From an engineering perspective, the sad thing about this is that the work to finish extensions in GeckoView was essentially completed in the months after the initial Fenix release.
When GeckoView was still being rolled out into release, we understandably wanted to restrict the selection of addons only to those that exercised APIs that we knew were ready for production. Since that time, however, the WebExtensions work was essentially completed -- since that time it has entirely been a business decision to continue restricting the selection of addons available.
I didn't personally work on the WebExtensions bits, but I know that those who did were frustrated that their work to finish fleshing out full extension support was being held back for seemingly arbitrary reasons (that were never explained to engineering).
I think a more nuanced perspective here is that roughly 80% of the work was done, and the remaining 20% require significant effort and organizational energy.
Not all of the WebExtension API surface is currently supported; there's a long tail of infrequently used extensions that require non-trivial engineering effort and often cross-team coordination to implement. However, the actual usage of these APIs in Fennec was very, very low, so the actual bet and the organization sales pitch for this work must be on building a platform, and evidently that's not happening. You can argue that this type of platform work and extensibility is why people use Firefox for Android. You can also look back at the actual usage telemetry (current whitelist is basically what vast majority of people used) and wonder if that additional investment will move the needle.
There's also front-end/back-end engineering required to fully expand existing UIs into a proper "store" experience.
Personally, I think as a matter of principle Firefox for Android should be fully open in terms of what extensions it allows installing.
I believe that will eventually happen - it's where the prevailing winds are blowing inside the org, too! but it may take time for the stars to align, people to have energy to fight through the internal malaise, to pitch work that may not immediately help with any OKRs and is mostly about building community goodwill and sending a message, etc.
As always, it basically comes down to lack of strong leadership.
While API support in GeckoView/Fenix might be incomplete as compared with Fennec, then again the API support in Fennec was equally incomplete when compared to Desktop, and yet with Fennec there were no restrictions in installing addons.
> There's also front-end/back-end engineering required to fully expand existing UIs into a proper "store" experience.
I suppose you could always try polishing thins up even more, but given that addons.mozilla.org already had (actually still has) a mobile view/responsive layout that seemed perfectly adequate, this still seems somewhat strange.
what benefit does having a CEO to mozilla do when insiders and outsiders like me see no tangible benefit? its not like apple which has to pay their CEO top dollar to show they are so good. can the mozilla org not hire X number of developers who would be doing the actual work instead of a single CEO whose job, according to me at least seems to be doing everything in their power to ruin the good name of mozilla? its as if they are paid to take all the bad decisions. strange
It's quite irritating, as AMO even asks whether or not an add-on is compatible with Android when uploading.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
yep. a product superior to Chrome would be detrimental to Mozilla's de-facto parent company.
same story with the desktop version.
it's all so tiresome.
I have a purely speculative and very pessimistic opinion that is to not compete too much with Chrome and Google, so Mozilla does not antagonize with the source of their money while still providing Google with a "but we have competition!" card that they can use to prevent governments from treating them as a monopoly.
This is almost a conspiracy theory but, hell, that's the only explanation I have for so many management failures and aversion to their userbase.
Just because something is open source (like most of my projects are open source), that doesn't mean the project owner must now accept any changes anyone in the world wants to make. Particularly when this 'anyone' is being paid by a company to implement what this company wants in a repository owned by said company.
That's not to say that open source is useless: if it were closed source, you wouldn't have been able to tell that the code is in the repo, just not activated, and you wouldn't have the option to fork it and enable it yourself and make your own custom build (freedom to study, modify, redistribute, and run), or pay someone else to make this change for you. Try that with Microsoft Windows source code, you can't study or modify that or even run it without permission.
Surprised to hear literally the sole reason I use it on mobile is also neglected. Do they think they're going to out compete Chrome on Google's own platform for casual users or something? I don't get it.
NewPipe on F-Droid is a killer app.
Coincidentally, there's an addon for that, which is in the ‘recommended’ from its early days, and you don't need the desktop mode for this feature. The addon is called ‘Video Background Play Fix’.
"Video Background Play Fix" extension is available for FF on Android.
The fork Iceraven whitelists/allow all (?) of the addons (not all work fully, so the whitelist has a purpose): https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
With the much more limited plugin API (and simple html plug-in config pages) of the new browsers you'd think it would be easier to build and vet secure, cross platform add-ons.
And further along, in a universe where they poured a lot of time energy and money into fixing the whole plugin ecosystem and succeeded, they're complaining about something that didn't get done because of that shift in focus.
The conversation goes something like:
"Why are they spending time and money on fixing mobile addons no one uses? I think this is because their management are too political, not like their old unpolitical leadership. And as I say every time they get mentioned "I hate people who say and do political stuff!!". It makes me so angry. They should only do what I want or I'll force them out of business from pure spite. That'll teach them to be political.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
When this was released I switch back from IceRaven to Firefox as I prefer a browser that receives timely updates.
What's worse, bookmarklets were as broken in Iceraven as in Firefox. I never though it would happen (I've been an extremely loyal Firefox user), but I had to switch to Kiwi.
Fennec only supported a limited (perhaps slightly larger than what is currently supported) subset of the Webextension API, too, and yet there were no artificial restrictions on add-on installation.
On desktop I use Firefox exclusively. I tried several time to use Firefox mobile but the sideways scrolling was really a pain.
I can't believe no one has implemented such a basic and important addon for readability. I search for something like that about once a year but find nothing. But it's probably just me. And phreack above.
Bug reports pile up, nothing is really fixed, a ton of commits about telemetry, some commits here and there changing certain UI elements, some refactoring, almost nothing else. Go check its revision history all you want: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/commits/main
Mozilla has seemingly totally given up on it. It's incredibly sad.
Rereading your comment, you're referring more specifically to mobile; I suppose you might have a point there, but when almost everything is in mozilla-central, I'm not sure what you expect to see there (well, extensions, but beyond that) other than UI work.
I have a fairly new phone on a 5G network and the browser is soooo much better than it was even ten years ago yet I use it far, far less than I did back then. Part of it is that my phone just didn't do as much back then and so I spent more time in the browser, but I think the other part is that the web has turned into a garbage fire.
I used to browse the web the same way I used to channel surf in 1984. It was what I did for fun. Today, I go to five sites 99% of the time and I kind of dread having to use my browser on my phone outside of that.
(I wish we had standardized sync protocols for this stuff. But we couldn't even standardize IM, so that's just futile dreaming on my part.)
Edit: then I remembered that F-Droid has the quirk of requiring a manual refresh of its repository. I did it and got version 101.1.0 from June 5. Much better.
Your statement is akin to saying: "Firefox on Debian is my solution to Mozilla abandoning FF on desktop"
If FF on Android _were_ abandoned, then so would Fennec.
I use Fennec, but because I know that it the well-supported, actively developed Firefox on Android, but available on F-Droid.
which sadly Mozilla doesn't provide or allow F-Droid maintainers to publish it as "Firefox"
Such a wasted missed opportunity for the mobile web. FF could and still might be able to recognise the utility.
(* Yes I can install it via developer mode I think, but it was for you too)
The web (HTML/CSS/JS/JIT/WebAssembly/Audio/WebGL/WebRTC/etc) engine is exactly the same, the rendering engine (WebRender) is the same, synchronization is the same.
The UI is completely new - that's it.
This is not a wholly new browser, this is a wholly new UI.
I have read that geckoview takes the old gecko implementation, probably copied and adapted, but other than that it's a new project with a different development path. That's why I say it's a different browser.
I may be wrong though,I tried to search for sources but unfortunately couldn't find any.
In fact, the new one doesn't remove things from suggest even if you remove it from your browser history manually, which is also really only convenient to do if you accessed it recently. If you don't want things spamming up suggest, the only option is to use private browsing or wipe your entire history.
In any case...finally! Thanks
Going by the numbers, that's far from the truth. Majority of user never used addons, not even adblockers. Even the most popular addons are only used by a small minority of users.
I'm also a big addon-user and complain what firefox has lost over time. But we should also admit that we are a minority, and addons are simply not the major selling point for a mainstream product's success.
It's entirely plausible that when you alienate a power user, you also alienate their entire social circle, dependent on them for tech advice, so you lose 20x-100x of your audience/users.
I'm not saying that's exactly what happened, but it definitely happened to some degree. Personally, I no longer recommend or use Firefox to anyone. The techy people in my circle use Brave or ungoogled Chromium.
The untechy ones use Chrome/Edge and maybe have Opera/Vivaldi as their backup browser or Safari if they're big Apple fans. Almost no one uses FF anymore. Without its extensibility, it simply doesn't compete anymore.
Do they get those numbers via telemetry or from the server-side? If the former, those stats may be skewed by the overlap between the users who use several extensions and those who disable all telemetry.
In a mozilla bug report where they discuss removing user.js, they point to telemetry that indicates that no one uses this functionality. I'd argue that the Venn diagram between users of user.js and those who disable telemetry approximates a single circle.
I'm sure I'm far from the only HNer that has recommended or installed Firefox for many friends and family. I mean, I used to recommend and install Firefox before their terrible management turned the org into a dumpster fire. They've lost both myself and everyone I would have turned onto Firefox.
Since 2015 Firefox has become rapidly less capable and rapidly more 'secure' for non-technical users. It's just not what I or the original userbase want. But like with all things Mozilla (including the original employees and CEO) we've been replaced. There's plenty of users who just want Chrome that's not labeled Chrome and Firefox modern gives it to them.
(I'm a 15+ year user, I started using it when I discovered I could run it off a flash drive on locked-down shared computers.)
I feel like it should be obvious that, at least in the case of addons, some users want addons and some users don't care about addons, but very very few users explicitly don't want addons to be available at all, and that consequently the correct approach is to make addons available.
Haha. Firefox went from above 20% marketshare in its early days, to below 4% today, and the number is continually dwindling. At this point it's the few defensive, aggressive fanboys left who are "speaking for themselves". We'll probably still hear this kind of comment from the likes of you even when usage drops below 0.01%.
And I don't want to hear the "it's chrome's fault" again from the FF brigade, IE had more marketshare in the IE vs Netscape days than Chrome has today, and it didn't stop Firefox from eating at IE's shares.
In my mind, that was peak Firefox. Yes performance wasn't great, but I didn't care. It was good enough and I mostly browsed with JavaScript disabled.
The new vim mode plugins can't compete with the old plugins because they are much more restricted in what they can do.
And somewhat ironically, while I already had it installed for quite a while, I only really started seriously using and valuing DownThemAll after Firefox 57 had already come out.
[1] Eventually they relented somewhat and said that they would accept an API extension whereby an extension could download to the last downloaded-to location (even outside of the Downloads folder) without having to explicitly prompt the user again – but until now it was never actually implemented (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1342563).
[2] You can only choose between "automatically rename" or "overwrite", and you can only choose in advance (!) when you don't actually have the necessary information to make that decision (especially seeing as Webextensions can't read any local files, so they have absolutely no idea what sort of filename conflicts could potentially exist). There's no "skip" option, and while there's a "prompt" option (however well/badly implemented that might be), Firefox doesn't even support it.
that's why they've killed XUL. that's why they're going even further by enforcing an inferior extension standard from their supposed competitor. that's why they've killed off the extensions and about:config for the android version. that's why you can't even use a private extension on desktop without jumping through the hoops. that's why usercss (toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets - legacy and disabled by default - the writing is on the wall already) and userjs will get axed. that's why about:config will get axed on the desktop version as well.
all of that is just off the top of my head. and in the end, Firefox will be a clunky and inferior alternative for Chrome with not 2%, but 0.2% of the market. which is the goal.
> that's why they've killed XUL
We couldn't deliver a multiprocess browser without doing it.
> about:config for the android version
I completely supported this and continue to do so. GeckoView on Android works completely differently than desktop Firefox, and about:config's semantics are not identical between the two. A few of us were interested in offering an alternative that gave users a way to make adjustments in a way that was "safe," but as you can imagine that has never been a management priority.
I don't think so. There's many more ways and decisions they could have gotten away with to make Firefox worse without outright killing it, that they haven't done (yet).
Rather, I think it's more likely that Firefox, the browser application, is a bit of an albatross to the Mozilla foundation. Something they begrudgingly have to live with, at least in the short term. It's their organization's 'product', but to a certain layer of leadership and above, it's just another vehicle for their broader mission which could be accomplished much easier by just being a chrome fork instead. It'd also remove the need to hire and retain so many pesky and annoying engineers.
Such that the Mozilla corp. is something they have to keep around, but definitely not something they want to keep around.
It is an attractive way of rationalizing the astonishing and bewildering decision making at Mozilla.
The existing gap between even the core features has been puzzling for a while.
On mobile I can add a current page to home screen, collections and the top sites. Neither is available on desktop (with the same profile).
WTF mozilla? What kind of usability is this? I am totally not looking forward switching to another browser but it looks inevitable...
i find collections super handy and use them but the fact they are not exposed (even in rudimemtary form) in desktop UI is appalling. the usefulness of collections drops by some 50% to me - i basically need to reopen a saved page in mobile, send it to the desktop browser (using "send to device" feature) and then, probably, save it again in bookmarks.
If there's a better (more accurate and neutral) title that uses representative language from the article itself, we can change it again.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
From the github link : The ability to attempt to install a much longer list of add-ons than Mozilla's Fenix version of Firefox accepts. Currently the browser queries this AMO collection Most of them will not work, because they depend on code that Mozilla is still working on writing in android-components, but you may attempt to install them. If you don't see an add-on you want, you can request it.
The day they do that on Desktop, I don't know which browser I'll switch to...
I was disappointed to find that Firefox's tablet interface is just a blown-up phone interface. I have switched to using Edge instead because it looks like a proper desktop browser with a tab bar, and has integrated ad-blocking.
For me, the two biggest pain points I experience with Firefox is the lack of PWA support on desktop, and now the lack of a proper tablet interface. So I end up using Chrome/Edge on desktop for PWAs, and now I use Edge on tablet.
It's getting harder to stick with Firefox...
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1528838579455250434
> For non-search tracker blocking (eg in our browser), we block most third-party trackers. Unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon. > > We've been working tirelessly behind the scenes to change these requirements, though our syndication agreement also has a confidentially provision that prevents disclosing details. Again, we expect to have an update soon that will include more third-party Microsoft protection.
I wish it really was "no need", but it's frustrating if their built in list doesn't meet your needs. With uBlock I can add new rules easily.
Then, out of nowhere, they phase out what we currently have with this half-baked Nightly version. The app updated itself overnight and now all the addons are no longer supported (Violentmonkey was a big one for me as I could customize some websites with a user script), the home page icons can't be rearranged, the history can't be deleted and overall this updated app seems like a worse deal that we previously had.
Mozilla has stopped caring about their products. It seems that nobody in there is dogfooding Firefox, and it shows. They have a big advantage because of Google still not allowing addons on Mobile Chrome, and instead of opening up the whole ecosystem (which previously most of the desktop addons were compatible with the mobile app), they double down on allowing only a very short list of preapproved addons.
Things have improved quite a bit though. They finally fixed that stupid scrolling bug that cuts off a part of the page below the nav bar. That finally got me off Kiwi Browser.
Eagerly waiting for all add-ons to be allowed in stable.
No more ads, no more cookie banners.
Kiwi Browser FTW https://kiwibrowser.com/
