Add-on support in new Firefox for Android

[petr]

Hi @caitlin Oh I just see that all new addons in FF83 are “Recommended”. I must have been mistaken. Sorry. I ask myself if we as user can help in any way. If with each update only 100 addons are added, it takes a very long time until all (or most) of the addons are supported.

[maka]

Hello, I have a very simple extension and I would like to port it to a newer version of mobile browser, how can I do that? Can you allow it to be installed?

https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/nhentai-vertical-scroll-mode/

[DaveRo]

Hi @maka *

You have to use Nightly. It’s explained here. There’s more discussion up-thread.

Expanded extension support in Firefox for Android Nightly

(* Did you know there’s an add-on called MAKA: Make America Kittens Again.
I didn’t write it, but I bought the author his first computer - an Atari 520ST)

[amuck (Margaret Miller)]

@jorgev

this thread has veered into speculation, bad-faith assumptions,

With all due respect, why is that so surprising? With this development decision, you basically pulled the rug from under the core of the Firefox mobile users. The point of an add-on system is that users can arbitrarily extend the functionality of a software. Now you, or whoever made the decision, decided that this feature isn’t valuable enough to keep. That not only will there be a manual approval process, but you will only approve add-ons that are popular enough for you to consider. Now people are begging on their knees to have their addons whitelisted. The previous years have been a continuous nightmare where Mozilla took away user freedom step by step and completely ignored us. Meanwhile more news cropped up that Firefox is losing market share and revenue, and its existence is in danger, and then you make this crippling decision which goes against all reason. Has no one on the board thought about how this will make users feel in this context? Of course we will make bad faith assumptions.

And while this decision is a failure, it’s not the only reason you’re getting this kind of response. It’s also because of how you communicated it.

• You pushed a software update that enacts these breaking changes without any forewarning or user consent.
• You write a blog post where about two paragraphs touch on this subject, and open a forum thread. And that’s all the communication that can be found. I had to search for hours to arrive here and comprehend what happened.
• You don’t answer user questions, you show zero acknowledgement of the damage done, and after growing pressure, all we get is that you guys are thinking about stuff and not yet sure what you want to do.

You just broke a software and said that you’re not sure you want to unbreak it, ever. Completely left in the dark. For me personally, you broke workflows that will take weeks to restore/substitute, and some parts are irreversibly lost. How can you expect us to not speculate in this situation?

[anon18296772]

It is not surprising that the decision is being questioned, see also a side thread of this.

[anon18296772]

@davidpiano

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.

Indeed I noted that volunteers’ replying at SUMO to users who have add-on problems already are “moderated” (kinda offputting, no?), while other areas of problems are not.

There is no way to notice that, however, unless you actually are going to help out a user with a reply.

I am not sure whether this is going to motivate many volunteers to put more hours into a system like that.

Meanwhile, helpful replies simply get delayed, it appeared to me.

[jscher2000]

@anon18296772

Indeed I noted that volunteers’ replying at SUMO to users who have add-on problems already are “moderated” (kinda offputting, no?), while other areas of problems are not.

If you think, there is a problem with moderation policy at SUMO, the discussion forum for that is here:

https://support.mozilla.org/forums/contributors

If the problem is with URLs in replies delaying the appearance of posts, that is due to the link moderation implemented in response to scammers. If you are a frequent contributor, you can be added to a group that is allowed to post links.

[anon71100618]

@jscher2000

If you think, there is a problem with moderation policy at SUMO, the discussion forum for that is here:

https://support.mozilla.org/forums/contributors

And if they think they have too few volunteers to help out lately, then maybe they’d reconsider all those policies (anti-scammer or not) with or without discussion at https://support.mozilla.org/forums/contributors .

[janghou]

Should have posted in this thread. Sorry, didn’t see it in time.

Support omnibox api in Android

Now the new Android versions have dropped the support for keyword search, which is a big loss IMHO, we desperately need support for the omnibox API on Android. Why is the loss of keyword search a big issue? I have dozens of keyword search bookmarks. Sure I can change them to search engines, but instead of typing g search [enter] (1) or h search [enter] (1) etc, I have to type search (1) click Search engine (2) scroll to the desired search engine (in a list of +40) (3) and click [enter] (4). I…

[anon18296772]

@anon18296772

@anon71100618

What I will do, however, is less volunteer work.

One of the few options they leave us with.

this makes perfect sense. It addresses the underlying problem commensurately.

[DaveRo]

@DaveRo

I’m now using Nightly on this 10" tablet. All my own addons work. It is certainly faster than Fennec

And it was stable too - up to yesterday when it was crash central, and many sites - including several Moz ones, just froze.

I wanted to reinstall an apk of an older nightly, but couldn’t find them. Can someone post the location?

We really need the addon fix for beta!

[lost_cowboy (lost_cowboy@hotmail.com)]

Well, it is a new year, and still the stable version of “Firefox for Android” does not support searching for and installing “add-ons” or “extensions”. It should have been a simple fix, just add the link to the search page at the bottom of the add-ons manager tab, as they had it working before. Something like this For more add-ons click here. . Once you click on it the website should be able to show the compatible add-ons for the version of Firefox you are using, not just the “11 Recommended add-ons”.

Over the last few months as my disappointment with the new “Firefox for Android App” has grown, my rating of Firefox has gone down on the Google play store. It has gone from a Five star rating to a One star rating. That’s because the one “BIG Thing” that made Firefox different from Chrome was the ability to search for and find new add-ons, install them, test them, remove them if I didn’t like them, complain to the developer if I found a bug, report the add-on to Mozilla if I felt it should be removed from the Firefox Add-ons web site. RIGHT NOW I CAN’T DO ANY OF THAT!!!
I recently went to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/ and tried to search for “fit to width” and “Fennec TextWrap” the search came back as not found! I was hoping to find out if they had been updated and compatible with the latest version of “Firefox for Android”, It seems that the search function on the web site will only display recommended Add-ons.
So even if I was to install the unstable nightly version and was able to do the “Collections” workaround, it would fail because I could not search to find the add-ons!

This reminds me of the “Laurel and Hardy” movies I would watch as a kid. This is another fine mess you have gotten us in too!

[jesus2099]

Firefox (up to 68.11.0) add-ons were the reason I used Firefox for Android instead of Vivaldi, which does not support extensions on mobile.

That even made me switch from Vivaldi (I’m an ex Opera Presto user) to Firefox, so I can share my favourites between PC and mobile.

Because my whole mobile use of a browser (second hand CD shops, list of things I already own) requires a certain MusicBrainz COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTER user script that in turn requires Violentmonkey to run.

Or a browser that natively supports Greasemonkey scripts / userscripts.

Now I am still on Firefox 68.11.0 but some people say it’s not safe.
I tried Iceraven, my user scripts work there, but I don’t feel confortable using a fork. Maybe it’s still safer than official Firefox 68.11.0.

Please add Violentmonkey back to the Firefox add-ons.

[jesus2099]

@caitlin

We’d like to expand support and we’re still evaluating how we can do that without running into the security and compatibility problems we saw with add-ons in Fennec

Oh first time I see why add-ons support has been removed!

• What kind of security problems? Malicious add-ons? Which ones?
• What kind of compatibility problems? Broken add-ons? It’s just the problem of add-on maintainer.

[freaktechnik (Martin Giger)]

One public mention of a potential security improvement that may be missing has been in this blog post I’ve mentioned earlier in this thread:

Add-on support in new Firefox for Android

A side remark in this recent add-ons blogpost: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/08/24/introducing-a-scalable-add-ons-blocklist/ may shed some light on the factors involved with allowing the installation of arbitrary extensions on Android: We are currently evaluating additional optimizations in order to further minimize the size of the blocklist for use on Fenix, the next major release of Firefox for Android. This may of course also not have been a factor in the decision.

[DaveRo]

The latest nightly I have (210310 17:03) broke my addon, and the next one seems to be delayed.

Where can I find APKs of earlier versions?

[DaveRo]

Well, I found an older one on a site called ‘uptodown’ but I couldn’t find a proper mozilla source.

Q1 Is there a safe mozilla source for old nightlies? I’ve asked before, but got no answer.

So I’m back on 210308 and my addons are working again. I first deleted the Gplay version, which deleted it’s profile, so I had to reload lots of stuff (eg top-sites) so the whole procedure took ages.

It’s why having ‘unapproved’ addons only in nightly is a bad idea. Why can’t we have private collections on beta? Beta releases are all on github.

Gplay is now offering me an update - but doesn’t tell me the new version, so it could be the same faulty one.

If this were desktop Fx I would look at bugzilla to find out what’s going on, what fixes have been landed, whether there’s been a regression. I can’t find anything similar on github. (I use github but I’m not very familiar with it.)

Q2 Where can I look to find out what went wrong, if anything (Gplay updates seemed to stop for two days) and what version has been pushed to Gplay?

[gojin56321 (gojin56321@asfalio.com)]

Hello there @caitlin Oh I simply see that all new addons in FF83 are “Suggested”. I more likely than not been mixed up. Sorry. I inquire as to whether we as client can help in any capacity. On the off chance that with each update just 100 addons are added, it takes quite a while until all (or the vast majority) of the addons are upheld.

[davidpiano]

What’s actually gone wrong is this: People in Mozilla leadership are aware that the latest versions don’t work and are unacceptable, but they really REALLY want to stop people from using the older, still-working versions - they don’t want anyone to find out that that’s an option.

Because if people found out there was a way to install a working version instead of the latest version, a lot of them would obviously do so. Can’t have that, now, can we.

So anything they can reasonably do to make older versions disappear, they’ll do it. (That includes not answering questions that refer to the fact that newer versions are broken, or that ask how to get older versions, or even ones that ask for clarity about what the latest update actually is.)

I know there’s a possibility that someone may deny what I’ve just written. To that person: Along with your denial, please post the Mozilla-approved publicly-accessible downgrade path enabling users to choose which version they’ll install, definitely including a link to version 68, and also including whichever others you think might be helpful. Failing that, please consider not starting the denial charade in the first place.

[caitlin (Caitlin Neiman)]

Hi @DaveRo, I apologize for missing replying to this. You can find older Nightly builds at https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/wiki. These builds expire every six months or so. As a quick note, Android requires you to uninstall your current Nightly before you can load an older build. (Release and Beta channels will be unaffected, if you have those channels installed.)

I’m not sure about the best place to look for info about Play Store issues. If you’re able to do so, you can drop a message into the #fenix room on Matrix.