Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Thriptic 2257 days ago
So to be clear, the existing Firefox on Android which has broad extension support is going to be replaced with a version with less extension support? Why? One of the biggest value adds of Firefox on Android is broad extension support.
3 comments
NikolaeVarius 2257 days ago
Only way to make it suck less

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/06/27/reinventi...

link
TomMarius 2257 days ago
It sucks? I switched from Chrome last year and am nothing but happy. Who decided it sucks?
link
ta1771 2257 days ago
Single process for all tabs/sites, no sandboxing, for a start.

I personally won't touch Gecko anymore, and I've been a FF advocate since it was called Mozilla, ha

link
solarkraft 2257 days ago
That article doesn't explain anything about it. The previous Firefox runs (almost?) all extensions impressively well, with little required optimization.
link
detaro 2257 days ago
That link doesn't seem to address why plugins need to be restricted to a whitelist? (Which might not be the end-goal, but Mozilla is quite cagey about it)
link
gnomewascool 2257 days ago
> So to be clear, the existing Firefox on Android which has broad extension support is going to be replaced with a version with less extension support?

Probably not. By the time the switch for release (non-nightly/beta) Firefox comes, I expect all the currently supported extensions will still be supported.

In the long-run, since the new architecture will be generally easier to develop, I hope that some of the WebExtension APIs supported on Desktop, but currently not on Android (on Fennec), will also become available on Android (on Fenix).

link
iggldiggl 2256 days ago
> Probably not. By the time the switch for release (non-nightly/beta) Firefox comes, I expect all the currently supported extensions will still be supported.

I think you're being too optimistic - the fact that the regular Nightly and Beta release channels have already been transitioned to the rewrite means that at the same time you've lost all large-scale capacity of doing any pre-release testing on the old version. While that one has been getting ESR-style bug fixes only for quite a while anyway, even those still need some amount of testing. So barring some major hold-ups, they're now committed to transitioning the Release channels in the near future as well, even if that means mediocre add-on support and quite a few other missing things.

And it's been clear for quite a while that they've decided on a https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... -style rewrite for better or for worse...

link
Fnoord 2257 days ago
I suppose that is why the replacement is called Firefox Preview, for the time being.
link