Firefox Beta for Android now supports custom add-on collections
ghacks.net
ghacks.net
Sadly its still a pain in the ass to enable developer mode yet still be limited to a custom AMO.
I'll probably wait until this hits stable then switch away from nightly.
One thing ff can do is make andriod like browser that supports ublock using altstore. That being said, this may not justify the time spent by developer.
Funny you said that, out of the top of my head:
- Brave have a full featured adblock built in on iOS;
- Edge(!) have adblock plus extension built in as well;
- iCab have adblock capabilities built
As you can see, there's plenty of options even with Apple engine restriction. They just don't care enough to give iOS users a good experience, see the frustration on these threads[1][2]. It's all fair, I just gave up using Firefox on iOS and stopped caring about Firefox as well. Surfing the web without a proper adblock is just a rollercoast of frustration.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/7374
[2] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/5198
Last year Safari on iOS gained web extension support. There are orders of magnitude more Safari extensions on the App Store than Firefox on Android.
I use Dark Reader, AdGuard, Vinegar, and Sponsorblock.
- Wireguard is allegedly more efficient... I'm not 100% sure about that, but it does seem to connect faster, and my battery metrics report < 5% battery usage from WG, compared to ~8% for openVPN. YMMV ofc.
- Wireguard can automatically connect to the VPN whenever you're not using a whitelisted Wi-Fi SSID. It's nice that my phone doesn't use VPN on my home wifi, but the minute I leave home, the VPN automatically updates.
Not that you're doing anything wrong, but I just figured I'd shared because I put off the switch to WG for a long time and I've had a positive experience since.
FWIW I really really wish I could run FF + ublock origin on my iphone.
I don't think I understand. I run my VPN at home on a raspberry pi. So all of my network traffic, at the end of the day, goes through my home ISP.
I've considered shelling out for a VPN service to shield my traffic from ISP snooping, but at the end of the day you can only hide so much from your ISP, and I'm hesitant to introduce another failure point to my network (my SO will only take so much downtime!).
I mostly use the VPN as a convenience to ad-block on all devices at the DNS level and access self-hosted services like my Jellyfin server even when I'm not at home. The security benefit is also nice when I'm away from home on any WiFi network other than my own -- you never know what's going on behind the scenes.
Overall I don't worry too much about ISP snooping. But I probably should.
I think you definitely need to not give your ISP any chance to snoop. I’m sure they can’t look into your packets but just knowing which sites you visit is crucial info. As is exposing your Wi-Fi info for apps on your phone which use it as a correlation data point.
Obv since we’re on this forum, we both likely know how deep the privacy rabbit hole goes but in my experience, a good vpn service can do a ton of stuff together like dns filtering, traffic shielding from the isp, location shielding, ad blocking etc. Quite a one stop shop in a lot of cases.
I feel the same.
I have one OpenVPN setup and one wireguard setup, both with Pi-hole in them. Since some OpenVPN don't work in some networks/countries(I am looking at you China!), it helps to have an alternative.
I have a self-hosted bitwarden which is accessible only via my VPNs. So it's important to have a backup VPN to access my password manager and to block those pesky ads/trackers.
Are you sure it's uBlock?
But in any case, you provided useful information. I've been an Android Firefox user for many years now - love it.
Using custom add-on collections isn't as straight-forward as installing an add-on. While it's not rocket science, it's annoying enough that I haven't bothered doing it. I'm pissed that I can't just log into my Firefox account and have all my shit work
Does it require an account now to add any addon? Why would they require such a thing?
Mozilla.
You can one-click install an entire collection, streamlining the setup process.
Edit: not ranting at you, just ranting about this stupid extra hoop
> Collections make it easy to keep track of favorite add-ons and share your perfectly customized browser with others.
I'm not sure collections changes anything in the case of Firefox mobile, the add-ons are still bifurcated.
My review of firefox from September 2020 was very consistent with the ratings drop and other reviews of the time -- there is a reason that 4.6 stars persists when it used to be virtually 5 stars:
> I keep waiting for a way to override text size defaults. As an example, old.reddit.com always renders as tiny text no matter what phone I try on (pixel, Blu). It would be very nice to just be able to override default text sizes or at least make the size human readable like Chrome, Vivaldi, and Brave do. Further, the new UX is a downgrade from before. No speed dial, everything moved around. Doesn't appear to have about:config, and so forth.
why are they making this difficult?
Which is a ridiculous opinion, of course, since the whole point of a browser is to run arbitrary code.
That was never a thing.
Though I’m not quite sure if there are normal people on mobile who use anything but the default browsers.
I think that #4 is bad, but I believe it to be true, with moderate certainty. I believe 1-3 to be true with high certainty.
I believe that this is a problem that should be fixed with tech education - but until then, the above hold, as sucky as it is.
Their reputation with technical users is almost everything they have left and they're doing their best to destroy it further and further. This decision looks to be a rare exception, but if you still need their dumb account effectively nothing will have changed...
I hope it will go to the production version soon too. I would really like to use bypass-paywalls but without this it doesn't work.