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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> The baffling thing is why this took so damn long.

I'm surprised it's baffling in a community of developers and other IT professionals.

It's not baffling to me that two significantly (wholly?) different applications on different platforms and form factors would require quite a bit of work to both be generally compatible with the same third-party software via the same API - and all while maintaining the same compatibility with another application, made by another company, completely outside Mozilla's control.

And it needs to work reliably enough to release to a world of developers - of every skill level, motivation, writing every kind of software (within the domain of browser add-ons) - with confidence that it will work for them and users.

And you need a way to maintain all that over the long term.

I'm impressed Mozilla!

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Firefox android extension support went from "all" to like "5 chosen ones, but we'll enable all of them very soon" in mid 2019. How and why those were handpicked, who knows, clearly extensions weren't enabled by supported functions at the time. In the usual mozilla fashion that "very soon" turned out to be multiple years.

Importantly, during this entire multi-year gap, nearly all of them worked just fine but it was gated behind an AMO account for... I don't know what reason.

If it was just an experience issue because like 5% failed weirdly or had bad performance but they couldn't validate them all: that's basically fine! Hide it behind an about:config flag! The AMO requirement was a privacy-invading piece of nonsense that had no business existing.

Privacy-invading requirements that delay implementation of plugins that would enable plugins providing better privacy and ad-blocking functionality?

Hmmmmmmm, now what major Mozilla sugar daddy would be interested in that /s

Why the sarcasm tag?

Again, it's easy to imagine answers to these questions and to grasp what is happening. Instead people choose to play the sport of tearing things down, no matter the effect on the people involved, Mozilla, the open web, etc.

Again, Mozilla had a long time to answer these questions (if they had a good answer). If you leave people to imagine things then don't be surprised if they don't follow your PR-sanitized version of events.

If mozilla cared about the open web they would immediately distance themselves from Google and reallocate funding from their CEO's family to things that actually matter for their mission.

You may find some clues as to why they don't want to interact with people like you in your very own post!

It's not just that; their other "unstable" release, "Firefox Nightly", didn't have this limitation.

The extensions worked just fine on Android before an update a few years ago broke them. I can finally use extensions that I've been missing for years.

Did you read past that sentence you quoted?

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