I noticed an inconsistency with the Extensions button in Firefox for Android.
When the toolbar is expanded, there is an “Extensions” button. However, its behavior changes depending on the current page:
On a normal webpage, tapping Extensions opens the list of available extensions. There is also a separate “Manage extensions” option for extension management.
On the Firefox Home screen (New Tab page), the same “Extensions” button directly behaves like “Manage extensions” instead.
This makes the Home screen feel like a special and limited context. For example, with Bitwarden, I cannot access the extension UI from the Home screen and have to open a normal webpage first.
A more consistent behavior would be to keep the same interaction everywhere:
Extensions button → open available extension actions/UI
Manage extensions → manage installed extensions
The Home screen should not require a workaround just to use an installed extension. Since WebExtensions have their own UI pages (“moz-extension://”), they should be treated as first-class browser pages rather than something that only exists while browsing a website.
I found that a similar idea about accessing add-ons from the Home screen was proposed on Mozilla Connect in 2022, but this inconsistency still exists today.
Firefox for Android has made great progress bringing extensions to mobile. Making extension behavior consistent across all browser states would make extensions feel like a natural part of Firefox.
I agree that this would be ideal, but I’m not quite sure how it would work in practice. The problem is that if the extensions menu were exposed as it is on normal pages, it wouldn’t always work as expected. As a result, Firefox itself would feel broken.
A significant chunk of extensions react to users hitting the action button (the extension’s entry in the extension menu) by directly interacting with the current page. That might be injecting some scripts, showing UI, or something else. But those interactions would fail on the home screen/new tab page because extensions can’t access that page’s content. From the user’s point of view, you’d tap on an extension you want to use and nothing would happen.
I’d bet that rather than silently error and feel broken in these cases, the Firefox for Android team decided it was better to prevent extensions from being able to do the wrong thing in the first place and hid the extensions menu.
I understand the trade-offs the development team has made in this regard. My message is not a demand, but a request—one coming from a long-time user of Firefox for desktop who is puzzled by the discrepancy where the desktop version freely allows extensions to run on `about:newtab`, while the Android version refuses to do so.
In fact, the post published on Mozilla Connect back in 2022 that I mentioned was mine; around the same time, I also submitted another post requesting features such as an “always request desktop site” option and improved handling of the site toggle. I am delighted to have returned to Fenix in 2026—after a long stint with Chromium for Android—and to have once again chosen it as my primary Android browser.
