Firefox will support at least 200 new extensions on Android this December | Hacker News Reader

Firefox will support at least 200 new extensions on Android this December

androidpolice.com

87 pointsthunderbong17 comments

Whether an extension is supported on Mobile Firefox or not is completely arbitrary. There's a list maintained by Mozilla of all the extensions you are allowed to use. But if you are using "Firefox Nightly" or "Fennec", you have the ability to use a different or user-created list.

That's exactly what's changing; Mozilla is moving from a strictly curated model to a more open model.

I wouldn't say support is completely arbitrary because extension features and requirements between mobile and PC are different; there's a reason Mozilla is trying to get devs to test their extensions on mobile before they launch. But there are certainly a lot extensions that should work fine, especially as more extensions start to move to Firefox's version of Manifest V3, and the existing curated model locks them out. It is (was) a major failing of the browser on mobile devices.

My understanding is that the December update will move Mozilla from curating a small number of allowed extensions, towards a model where developers just specify which platforms they want to support. And my understanding is that the only reason that number is going to be 200 instead of thousands is because only 200 developers so far have checked to make sure their extensions work with requirements like non-persistent background pages and with mobile layouts.

On firefox nightly you can now (don't know since when) go on addons.mozilla.org, switch to desktop mode and then install any extension you'd like.

> It also announced that extensions were no longer being hosted in the main process of the browser’s user interface.

Is this the behavior on desktop as well, because I'm a big fan of isolating extension processes. It would be good for both security and performance.

And I'm having a hard time figuring out in Firefox's Manifest V3 what APIs would break, other than maybe sharing JS context between the page and content scripts? But that's not a great way to build extensions anyway, I sort of feel? You're better off directly injecting scripts if you need access to the page's JS context.

:shrug: but there might be complexity that I'm not seeing.

What Mozilla need to be doing is porting the desktop Firefox codebase to Android, full stop.

Isn't it largely what it is though? Apart from the UI – it used to be XUL [1], like on desktop, but for some reason got replaced with native UI.

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Architecture

If I remember correctly, "some reason" being horrible performance.

Most likely, yeah.

One of the missing features which keeps me using Chrome on Android is Firefox's inability to simply download a copy of a page's HTML. Mozilla engineers removed that feature because they didn't want the interface to be "too cluttered". (Yes, sometimes I can print a PDF, however for many sites that results in something unreadable.) Hoping that there will be an extension to re-enable downloading of HTML or full pages.

My gut instinct is that this wouldn't be particularly hard to build. I'm not aware of any extensions that do that, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some extensions start to fill in mobile gaps once it's easier to install them, so you might get your wish.

I'm certainly going to be playing around building mobile extensions just for fun; absolutely zero promises but if I'm running out of other things to build or if it turns out that this is easy to implement in a single weekend, I wouldn't be opposed to building a quick addon for this and Open Sourcing it -- that's assuming I'm not underestimating how annoying it would be to rewrite URLs in the page or something.

Have you seen SingleFile?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/

https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

Appreciate the tip. I already have SingleFile installed on my desktop Firefox, however it is currently only compatible with Firefox for Android Nightly, not vanilla Firefox mobile:

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

So I'm eager for the update to the vanilla experience. It will probably be one of the first of the expanded set of extensions that I'll install.

Wasn’t iOS 17 supposed to support side loading? What happened? The whole iOS side loading discussion went poof.

They have time until March 2024

ELI5 why is Firefox "supporting extensions", instead of implementing an API?

I'm not sure there's much of a difference in practice?

Firefox is implementing the Firefox-specific V3 webextension API (at least, most of it) that they have on Desktop, and they're also turning on support for installing addons from the AMO generally rather than just a subset of curated addons.

So it's sort of both (with some emphasis on "turning on" because as far as I know a decent portion of the API was already implemented before this point).

Any chance any of these extensions will re-enable the keyboard shortcuts that were removed for Firefox on Android a few years ago?

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