Of course it’s only a solution for nerdy people, not for the ‘normal’ ones.
And when does Fennec implement the recent update which killed the FF?
This is the way I’m seeing things a couple days after the loss of most my add-ons (user, not maker):
Yeah, fenix is faster and smoother. Would love to use it.
Until I cannot install arbitrary add-ons that will never get enough “likes” to be vetted and added by Mozilla I have switched to F-Droid Fennec (Firefox Sync works by the way!). This is a temporary solution and if I don’t see Mozilla coming to it’s senses, I will find a modern Browser that does what I want.
It doesn’t really matter which add-ons I’m missing, it’s about diversity and control.
How do you plan on newly developed Add-Ons ever making it to a recommeded status? All things start small, none of the Add-Ons that are Recommended, werde noticed by the Mozilla Staff from day one. The beauty of add-ons is that they do not require an active interest by the browser-maker, just of the author and those who what to use them.
@Mozilla_Support I would really love some input here (or are you busy coding the unlimited add-on support, which is the only acceptable reason for your silence?).
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Kiwi is not great in all ways, but it’s better than Firefox.
Not even just one of many others. Firefox has become a pointless choice, when it was formerly a viable choice. To make a game analogy, Firefox was a lackluster player who had one very powerful secret weapon, powerful enough to win frequently. Since the switchover, Firefox is a lackluster player, period.
The out-of-control extension free-for-all was and still is everything that Firefox has going for it.
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@d-r-k You’re right, of course. The objective should not be to allow sideloading but to allow addons from AMO. But sideloading in the nightly build (which is pre-beta) is a good first step.
It seems that the approved addons are part of a ‘collection’ on AMO. During migration any addon not in this collection is relegated to a ‘not supported’ bucket. The obvious way forward is to allow addons that are known to work and are assessed as harmless to be put in another collection - ‘unapproved’. Users would have to opt in to this collection.
Getting an addon like mine into this new collection could involve two steps:
1 That the author has tested in nightly. Mozilla could monitor that with telemetry. (That would solve the problem Kim Cosmos identified.)
2 Maybe a stricter automatic validation tool, depending on the addon’s permissions. Addons such as mine, which are mainly content scripts options and local storage, are very low risk.
But what I’d really like now is a commitment to enable addons from AMO eventually. Or at least something more positive than the vague marketing-speak we’ve had for months. Then I’ll just carry on using 68 and wait. (The early Maemo builds lacked a few features too!)
And some sign that the Fenix team are reading this?
Hey folks, we recently published an update about extension support in Fenix.
The three main takeaways are:
- More Recommended Extensions will be enabled on the release channel
- We’re working on enabling a setting to support loading any extension listed on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) on the Nightly build
- We’re continuing to work on increased support
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Excellent news indeed. Thanks
Hi Caitlin,
thanks for the heads-up about the post.
I appreciate that the subject is on your radar, but the proposed measures are simply insufficient.
Some of the Addons I use have 200 users, they will never ever make it onto some Recommended Extensions list. It is THIS kind of customisability that made FF attractive. Not a list of Extensions that might as well be part of the bowser itself.
Pushing me to use an alpha-version of the browser in order to be able to use the addons I want is not fair. Just give me about:config back, let me set some setting to true, show me a warning that I am doing this at my own risk and let me install any addon I want.
What is so damn hard about that?
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Firstly, I agree with @imforumman — a user should not be forced into using the alpha of the browser just to use an uncommon addon. Consider the example of a corporate environment where a certain addon is needed, but which isn’t a recommended addon. It would be untenable for that use-case to use the Nightly version as it is simply too unstable for production use.
But also, only allowing for addons to be installed from AMO isn’t sufficient. What if a developer wants to test the addons before uploading to AMO? Just like on desktop, one needs to be able to test an arbitrary XPI without it coming from AMO.
This applies also for in-house extensions, or other extensions which don’t belong on AMO in the first place. Mozilla should definitely not impose a walled garden on nightly users (nor on release users, for that matter!).
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Firefox already shot itself in the foot by permanently disabling a lot of the best extensions a few years ago. Now the gun is aimed at the head; hoping they put the gun away instead. Difficult maintainability is peanuts, compared to being out of work with nothing to maintain. (That’s if maintainability was ever the issue, rather than disapproval from corporate sponsors.)
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More addons for release channel and full support in nightly is not what people want.
They want full addons support in release.
Hand selected addons is just features the browser should just have built . If Firefox thinks an addons feature is so great make the feature part of Firefox itself.
Addons are one of Firefox’s primary features and you are effectively removing it from the release product.
This is a terrible decision and is currently killing Firefox on mobile. Just look at your reviews on play store, the 1 star reviews are not stopping.
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I don’t see one other primary feature that would make me think of recommending Firefox to anyone. Having no “hook” type of desirable feature, and just being a nice-looking efficient browser, in a market where other nice-looking efficient browsers come pre-installed, looks like a quick trip to oblivion. Already having that type of popular feature, and deciding to throw it away, looks pretty hard to justify.
I use my phone all the time. My desktop browser choice is dictated by what’s on my phone, not the other way around. Whatever Firefox puts onto Android becomes Firefox’s flagship product in my view, whether they intended that or not.
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I’m sorry to have to join a chorus of discontent, but in the past week or so I’ve gone from blissfully ignorant Fennec user to slightly-better-informed and extremely frustrated Fenix user.
From what I’ve been able to piece together so far, neither making the extension API robust nor making resources publicly available to extension developers to get their extensions ready for Fenix were prioritized. I imagine the time to express my opinion about what should be prioritized for the Fenix release was about a year ago, but I was a happy Fennec user who didn’t even know that code name or that a big rewrite was coming. It would of course serve little purpose to rant here about how this update was not what I wanted.
Instead, what I will say is that as a user, a long tail of extensions is a core feature of Firefox for Android for me. It’s not just the big ones with functionality browser makers might seriously consider replicating directly in the browser. That one extension with 37 users that makes a seemingly minor improvement to an obscure website? That’s why I use Firefox over other browsers on Android.
The best time to prioritize a robust extension ecosystem with an extremely long tail would have been a year ago, but the next-best time is now.
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I agree that you’re right about this, but IMO it’s important to keep in mind that some of the people who work on Firefox agreed that “Will we support extensions?” could be up for discussion. It’s as if the Levi’s company held high-level meetings where “Will we continue to manufacture jeans?” got taken seriously. You’d certainly wonder about the future of the brand, if you found out.
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Yeah this is retarded. It’s been how long since the update got pushed (forced) to users, almost a month? I heard rumblings that about:config support was coming along with general addon functionality for Nightly. So I installed that today expecting literally any difference. Instead found the blog post (…from 2 weeks ago now…) saying nothing at all except the same thing I already knew: Coming Soon!™
Yall really wanted to take that 1% market share down another order of magnitude huh? Well, at least the law of logarithms technically cannot reach actual 0. Let’s see how many more decimal places we can addon (heh)
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with Nightly, @juraj.masiar. At this time, we don’t have concrete plans to implement this in Beta – we’re focusing on the Nightly setting and working on other increased support plans.
Noted; and I yield. Sorry- I’ll refrain from such language. But also, I think it’s genuinely still a pretty accurate description of the situation.
If the different versions of Firefox were separate people, then Fenix in its current state would likely be aptly classified as mentally handicapped, at least compared to the perfectly capable, exceptionally intelligent previous build (Fennec), as many in the thread and the Play Store have already made clear.
I mean there’s no dancing around this. I get that if it was a decision made at the behest of the people who dole out the money, and they mandated that the new version shall be released, because it’s what we think is best for the future of the brand!, etc, then there’s not much you the devs can do in opposition. But I sure hope none of the people writing the actual code have deluded themselves into thinking this was truly an acceptable direction to take the browser in. There is so much of the great functionality of the previous FF generation missing in Fenix, it’s honestly laughable; I just can’t imagine the discussions in the board room that must’ve taken place prior to pushing the update leading to an ultimate consensus that it was a good idea, without chuckling. FF being the only mainstream browser with full extension support was an amazingly cool idiosyncrasy that I myself only discovered circa ~the beginning of this year. I thought “wow, I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this and settling for using chrome/brave for so long!” And thus seeing it all being taken away not even a few months after I figuratively stumbled across the holy grail of mobile browsing, along with the realization that no, it’s not just my bad luck, it’s a real problem for everyone, was I guess amusing you could say, at the very least
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To be fair, this is not a case of “Oops, there may have been a glitch in one of the Nightly builds”. The only reason this person tried Nightly (which apparently may not have worked, who knows what might have happened with it) is that a forced update broke Firefox. It’s not a bad experience with Nightly, it’s a bad experience with Firefox.
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And… There’s also a move to minimize the perception that the forced broken update continues to be a problem, by closing down discussions that mention it and redirecting them here. It’s probably a smart strategy, in terms of shutting people up. It’s definitely not a smart strategy for browser development.