1y ago

Firefox for Android is getting 400 new browser extensions - and you can try some now

www.zdnet.com Firefox for Android is getting 400 new browser extensions - and you can try some now

Developers have been readying their Firefox desktop extensions to work on the Android flavor of Mozilla's browser.

Also from the official announcement (https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/28/open-extensions-on-firefox-for-android-debut-december-14-but-you-can-get-a-sneak-peek-today/ ):

Starting December 14, 2023, extensions marked as Android compatible on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) will be openly available to Firefox for Android users.
“We’ve been so impressed with developer enthusiasm and preparation,” said Giorgio Natili, Firefox Director of Engineering. “Just a few weeks ago it looked like we might have a couple hundred Android extensions for launch, but now we can safely say AMO will have 400+ new Firefox for Android extensions available on December 14. We couldn’t be more thankful to our developer community for embracing this exciting moment.”

69 comments

shows image of iphone
- I don't get how the EU is not in arms about this. How is Apple able to get away with offering various browsers in the Store, when in the End they all are the Safari-Backend and therefore do not allow for competition in this ecosystem? How can a competitor stand out with a remarkable/better product, when he is not allowed to use his own engine? Or in this case: Prohibiting user from using Extensions like uBlock? Firefox is only a shell of their original performance when castrated by apples webview engine.
  
  The EU is up in arms and the browser question is going to be handled through the DMA. The legal process has been going on since the summer and it's hilarious.
  
  It helps that Apple doesn't have such a huge marketshare here.

uBlock is already available on Firefox mobile as well as Tampermonkey, I'm not hating but what other extensions should I be excited to try? At the moment that's all I need to use.
What are you going to install?
- Consentomatic is the only other one I can think of, cookie popups are so much worse on mobile
  
  I think there's a filter for cookie popups in uBlock. I'm still using the I still don't care about cookies extension tho.
  
  The "annoyances" filters in ublock stop the cookie popups
  
  This single extension is why I'm excited for it myself.
- Midnight Lizard, it's better than Dark Reader. Skip Redirect is also pretty handy to fast-forward those pesky url shorter page redirections.
  
  Is there a more updated fork that you use? The last update for Midnight Lizard was ~3 years ago.
  
  It's available on Nightly.
- I would like to install the bring back youtube dislike extension. Otherwise I'm happy with what I have already
- Privacy badger/possum were welcome sights for me personally.
- Could you tell me what you do with tampermonkey/greasemonkey?
  
  You can for example restyle old.reddit.com so that it renders nicely on mobile if you don't want to install an app for that: https://github.com/OctoNezd/oldlander (see the Tampermonkey section)
  
  I use it to run automation on a website where there's lots of pointing and clicking. It's pretty cool you can do quite a lot with it.

It's about time. With Google being more and more hostile to AdBlocker on mobile, having Firefox taking an open approach to extension is welcomed.
- Ublock origin was long available on Android

Been using Firefox Android for quite some time already. It's been my perfect browser pretty much. I'm glad more extensions are coming, so others can enjoy it as well, but I'm happy with just Dark Reader + uBlock Origin lol.

I've been using extensions on the Nightly build and love it.

What about the missing about:config feature ? :/
- Let's make an extension for that!
- fennec android enters the room

Still no site isolation right?
- https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/05/18/introducing-site-isolation-in-firefox/
  
  This on desktop, Firefox still doesn't support it on Android.

Good step forward, but this will again flood people with duplicate extensions, useless adblockers, or even harmful ones. And there are quite a lot, even on AMO
- I mean...... it's not like the app stores are any better.
- but this will again flood people with duplicate extensions, useless adblockers, or even harmful ones. And there are quite a lot, even on AMO
  But doesn't the best "float to the top" and are what is mostly installed though?
  
  Most is not all. Would be great if Mozilla limited Addons like Ghostery

Hope there's one that can let me control the browser media player by double tap, it's quite annoying feature that's lacking

That t-shirt would be cool, but don't have time to properly test our extension before then
I'm looking forward to December when I'll have time to work on it. I'll try to attend some office hours, I didn't know that was an option

After the latest update of Iceraven browser (a fork of Firefox Mobile), it now allows to load add-ons offline as well as some browser addons directly from Firefox addons site.

iceraven becoming more pointless
- IceIndri, IceIbex, or Rustyraven would have been better name imho

I'd like to see LibRedirect ported!

Might help me move to Firefox eventually now that there's more than just the few from before. Not many things keeping me back compared to before.

That's more extensions than I need, but thanks.

Weeelll if they load the same as currently I wonder if that doesnt crash the browser

Did they ever fix the connection through proxy servers issue. Ff was literally unusable at my work, and such. I had to uninstall it

You have been able to use a custom repo for extensions for over a year.
- Whilst true, this has only been available with Firefox nightly. I've found some extensions break the collection where none of the extensions load until you remove the one that breaks it.
  
  It also works on Beta, has for a while.

Rats, still no TamperMonkey lol. Prob asking for a lot to expect that to ever happen, though.
- TamperMonkey is one of the "recommended" add-ons when I look at the list on my Android version of FF and I am not on a beta or dev build.
- Tampermonkey is one of the few that have already been available
  
  Wait what? I was looking for it a while back. Damn!
  
  Violentmonkey too, which is open source

This is nuts but desktop firefox is already like that. Imagine /usr/bin/sudo getting 400 new extensions. Browsers are a security nightmare even without extensions. That said, we can't live without ad blockers any more.
- What kind of comparison is that? sudo is setuid while Firefox and its extensions run as the user you started it as.
  Also sudo has just one very specific and limited use case, while Firefox is more of a platform for web content. I could argue that sudo itself is an 'extension' to a Linux system, like every application.
  You also don't have to install all of those extension, you can choose which you trust, similar to a Linux system, you don't have to install every application in the repository.
  If you say that the Firefox add-on repo should be more managed like a repository of a Linux distribution, where developers cannot simply upload their own software, but need to find a trusted maintainer first, I could agree to that. But that would mean more work and overhead.
  
  For most people, firefox touches a lot more private information than sudo does. For example, once the malware extension gets your email password, it can reset your passwords to everything else, and take over all your accounts on everything everywhere, rather than just one machine like sudo.

69 comments