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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

The best outcome of this might be to have extensions more widely available on mobile browsers. A bad outcome would be that Firefox limits the capabilities of its extensions.

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On my Android tablet I use Kiwi Browser, a fork of Chromium that supports Chrome extensions. Ublock Origin, Tampermonkey, and a few other of my favorites all work reliably.

https://github.com/kiwibrowser

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

Insight Browser [1] supports extensions also, though not straight out of the Chrome store. They’re on iOS now and I think coming to Android soon.

I worked with them to get the BeeLine Reader extension available on their browser, and now Insight is my go-to mobile browser.

1: http://www.insightbrowser.com

Kiwi Browser is a great one! I have it installed, but use an older version of Firefox for the peculiar reason that I like to be able to save pages [with SinglefileZ].

There's no way mobile computing will improve; there's too much money to be made taking advantage of the people that don't understand their devices.

In what way has mobile computing remained static over the past decade? The only thing that hasn't changed, is Apple strictly controls what apps are available on iOS. The capabilities of those apps has been changing at a steady clip since "apps" first became a thing

Mobile computing has regressed but there have been almost no technological improvements (outside of incremental hardware improvements.)

Lots of social integration (like payments) but really there hasn't been any real technical innovation for about a decade.

What kind of innovations in desktop computing would you classify as technological improvements? To me, since we created integrated circuits, we've generally been talking about incremental hardware improvements. If anything, mobile computing has actually innovated more than desktop (see ARM coming to laptops via M1 with amazing performance; integrated graphics / system-on-a-chip becoming more common in desktops).

If Google demands Firefox limit the capabilities then that is what will happen.

Google is Microsoft in the 90's when it comes to the browser but sadly there is no one to stand up to them like Mozilla did to MS/IE.

Which feature has Firefox removed or crippled due to such a demand? I cannot think of one, but presumably you have a few documented examples given how confident you are about this.

It's not about Google demanding it, it's that Mozilla has less developer capacity than Google so they're spending more time matching Google's API changes instead of implementing their own.

For instance Manifest V3 would mean the end of uBlock Origin and other content blockers if Mozilla follow Google's implementation exactly, and whilst they've said recently they're not intending to deprecate the content blocking APIs this isn't a long-term certainty especially with this new conformity group arising.

The original claim was: "If Google demands Firefox limit the capabilities then that is what will happen." What you're writing seems completely unrelated to the original conspiracy theory.

But sure, why not. Let's move the goalposts. If Mozilla does not have the resources to implement standards, why bother joining a standardization effort? Why not just stand outside tent and piss into it?

Because everyone is actually better served by standards, and Mozilla is better off having a say in what gets standardized.

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