ok.

This is correct. On Android, add-ons from addons.mozilla.org can be installed onto Firefox Nightly or Fennec F-Droid (a fork of Firefox stable).

Instructions: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Firefox Nightly: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...

Fennec F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

I don't know about the Amazon Devices version, but on Android Firefox works great in my experience. In particular the advantage is that it does support extensions.

I don't understand what FR and AMO mean. Are you saying that many extensions are not compatible with Firefox Mobile?

AMO = addons.mozilla.org, I don't know what FR is, but in short... well, I dunno about actually technically incompatible, but yes Mozilla redid mobile extensions and at the same time switched to only allow installation of a tiny hand-picked set of approved extensions on mobile.

AMO is addons.mozilla.org, i had to look that one up too. no idea about FR, that's harder to google (since it's the country code for france)

FWIW, on Nightly you can make your own custom addon list. It's not that they can't support add-ons, but that there are things to work out again before a wide re-release. Fenix, based on GeckoView, is a total redesign. I appreciate it, even if I lose access to one NON-AMO extension that was useful.

Yes, it is possible, but hardly user friendly - each user needs to create an AMO account, create a custom addon list and then copy paste id strings back and forth.

Only then finaly you can actually use an addon from AMO in your Nigtly Firefox.

Frankly sounds much more like jumping through unnecessary hoops than anything. Most users will likely give up than provide much needed feedback to extension authors about how their extensions work on Android.

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