Add-on support in new Firefox for Android

Add-ons Add-on Support
#44

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.

4 Likes
#45

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.

1 Like
#46

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.

3 Likes
#47

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.

2 Likes
#48

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)

#49

@jDally987 Please keep it respectful; we don’t welcome the word “retarded” here.

1 Like
#50

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.

#51

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

2 Likes
#52

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.

2 Likes
#53

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.

#54

Thanks for your feedback, @davidpiano. It’s easier for us to keep track of the conversation when it’s on one thread.

#55

My add on was working on firefox android browser but in latest version it says Not available for Firefox for Android.

How do I make it available again?

3 Likes
#56

Please read this blog post for more information: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/02/update-on-extension-support-in-the-new-firefox-for-android/

#57

I just discovered that bookmarklets don’t work!

Even Safari can run bookmarklets!

#58

That’s actually what I already said, more or less.

#59

Question for developers, please answer:

How is Mozilla holding to its Open Web policy when only a select few people have the right to customize their browser?

I understand quality is important, but the rate of community input for extensions should be faster. Six months to consider new suggestions is too slow. Trust the add-on community. It certainly knows what works right and would never want to use poorly made add-ons.

You also need to make sure any new add-on works on release version and will not break by your nightly changes. That makes them look bad, and decreases chances of being chosen for consideration. Testing on a stable build gives proof they can be useful for end-users.

(Posted this on the blog too to contribute to more than one conversation.)

#60

Our plans for add-on support on release have not been solidified beyond what is outlined above… We will post updates to this blog as plans solidify each quarter.

So three months from now, I’ll get an update about whether my browser will eventually get un-broken? Is that before or after all the extension developers give up on actively trying to support mobile?

Is this time to jump ship? Does anybody have plans to actively support a fork of Fennec? What about that one Chromium-derived browser with extension support? Kiwi, was it? I suppose I should just give it a try.

#61

One bright spot is the comment from PJ in Wladimir Palant’s piece that I linked to earlier:

Fortunately, once the code is in Nightly it won't be hard to make a unrestricted fork of Stable. Even now, with the minimal case of choosing a different list from AMO, the PR for android-components is tiny, and the changes to expose it as a pref shouldn't be much larger.
#62

My initial impression of Kiwi is pretty positive. It looks like it’s a little behind the codebase of the latest Chromium, but more current than Fennec. So far it seems to run any extension desktop Chromium can.

Firefox is never going to displace Chrome for mainstream users when it comes bundled and most people find it good enough, but if it’s to be the browser for power users, Kiwi may be the new reference it needs to equal to be competitive.

#63

Maybe that’s right, I’m not sure…

What I am sure about is that for this to happen, Firefox has had to go through two iterations of carefully saving the bathwater while intentionally throwing out the baby. It’s sad.

2 Likes