Add-on support in new Firefox for Android

I should have thought of that. It works. Thanks.

And Stylus appears to work with Fenix too, including importing Fennec’s userstyles :slight_smile:

I disrespect answers that are not completely honest. And I disrespect an organization if it decides to give that kind of answers.

The kind of dishonest answers I mean are the kind that Caitlin Neiman has been giving. She has not lied, she has obviously taken great care not to lie or to give false information, but at the same time she has made it perfectly clear that the full truth is not available. There are obviously no military secrets involved here, no good reason to hide anything.

I don’t blame Caitlin Neiman - this is her job. I don’t think she made a personal decision to give evasive answers to reasonable questions, I think she has been assigned this task because she’s good at it, and is doing the job to the best of her ability (and far better than I could do).

It’s just sad to me that “Mozilla disinformation officer” has become a thing.

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@davidpiano, you are welcome to voice your disagreement or disapproval with the new Firefox for Android product, but personal attacks aren’t welcome here.

Please make sure you read Mozilla’s Community Participation Guidelines before commenting again and consider this your final warning.

We understand your frustration with the current state of add-on support in Fenix. We communicated where we are in this process but haven’t said specifically where we are going. That’s because it hasn’t been fully decided and we prefer to post information we are sure about. We will provide updates as soon as decisions are made.

That said, this thread has veered into speculation, bad-faith assumptions, and call-outs, and that will not be tolerated. We will start moderating messages and will close this thread if this behavior continues.

I would also like to share my frustration :slight_smile:
I also don’t like that these huge decisions are being made somewhere somehow with no public discussion.
I DO like that your UI designer is now asking users opitions on Reddit (I wish it was done before the first public release though…).

BTW - I’ve been trying to “go with a flow” and use the new Collections feature. But did you know it’s loading old cached content and it’s by design?
So my two collections “Weather” and “Lunch menu” are always showing me yesterdays weather :sweat_drops: and yesterdays lunch menu :pizza:!

I would really like to know if the person who designed all these features is actually using them and is happy about them. Because I’m for sure not happy :frowning:.

And hearing that the future is unsure and addons that are here to solve these kind of “unique” (???) issues / use-cases may stay blocked forever is a nightmare for me.

I’m sure you are getting a lot of feedback these days, so just make sure to read it and act on it :slight_smile:. Thank you!

I would like to express frustration that it wasn’t fully decided whether to continue to support addons before moving forward with Fenix. The worst bad-faith assumption I could’ve made previously about Firefox for Android was that the team didn’t even have a plan for supporting all addons. And that assumption has just been confirmed.

For me, and other users, addon support was the killer feature of this browser. I hope that will inform where the team is going with this process, and we can have good faith that full addon support will resume as normal.

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Reddit? Whose idea was that? ISTR someone has written about communication channels - I don’t recall Reddit being mentioned.

I’ve been trying to use nightly - all my addons work - but it’s unusable on my tablet in the absence of accessible bookmarks or editable Top Sites. And huge amounts of empty space. So this is still Fennec.

I have update 201030 17:00 for Nightly Android. I followed every step from creating collection, debug mode, custom add-ons etc. After I put in User ID and name and I go to add-ons it shows “failed to query add-ons”

It disheartens me deeply to see what Mozilla has become.

You have lost my trust, and I cannot believe in the reasons you have given so far on why you want to make a walled garden. Sadly, I see no light at the end of the tunnel.

From your current stance, I can extrapolate that you will never add back the ability to sideload arbitrary addons from any place, with me taking the risk only for the addons.

I’ll start looking for an alternative, and I’ll switch over when I find one.

Very sad that this day has come.

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I had something like that error at first. Make sure the collection name has no spaces in it; I had to set up my existing collection again with a new name. And load any of the recommened addons you want, like uBlockOrigin, before you start; you can’t get at them once you change collection.

I’m now using Nightly on this 10" tablet. All my own addons work. It is certainly faster than Fennec and copes with complicated sites like NYT without freezing like Fennec sometimes did.

The user interface is just dire, though. Several taps to do simple things that you could do in Fennec with one tap. No easy way to find my favourite sites. I’m just not the user they designed it for: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/15474#issuecomment-714979846 (None of those little top-site icons are editable, and identical-looking ones go to different URLs.)

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Thanks a lot! Removing those spaces made add-ons work. And I saw your ss. Yeah that UX needs to be fixed and optimized for tablets.

Hi all, is it possible in any way to set a password on the add-ons section through Firefox or Nightly?

Hi @peter_rock7, we currently don’t have this feature and are interested in learning more. Could you tell us a little bit more about why you would like this?

Hi Caitlin,

I see this would be a great security feature for anyone who lends their phone to another (to ensure the functionalities from the addons are not tampered with) and I think also useful for parental control addons. There is a Public addon that essentially required a password to access the setting of all addons on Desktop but I do not believe it carries over well to android.

I discovered that view-source: doesn’t work in nightly (I often needed it in Fennec) and found this issue:


This is clearly a bug not a feature request, whatever that issue says. Anyway, this addon is good - better than the actual view-source facility - so I thought I’d share that here.

And it’s a good example of an addon that should be available in Release, even though it’s never going to be popular.

Tip for big tablet users using discourse: add ?mobile_view=0

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Hi @caitlin, I have seen that in Firefox 83 more addons are supported. My favourite add-on is unfortunately not included. :frowning_face: Is there anything we can do to support you in this process? It takes a few years until all add-ons are tested :smile:

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Hi @petr! Sorry to hear your favorite add-on isn’t officially supported in Firefox 83. :frowning: Can you share a link to it?

Currently, we are prioritizing support for Recommended Extensions. You might want to nominate your favorite extension to be Recommended. You might also want to use this workaround to install other extensions in Firefox for Android Nightly.

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Thanks for your answer. I know the workaround and I use it :slightly_smiling_face: It would still be nice if my favourite add-ons were transferred to the normal Firefox. I noticed that for FF 83 also addons that are not “recommended” are included :thinking:

The extensions are https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/floccus/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/localcdn-fork-of-decentraleyes/

Can we as normal users support you and test?

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On nightly, on stable when ?

Hi @petr, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “Can we as normal users support you and test.” :slight_smile: We try to keep our Recommended list tightly curated, so not every extension that is nominated to the program is accepted.

All of the new extensions available on mobile should be Recommended. :slight_smile: