[bennysomething]

Can anyone tell me why since past version 68 of Firefox on Android nearly all my add-ons don't work. Is there an alternative for "I don't care about cookies" . Add-ons working on mobile in Firefox was the main reason I'm still a Firefox user. They have pretty much killed that by breaking compatibility.

[jeroenhd]

The reason is that Android part of Firefox got a complete rewrite when they switched to the new engine. They switched from a deeply integrated system over to a more separated frontend for GeckoView, a generic Webview component based on Gecko. This change implied a lot of changes, particularly to the UI and framework surrounding the existing addon code.

Secretly, a lot of addons will run just fine. You can install them in the Firefox nightly through the "secret settings" (tapping the Firefox logo in the about screen seven times) by creating an addon collection and stuffing the right ID in your browser.

I can say the new engine is notably faster and the UI is easier to use for basic tasks, but all of the features that made me switch to Firefox on Android in the first place have been removed. Slightly nonstandard features ("being able to use your own CA" or even "being able to ignore TLS warnings") took years to implement, and logging into a website with a client certificate is still not possible.

They even took about:config from us in the stable builds, because they consider their users babies that will change random settings and break something. Firefox has dropped all support for power users and has focused on becoming Chrome 2.0, a goal which I don't think they'll ever be able to accomplish. If you don't follow the standard workflow of the 80% who forget to disable Mozilla's stalking, you're no longer important.

I'm still on Firefox but every day I'm nudged closer to just switching to Bromite instead. The lack of proper addon support was understandable at first, but by now I hoped to have some decent addon support back already. I guess the team working on it must've gotten culled so Mozilla's CEO could afford their pay raise.

[gruez]

>Can anyone tell me why since past version 68 of Firefox on Android nearly all my add-ons don't work

Because they switched rendering engines or something. Now addons are restricted to a small subset that they've validated. You can use a custom addon collection to install untested addons (see: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...) to get around this, but there's no guarantee that the addons will work.

[noisem4ker]

I can confirm the add-on I Don't Care About Cookies works just fine if installed that way. It's just inconvenient. I wonder what stops the list of approved add-ons from growing.

[bennysomething]

I might try this thanks. Looks really involved though!

[tomrod]

It also broke font sizing/rendering on sites like reddit.

I loved Firefox mobile and this did me dirty. One of the big draws was adblock, and on top of needing text and extensions they changed the UI to be antiproductive.

Their playstore ratings took a massive nose dive after that release. Shame. They are the only real browser competition to Chrome.

[afterburner]

Does the font scaler in Firefox help? I actually switched to Firefox mobile several months ago because that finally resolved my issues with browsing i.reddit.com on Firefox. Chrome would just get the font scaling right, Firefox wouldn't before the major engine change.

I am annoyed that Firefox mobile tabs seem to have to refresh every single time I "tab out". I'm stubbornly sticking to it because of addons though (Dark Reader and uBlock).

[iggldiggl]

The font scaling was available in the previous Firefox on Android (i.e. ≤ 68), too, but it had been disabled by default for a long time because while it does make text more readable on pages written without mobile phones in mind, it can also cause some layout breakage on some pages, and there was a little tug-of-war between people preferring the former even at the cost of some possible layout breakage, and those wanting to avoid the latter even at the cost of unreadable text. If you knew about it, it could still be re-enabled through the regular settings, though.

After having fixed a few bugs in that regard, I pushed for giving re-enabling it by default another try with the rewritten browser, and so far that decision luckily (from my point of view) seems to have stuck.

Additionally, it has recently turned out that for pages specifying an explicit desktop-sized viewport (i.e something like meta name="viewport" content="width=1024", as opposed to either using nothing at all, which gives the standard desktop-size viewport of 980 px, or "width=device-width", meaning it's a mobile-friendly responsive layout), there was a long-standing bug meaning that the font scaling for desktop-style pages was erroneously being deactivated on xxhdpi-phones.

This latter bug affects the desktop versions of both Reddit and Slashdot for example, as both of those are using an explicitly sized viewport. It has now been fixed in Firefox 93 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1685756)

[svnpenn]

Android Firefox has explicitly disabled support for installing custom add-ons [1], while they try to force developers into registering on AMO.

1. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647

[jccalhoun]

I have not tried it but iceraven is a fork of the android version and it tries to allow more addons to be installed https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

[blibble]

you can do it with nightly but it's a pain in the backside

[bennysomething]

Why the down votes!?