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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

I managed the team that did a lot of the integration of web extension support in Fenix, the new Firefox for Android. We were all on the brink of burnout. There was too much work. Unrealistic deadlines. And high expectations. So we decided to only support a limited set of APIs tuned for the most popular web extension. Which were basically all ad blockers if I remember correctly.

Proud of the team to have finally gotten to this point. Miss you all.

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Other people may remember this differently. Some things are a bit of a blur. My brain selectively blocks some of this - It was basically an exhausting two/three year crunch to rewrite Fennec as a modern Android app.

That's how I remember it. I was on desktop projects but following closely and the rewrite was a death march and people working on it moved or left along the way too.

We should have listened to Hyatt back in 2003-ish when he basically said of XUL, "it's never gonna be great on *nix or Mac but it's good enough on Windows." Because of solid desktop horsepower growth over the 2000s, we were able to make XUL go for the three desktop platforms pretty well but it should never have gone to mobile and replacing it with a native front end was absolutely the right thing to do, despite the pain.

XUL is not the whole story, though. There was an Android native Firefox before the current Fenix and after the XUL Fennec, and it had Web Extensions, IIRC. From that perspective, that people complained is understandable.

Just want to say thank you for your enormous effort on this. I'm extremely picky about software but Firefox on Android is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. And I use it every day - probably more than any other app. I still remember how happy I was when youn folks got those adblocker extensions working on mobile. Thank you.

Thank you to all the Firefox on Android developers! Ads on mobile Make the platform basically unusable without blockers.

It sounds like they intentionally under-provisioned you all to draw it out, which isn't surprising given their biggest source of funding is Google, and the last thing Google wants is ad/tracker blocking, privacy extensions, and, well, a major reason for people to set their default browser to 'not chrome'.

Lord knows there's enough money floating around that place.

What a shame - but thank you. Hopefully plugins come to Firefox for iOS some time.

Considering uBlock Origin was the first extension to work (and, from what I understand, they worked extra hard to ensure it works), I doubt that's the reason.

That could be a power struggle. I.e. some Google loyal PM sabotaged the extension feature, but quoting the poster above, the devs worked around it by doing a partial implementation to support adblockers, foiling the plan :)

You don't need to invent some spy story fiction to explain software cost under-estimates and delays.

Not everything is a conspiracy

Sure. Obviously I don't know why.

I am desperately looking for an extension that takes over godawful js video players and gives something standard. Some have click to pause, some forward backward, all don't have volume control.

Might not be exactly what you are looking for but I use an extenstion [0] to open videos in an external video player (mpv). That way the controls are consistend and playback does not depend on where I browse.

mpv uses youtube-dl (or yt-dlp) to fetch the stream URLs and that supports many sites.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/send-to-mpv-play...

Nope you are making up stories.

If you don't have manpower for a rewrite... then why rewrite?

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