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by Groxx 1895 days ago
From a quick glance, this seems to be even further down the "messy" side of the firefox-on-android mess. I.e. its capabilities are even more restricted.

Which is not to say it's not useful, and TIL - I didn't know they had released this, so thanks :) But I don't think it particularly applies to this thread.
1 comments
Daho0n 1895 days ago
What is the 'messy' problem with Firefox on Android? I have moved those I help with tech to Firefox. My mother for example. They don't know the difference between "the internet" and "Firefox" but so far they run Firefox with UBO with no problems (well not anything new that wasn't there with Chrome too but that is a old people Vs tech problem not unique to Firefox).

Anything I need to know?

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Groxx 1895 days ago
The messy problem is that you used to be able to run uBO with no problems on Firefox on Android. And most other extensions, with some obvious limitations (e.g. desktop-only UI extensions didn't work, some UIs weren't mobile-friendly, etc).

Then they released a preview of a re-design which also broke all extensions. That's arguably fine for a preview, though a bit concerning. Many were raising alarms at this point.

Then they released the re-design to the stable release, with still-broken extensions. This pretty unambiguously is "a mess", if not earlier.

Then they released built-in support for a couple dozen Mozilla-selected extensions (uBO included, I believe). This is still a mess, and rightfully raises a few eyebrows.

... and we're still there now, after over a year of "this will be fixed soon". I believe you can install nightly + manually tweak config and still install other extensions, but Firefox for Android does not support extensions right now. That's A Problem™, and not a good sign for extension-longevity that it was ever allowed out of preview. It broadly implies extensions are very low on their priority list, which is concerning, as extensions have been the clear leaders on preserving privacy and user control in general. Browsers overwhelmingly follow popular extension behaviors, not the other way around - cripple extensions and you also cripple advancement and experimentation.

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Daho0n 1895 days ago
Thank you :)
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DoingIsLearning 1895 days ago
To add to this they also blocked access to about:config on Android.

No access to extensions and blocking about:config was to me just heretic. Those two are the raison d'être of Firefox.

Nightly build thankfully reverted this babysitting of users but indeed we are still stuck with 'vetted' add-ons downgrade in the official Firefox release for Android.

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iggldiggl 1895 days ago
Even on Nightly, the procedure to install non-whitelisted-by-default add-ons is somewhat arcane though, and AFAIK even after following it you can only install the current version of add-ons that have been officially published on AMO, i.e. no installing a different add-on version or manually installing an XPI (not even a signed one).

Also lots of other little papercuts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26470454

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