[gcblkjaidfj]

I can't imagine the kind of Stupids that are steering mozilla, but they definitely want people to move to chrome.

They disabled many loved extensions by power users for absolutely no reason at all! after those power users spend years bending to all their capricious changes. moving to webextension? done. moving to a new mobile UI? done. But, they still want you to move to chrome no matter what.

We should take firefox out of their hands before it is too late.

[dralley]

>They disabled many loved extensions by power users for absolutely no reason at all!

The reasons were stated repeatedly. They rewrote the mobile browser engine, which broke extension API support since all of the internal APIs changed, and they didn't have the resources to support both browsers simultaneously for a long period of time, so they prioritized the most-used extensions first and will enable more extensions as the APIs are hooked back up underneath.

This had tangible benefits - the new browser is significantly snappier and uses less power in my experience.

>We should take firefox out of their hands before it is too late.

It's open source, if you aren't satisfied with the speed of their progress, you can always help out. You say you'd like to take this work out of their hands? Well, here it is.

https://mzl.la/3jgCsW3

These are, specifically, unimplemented APIs and known API bugs in the new Firefox Mobile, that are on the Mozilla TODO list, and for which contributions would presumably be welcome. Enjoy.

Unless when you said "we", you actually meant "other people".

[iggldiggl]

One problem is that it doesn't work as simply as "all APIs this add-on uses are supported, so let's enable it" – they instead still insist on explicitly whitelisting every individual add-on. So a few really popular extensions are whitelisted and the long tail is left behind, even if it might work perfectly well or at least useable enough.

I have for example one small extension that I maintain, which is basically little more than a glorified page script which therefore doesn't use any special extension APIs at all. Despite that, it took months for it to be enabled, and if it wasn't as popular as it is I might still be waiting even today.

> the new browser is significantly snappier and uses less power in my experience.

Ha! From a cold start, on my phone launching the new Firefox (with less add-ons) and loading a page seems to take approximatively twice as long as on Firefox 68, and still ~50 % more than even on Firefox 55.

[iggldiggl]

Postscriptum: To be fair, after investigating a little more it seems that the cold start penalty with the new Firefox seems likely due to fixing a bug that meant uBlock and similar add-ons were previously unable to intercept the first few network connections that were happening right during startup.

So on the one hand fixing that bug makes sense and has some value, but on the other hand and in practice the increased startup time still feels rather quite annoying, too, given that my phone isn't the latest and fastest model.

[gcblkjaidfj]

> The reasons were stated repeatedly. They rewrote the mobile browser engine

*this have nothing to do with my comment*

I am talking two or three iterations AFTER that. please, stop commenting long posts where you have no idea.

yes, mozilla moved to a new engine. Before that they moved to a new extension format. etc etc etc.

All the extension developers worked on the ports already, *THEN* mozilla, only for mobile, enabled "recommended extensions" which was fine. Until they DISABLED the non-recommended (not non-updated to the new tech).

It have nothing to do with technology. In fact I have many of those extensions working on my phone by fiddling with their whitelist urls. No problem running them AT ALL.

This is political.

[esperent]

> so they prioritized the most-used extensions first and will enable more extensions as the APIs are hooked back up underneath.

We've been waiting nearly a year and a half so far for them to enable extensions on the new engine.

[dralley]

And progress is being made. Like I said, I've personally seen most of my extensions that were initially disabled due to incompatibility, reenable themselves after update.

[deathlight]

They made a workaround for power users: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

One needs to make a mozilla account to complete the last steps and that's where I've been holding off. Mostly out of laziness and also from lack of necessity since I just moved on to other browsers in the mean time.

[esperent]

I tried this. Hardly any extensions are available beyond the ones already available on the stable build.