Firefox for Android will soon support extensions
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Anyways, the real headline here is that they are giving away free t-shirts to the first 200 people to submit a well-tested extension and enable Android support in their AMO listing.
Hopefully the free t-shirts leads to great extensions rather than sloppy jobs. I was able to qualify for it pretty easily, but I nit picked the quality of my extension's experience myself before submitting it, and didn't end up getting any feedback other than "looks great" -- so not actually sure what the quality assurance would have been like if it were a crappier extension.
I also have DNS66 (available on F-Droid) running continuously in the background, which takes care of most ads and trackers in any other apps.
No ads either, but also
- support for subscriptions (without being logged in)
- watch history (no login required either)
- picture-in-picture mode with control for speed, subtitles…
- offline support (download sound and/or video)
- granular cadence control (up to x3)
- skip silence feature
- support for other websites including soundcloud and peertube instances
- and more
Looks useful for watching specific channels and certain videos I watch repeatedly, so I'll probably start using it for that purpose.
What it seems to be missing is YouTubes algorithmic recommendations, which I find useful for discovering new content to watch.
For some people however, this might be a good or bad thing.
I also don't like ads. And I understand everyone needs to eat. I value some content on YouTube and I respect their right to receive revenue for their good work. I think changing me money straightforward is the most respectful and honest way for everyone.
While I find the ads a little long and too frequent, I don't mind too much. The reason is that I think YouTube is such a great facility, up there with Wikipedia and Google maps.
The about of virtually boundless information. Guides, Conference talks, old kids shows from my childhood, tutorials on how to fix cars, maintain bikes etc. It's one of the few things online where I feel a paid subscription or ads are justified.
So much of this would be lost to time otherwise.
But they do it, and the market loves their numbers, so I suspect Google wants the same result.
Next day shipping depending on items can be from £2-3 pounds to over £10 and higher.
So depending on how often you shop on amazon you can save a fair amount on free next day deliveries alone.
The reason the market loves it I surpect is that it is saving people more than it costs to buy it.
Where as YouTube + music Saves people nothing but 5 seconds and a button click.
And for £12.99 a month it simply not worth it.
Full premium is now the only option.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...
Of course, as soon as my credit card date needed to be updated, they kicked me off of the introductory pricing I was told I could keep forever. It's now about double that price (your price may vary for "reasons"). Then they killed Google Music in favor of the inferior YouTube Music.
YouTube legitimately has better content library than any individual streaming service.
To me, that's way, way less valuable.
And it’s fine that people who ad block get the service for free but they’re going to be playing a cat and mouse game forever, the same way I could get the New York Times for free if I threw links at archive.is, but if I’m a regular reader that experience is going to suck to the point of a subscription being worth it.
I also think that all of these streaming services are so ridiculously affordable compared to most other life expenses. Nobody seems to mind spending $12 on one trip to McDonald’s or Starbucks for product that only lasts a fraction of a day but somehow a month of watching zero ads on YouTube with a few extra features thrown in isn’t worth the price.
I disabled adblock about a month before started my YouTube trial because I wanted to do a fair comparison. What I have found is that the removal of ads is simply not worth the $18/month YouTube Premium costs in my country. For that price, I would rather just see ads even without any adblocker.
There are a LOT of things I could spend $216 on that would give me more pleasure than not seeing YouTube ads for a year. Even better, I could just reconfigure my adblocker a couple of times a year (something I already do due to the malware arms race). That's way better than cutting $216 out of my hobby budget.
Now, if I had the option to get YouTube Premium (or some reduced version of that only offered ad removal) for about half the current price, then it would probably be worth it.
(And no, I do not buy fast food, either. It is more expensive and tastes worse than something I can whip together at home.)
I was excited about downloading videos for offline viewing, but it turns out I can't download them to my laptop (only to my phone), so that's a feature I won't use after all.
I'm not interested in the music streaming service or any of the other features, either.
So ad removal is the only feature I'm using. I would pay half of what they are charging currently for just ad removal alone, but since that's not an option, I am about to cancel the trial and return to traditional adblocking.
It used to be you could see the ratio of likes to dislikes on videos, but they forcefully removed that from all videos. YT claimed it was to prevent bullying, but it was always possible to disable likes on your own videos. I think the real reason was: All the major news networks had extreme dislike ratios on their videos, and they wanted to promote that over alt sources of information.
With regards to being compensated, if I want to support a creator, I will just donate to them. Many creators ended up using Patreon due to de-monetization.
> but we already pay for Netflix/Prime/HBO/etc
No?
Stop watching them then, where is the problem?
So are you saying that the majority of people are against paying creators for their work? You mean deep down they believe people should work for free? I'm interested in the evidence you mention.
While I do agree that platforms in general tend to "stifle" creators it shouldn't be discounted how much YouTube actually does pay them. Especially in comparison to other platforms, e.g., TikTok, Instagram or Twitch, it seems to be quite fair. Though if you want to just compensate the creator other avenues tend to be far more better in terms money in from you -> money out to the creator.
It's a networking effect, unfortunately. While there are some very talented creators out there, there is an oder of magnitude between "is a great creator that quickly gathers an audience" and "a creator whose audience will move en masse with them to a new platform". Microsoft spent hundreds of millions trying to appeal to the latter with Mixer and it just didn't cut through despite having exclusive access to some of the largest streamers.
It's tough, and user apathy means it's hard to move off, even if you happen to find someone else to pay.
https://divestos.org/pages/our_apps#mull
I ended up switching to it after Bromite stopped being maintained, and the experience has been great.
Hopefully I can find an extension to auto dismiss cookie/signup popups once this rolls out!
> I have it enabled
There are 16 different "Annoyances" filters, but you used a singular pronoun.
I also don't get much popup pain on desktop but I have always assume it's because I visit very different sites. Will be interesting to keep an eye out and see, maybe it's broken on Android.
It works well in practice. I have to kill/restart the app every once in a while though.
But since then they've made so many exceptions to that policy, where the applications are important to keep people in the Apple ecosystem, that it's hardly a strict rule anymore. So while they probably could make yet another exception, they probably feel a general purpose browser such as Firefox would risk being the last exception they make.
It may still take longer, since dev work has to be done, and I have no idea if apple's still going to block JIT usage for anything besides safari.
It did take far too long to return, though. Given that it's Firefox, the browser known for its add-ons, I would have heavily prioritized shipping addons with the initial launch of the rewritten Firefox. It's not some optional feature.
The parent poster is talking about system webviews. They're used when any app wants to show web content embedded inside their apps, and yeah there's no Firefox option for those.
If you don't care about any of the extra functionality, you can configure it to always open your preferred browser and convert Custom Tabs intents to regular ones. No root access required.
"Apple Considering Dropping Requirement for iPhone Web Browsers to Use WebKit"
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/14/apple-considering-non-w...
The way it works is the extension runs on a browser on the server, which is then streamed to the device, and usable through any regular mobile browser, such as Safari, Chrome, Brave, Firefox, etc.
This browser technology removes the restriction on extensions on mobile, as well as limits some (but not even close to all) of the security risks of extensions. In a real sense it enables: cross-browser extensions.
While it sounds promising, it suffers from at least four major drawbacks.
1. We still need to build a shim of the Chrome extensions API: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/242
2. Rather than having many extensions on a single browser, this effectively serves a single extension from a given web endpoint, but crucially permits you to browse anywhere from there with that extension loaded.
3. While he have future plans for a "store", there is currently no store. This means there is no central place to discover extensions, and also no central authority to vet and restrict them regarding security.
4. You have to consider infrastructure, at least for now before we launch a managed service for this. While the application is easy to set up, maintaining a large fleet could bring additional workload that may limit your distribution, or increase your costs.
If you believe there is something worthwhile in exploring these avenues beyond existing browser technologies, and pushing the applications of the browser and the web further than they have been pushed before (at least in this meta sense), I encourage you to come get involved. We're open source and happily accept contributions that align with the project's goals: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
But it's good to see Firefox is finally implementing their long held goal to do this! This will probably cause other vendors to do the same, I imagine? What would be the reasons that vendors would resist bringing extensions to mobile?
Well, luckily you can't. But, anyway, it's not a little long, it's perfect! Hahaha :)
I get if you feel that way about it, but it's not how it is. So, it's good that you don't get to decide that for me! Hahahaha :)
In other words: "Should" may be that way for you, but not for me. More generally, you could consider that the comment you're replying to adds value to the discussion, but yours doesn't.
I mean, I get if you don't like promotion and that's ok -- but this is less that and more exploring some technical possibilities that are highly relevant to the OP.
But anyway, if you dislike it, that's not about me at all, that's just about you. You don't need to pretend it's "should" about somebody else, now do you, right? :)
That's one of the reasons we created BrowserBox, and what distinguishes BrowserBox from all its competitors:
it is self-hosted, and open source.
So not only can you run it on infra you trust, but you can vet all the source code to ensure it meets your privacy and security needs.
That being said the privacy/security & trust vs convenience trade off of using SaaS is acceptable for some customers, and we are opening up a SaaS version of our product soon, diversifying away from only "on-prem" deployments.
As I understand, the codebase is quite different. It's an Android app that wraps around GeckoView, with most of the UI is custom code written in Android-specific Kotlin code. This includes a lot (but not all) of the code used to implement WebExtensions.
I don't think this has any specific unique security implications other than that of introducing a lot of new code and an extensions runtime that a lot more people will suddenly be writing code for. The article mentions in the next sentence that malware extensions also plague the desktop browsers.
But in reality most add-ons worked despite that (by going through insane hoops you could still install other non-supported add-ons).
I have noticed it in Allan Wang experimental/toy repo https://github.com/AllanWang/GeckoView-Playground and with a few changes, I created a trivial "app" for Facebook Messenger (wrapping its web version to a mobile app).
And instead absolutely nothing changed for three years.
Furthermore the insane bugs from which Fenix suffers from its release (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12731) (and make it unbearable) have been left hanging, focusing the few resources on dumb ui experiments.
So everything suggested that Mozilla did not care of its Android browser, or actually that they were deliberately sabotaging it.
This news instead represents a huge improvement, hence my bewilderment.
I don't know what people who downvoted my message thought I meant.