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Comment by SSLy | Hacker News Reader

Because it's lighter on power usage, and that matters for firefox on android.

And because it can block ads without infinite permission to read and change every site you visit.

You know what else uses power? Ads! Particularly the flashy animated ones that fingerprint the browser and hoover up data to prove you're a real human ad impression. I'd wager it doesn't take too many of those slipping through the net to completely undo your "power saving" of a slightly more efficient way of blocking resources.

Has anyone actually done some quantitative research here? I've been using Firefox with uBO for years on Android and of all the apps on my phone, Firefox is not the one that's chewing through battery.

But now it's not even possible to use the add-on in Firefox for Android, as only add-ons from AMO can be installed.

I was curious if trying to load it via file:///storage/emulated/0/Download/... would work (as my recollection is that .xpi installation is content-type: sensitive) but insult-to-injury is that FF Nightly for Android searches for the string "file:///storage...", so they seemingly have nuked even the file: protocol handler for Android. Good times over there at Mozilla

Pretty sure file:// is very broken in different ways on every android browser.

For example, on kiwi browser typing in a file URL causes it to be searched, but using the "go to URL in clipboard" button (with the file url in your clipboard) works. Except when you randomly run into some weird android file permission issue and the browser just can't see certain files...

file:/// is gone in Firefox Android since at least 2 years ago. I discovered it a few days ago https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1806171

It works in Chrome on my Android 11 phone.

That's not true anymore. You have to press the Firefox logo on the about screen a few times, which will make the menu option appear in settings to install an extension from the local filesystem

Fixing this explanation:

You need to go Settings -> About Firefox -> Click the logo a bunch of times on this page specifically -> Press the back button

You will now see the Install extension from file option.

Wow, that's good to know, thanks!

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