Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

This is a big surprise and a welcome one. I honestly had given up hope of this happening. It's disappointing that it took this long, but it is a big deal to have full extension support on Android again. I'm very happy to see this news.

View on HN

In case you didn't know, you can have full extension support on Android with Kiwi Browser, which is based on Chromium.

I did not like the look of Kiwi Browser one bit, lots of weird permissions and dodgy ad-tech smells. Plus it's not Firefox, I'd rather use the same browser on both desktop and Android.

This is great news. Can't wait to have a no-fuss paywall bypass on mobile again.

Iceraven has been allowing a ton more extensions than Firefox all this time, no need to go chromium.

Yeah, I was doing Iceraven for a bit, but it was a pain to keep updated.

Super stoked with this news this morning.

How was it a pain? Ffupdater has had it available for a very long time, and there's Unobtainium that lets you update from git repo releases among other things.

> ... there's Unobtainium that lets you update from git repo releases among other things.

Did you mean Obtainium?

https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium

Heh, this is exactly why posting on HN is worthwhile. Probably just wait for FF now though.

Lol yeah, mily mistake. But on mobile if you're trying to be 100% FOSS obtainium and f-droid are basically all you need, updates are seamless with these two.

The permissions are the Chromium ones.

There is literally no ads nor external SDK or ad-tech or whatever you are referring to (before there was AdMob, but it didn't make much money anyway).

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.kiwibro...

The way Kiwi makes money is by partnering with Bing / Yahoo.

You launch the browser, it starts with Bing or Yahoo (depending on your country), and... that's it.

Bing then pays back a revenue-share to the browser each time the user uses the search engine.

The same way that DuckDuckGo gets a revenue-share from Yahoo and Bing too when you use DuckDuckGo.

So, if you prefer Firefox and Google, or Kiwi and Bing, this is just a matter of choice.

I've never tried Kiwi Browser but had similarly come across it while searching. The dev themselves refers to them as ads[1] (2022), though prior to being accepted properly into Bing's referral program Kiwi redirected all search queries through their own servers[2][3] (2021) (the original Kiwi repo's issues tab has been deleted since).

Tbf the dev always sounds reasonable in their responses but was a little off-putting initially so I kinda understand the GP's impression.

[1] https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next/issues/91#issuecomme...

[2] https://github.com/Tobi823/ffupdater/issues/35

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210605191305/https://github.co...

Fyi, I'm pretty sure you're talking to kiwi's main dev :)

Then the main dev is just wrong. That issue contains the exact words "Since then, now Kiwi Browser contains ads" as an explicit reason why they can't be in F-Droid.

I do know, but

> which is based on Chromium.

unfortunately that's a dealbreaker for me.

Not all Chrome Extensions work on it. It has issues.. Having a native browser supporting the desktop extensions on the mobile is much needed.

nope. just tried an XPI file, didn't work

In case you didn't know, many of us would rather give up an appendage than use a Chromium-based browser.

I use Firefox Nightly on Android but just only use adblock, privacy extensions and pay wall unblock

Same, and its amazing.

How can people complain about FF so much, when it's the only mobile browser that even gives you this option, and radically cleans up mobile browsing.

It's called motivated reasoning. "Firefox must suck because I don't want to switch to it", so when firefox buys a bookmarking tool and integrates it into the browser, that's apparently "user hostile", while google wants to force your browser to attest that you haven't blocked any ads.

But no, it's "mozilla bad"

Curious, why didn't you try Iceraven this whole time?

Here's a good reason not to install Iceraven:

> No warranties or guarantees of security or updates

In general it's fine for users to fork software to scratch their own itches. But browsers are super security sensitive.

That's just their way of saying "we don't have to build this for you". They merge upstream changes, as long as the project is maintained you'll get those updates as they're released. Last I checked you can't sue Mozilla for a security vulnerability and the open source license has a clause about no warrant of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. They don't guarantee security either.

Good question. Browser forks make me nervous -- I know Iceraven pulls fixes, but I'd rather have as short a chain as possible sitting between me and security fixes.

If uBlock Origin wasn't supported I would be on Iceraven, but I don't run a ton of extensions so I was willing to tolerate some inconvenience in order to be closer to the source.

The other thing is that Iceraven isn't a silver bullet, you can install any extension but if it's relying on an API that's not implemented yet it will break. Which is totally not their fault, but it gets back to -- Mozilla needs to actually implement full extension support beyond just flipping a switch on.

I'm glad Iceraven exists though :) I wouldn't not recommend them to someone who needs more extension support, it's just not right for my personal use case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com