(Former Mozilla developer here, who worked on GeckoView[1], the modern way to embed Gecko into Android apps, including all currently shipped Mozilla browsers on Android)
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).
(Also a former Mozilla developer, worked Fennec and Fenix)
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.
> 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.
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.
Right, I think it's pretty close to parity! I vaguely recall seeing some odd API that wasn't supported in Fenix that was in Fennec, but they're pretty rare. Fairly sure you could access history in Fennec via a webextension, and I think that's not supported in Fenix.
I think what's generally missing in these discussions is that the whole project to bring extensions into Fenix was extremely user-driven - whatever people actually use in any significant volume on Fennec, Fenix supports. And the actual UX of installing extensions is just so much more streamlined and nicer in Fenix.
If you purely look at it from the "most value for most users" perspective, Fenix extensions are a great success. And, it's also a success in purely engineering terms - code that's not bringing a lot of value but yet creates an overall maintenance drag is omitted.
What may have been missing from it is the ideological bit - for a platform to be truly open - and to be a viable platform!, it can't have a restricted "whitelist". And I agree with this. But it's not clear that "mobile-browser-as-a-developer-platform" is a sustainable long-term pitch for an organization as small and as resource constrained as Mozilla.
So, there's a tension between these two perspectives. In purely "rational" terms, what's there is good, and there are a ton of other much more pressing issues to work on for the small teams - bugs, performance, missing functionality that can actually "move a needle", etc.
You can make an argument that in this case, the rational, data-driven engineers won. Which is the opposite of what HN seems to think of Mozilla!
What's probably needed for full webextension support is a strong, perhaps not purely rational leader that will rally folks and actually push the teams to do the work that may be useless, or useful to a tiny percentage of the user base, in a belief that it'll produce a better future. Which may or may not pan out!
> If you purely look at it from the "most value for most users" perspective, Fenix extensions are a great success.
Except for the part where so many extensions that already have the needed APIs implemented still can't be installed.
Changing that setting would move the needle with minimal developer effort.
> But it's not clear that "mobile-browser-as-a-developer-platform" is a sustainable long-term pitch for an organization as small and as resource constrained as Mozilla.
They were trying to make an entire OS, and now they can't keep the browser shell updated?
There's correction and then there's overcorrection.
Also I want my desktop and phone browser to work together well, so failure to make the phone work pushes me away from everything.
> What may have been missing from it is the ideological bit - for a platform to be truly open - and to be a viable platform!, it can't have a restricted "whitelist".
> What's probably needed for full webextension support is a strong, perhaps not purely rational leader that will rally folks and actually push the teams to do the work that may be useless, or useful to a tiny percentage of the user base, in a belief that it'll produce a better future. Which may or may not pan out!
While I appreciate the development work you and other Mozilla engineers have done on Firefox, this kind of attitude is causing Firefox to bleed users. This argument dismisses honest feedback from users as "ideological" and "not purely rational" because it doesn't align with Mozilla's product decisions. Desiring access to more add-ons is a utilitarian position to take, not an irrational one. On the other hand, continuously ignoring your users is a surefire way to lose them as soon as they find a viable alternative to your product, and that's what I would call irrational.
Allowing users to opt out of the extension whitelist on the stable channel of Firefox for Android is a low-effort, high-impact change that would greatly benefit users who use add-ons other than the 18 whitelisted ones, while not harming the users who choose to stay with the whitelist (enabled by default) in any way. By refusing to make the whitelist optional, Mozilla is making Firefox for Android significantly less useful to users who want to use non-whitelisted add-ons, while not improving the experience for the users who choose not to opt out.
This pretty much feels to me what is happening to Mozilla as an organization from an outsider perspective. Engineering is no longer as important as the evangelism and management is making strange decisions that lack focus on what the target audience really is.
My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.
> My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.
Ex-Mozilla PM here, I completely understand what you mean by this and I generally agree. I'll go a step further and say that as a PM I often didn't have a choice, either, decisions were being made above me and I often found out from the engineers that they'd been told to do something different than what I'd just expended significant effort on documentation to support doing. A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering. I'm more technical than most PMs at Mozilla were and had a better relationship (I think) with engineering than most of the PMs did, but it was a fundamentally untenable situation to be in, where I ended up just being a middle-man, which is not what a PM is supposed to be, and it doesn't create good products or user experiences.
Somewhat ironically, I think that Mozilla needs a stronger Product organization to succeed, but that wasn't happening. If PMs are doing their job right, they are there to advocate for the users/customers and ensure that the direction of the product aligns with how people are using it. At Mozilla, it felt to me like there was a very heavy top-down approach and with some exceptions, most product features or projects were focused on enabling alternative revenue pathways without regard to how this alienates existing users. Very little of what I was asked to work on had any chance of moving the needle on market share, which was and is the fundamental issue for Mozilla existentially.
> A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering.
I feel this hard. On the occasions that I tried to reach out to product management about things that, for important technical reasons, weren't going to work, I was more or less blocked by director-level management and told that I was being mean to my colleagues for wanting to provide that kind of feedback.
Can anyone defend product management to me? Shouldn't this basically be UX/UI designers working together with developers based on user input acquired in some scientific way (either quantitative or qualitative)? How do product managers provide additional value?
IMHO: Product managers are super important: it's their job to understand the market (where it was, where it is, and where it is going), the competitive landscape, and work with leadership on strategic planning.
However, all three groups (UX, PM, Eng) need to work symbiotically. Everybody needs to be sharing information and acting as partners in the work they're doing.
Most of that evangelism doesn't even make any sense to me as a non-USian. I understand the US has its own share of internal problems, but feeding that to the whole world when I just want to download the damn browser seems weird. I won't post any links here to avoid offending anyone, but they should be pretty obvious.
Not only does it not make sense, they presume they know better than their poor users what their users should see and what opinion on web content they should have. If I want activist browser developers, give me teams like Brave and Vivaldi, thankyouverymuch. Both actually do things that serve the end user in their own way. Insofar as the browsers have politics, they are politics about the browser itself like antitracking, privacy and user control.
Also not American and yeah, if California would stay in California, that would be great.
The evangelism was about web standards, web privacy, and user control. They deferred on standards to Google, and became positively hostile to the latter two subjects.
I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it because I'm not the kind of guy who thinks an interracial couple in a tv commercial is commie globalist mind control. My problem is that:
1) their messages on standards are incoherent and not backed by taking firm stands. The only reason I'm confident that they won't break uBlock (i.e. will hold the line on a portion of manifest v3) any time soon is because they would drop from 4% market share to 0.5% market share in a month. This is not a good reason to be confident, because they lost a similar proportion of market share to get to where they're at now, and they didn't seem bothered.
2) Other than uBlock, they've taken away or left to languish things like javascript enable/disable whitelist/blacklists etc. and fine cookie control, and murdered their extension ecosystem that was filled with privacy protecting extensions, and 4/5ths of the ones that are there now look scary and I wouldn't install them. Too bad they lost the community that would have vetted those extensions in moments in favor of the technical solutions of nerfed webextension APIs formulated by a company whose entire business model is exfiltrating data from unsuspecting users. So much for user privacy.
3) Firefox started putting things into the browser that couldn't be turned off, removing configuration options, and pushing a "wrecker" or "overly-vocal minority" narrative at their users who objected to that. So much for user control.
Also, and I have no inside knowledge, it always seems like the people that write the website copy for whatever their latest PR effort is weren't even at the company for their last PR effort, and don't know anyone who was. I'm getting the impression that firefox is a place you go to burnish your resume/portfolio before getting a real job, which is the reason for the constant stupid tiny UI changes. Do people stay there for more than a year or two?
why should mozilla continue to pay for a CEO and "managerial staff"? i don't mean accountants and all, but bosses and "managers" who are not paid by the work done but instead based on "market rates" as i read in some mozilla report sometime ago?
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
The reason you're getting downvoted has nothing to do with the "progressive narrative" and everything to do with the fact that your posts are off-topic. Political complaints about Mozilla from a left perspective would be equally irrelevant. Availability of browser add-ons is obviously not a political issue.
Conservative comments are not removed, bad-faith discourse probably gets flagged. I've said some pretty spicy things here and never noticed an issue. Check yourself maybe?
That explains why all add-ons I tested in Nightly with the custom add-on list workaround[1] worked fine (ignoring the jank here and there due to missing optimization for small touch screens).
It's quite irritating, as AMO even asks whether or not an add-on is compatible with Android when uploading.
> Can you elaborate how engineering on an open source product is prevented from doing the right thing™ by management?
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.
Because the vast majority of engineers working on the code base are employed by the management. They can't just do their own thing & remain employees. Plus the FF code is controlled by Mozilla corp. You have full freedom (as an outside contributor) only in the sense you can always fork, not that you can somehow force Mozilla to accept your patches. Same as Android and all other major OSS controlled de facto by corporations. True community led OSS is quite rare, especially among the market leading software among their category.
Because the person in charge of the repository said so?
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.
I like using Firefox on Android because uBlock origin makes mobile browsing at least tolerable and it lets me use the "desktop mode" view on certain sites so e.g. I can listen to youtube playlists even if the phone is locked without paying for a premium service (for what I consider basic functionality).
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.
Every video, I get errors in the UI. I once powered through, it seems eventually the video does play normally. Perhaps that is because of blocked ads(by newpipe then - I have no other restrictions on mobile)
> so e.g. I can listen to youtube playlists even if the phone is locked
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’.
… and to circle back to the original topic: Even though "Video Background Play Fix" is a plain simple page script that doesn't even have any UI nor uses any other special Webextension APIs it still took quite a while for it to be finally whitelisted.
"the whitelist has a purpose" doesn't really capture what's going on, though. It's more like they whitelisted some of the most popular extensions and then just stopped completely with no intention of continuing.
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.
yes, you're probably right, they have no intention of continuing.
I think mozilla is not really committed to firefox on android. after all they have a minuscule market share on mobile, almost not existent.
they probably think that most users will install just an adblocker, so they don't want to "waste" money enabling other extensions.
so sad.
Somewhere in a parallel universe, Mozilla just let all the plugins claim compatability, and vaguely fascist users who dont like their politics are complaining that the instability of Mozilla on Android is the reason they hate them.
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.
So, Mozilla makes decisions to win over vaguely fascist users, or at least prevent them from having something negative to say? Or because in other universes there aren't perfect solutions?
Do they have any desire to just.. make a good browser that fulfills peoples needs?
The point is, if you don't like an organisation for reason A, you'll easily find reason X, Y and Z why you don't like them.
Ask someone who grew up supporting a certain sports team or religion why they don't like the rival team or religion, and they'll happily give you answers why. They may even believe some of them themselves. Some of them might even be valid criticisms, but they are almost certainly not why someone chose their home team or religion over another.
This never ending drama seems to mostly stem from Mozilla ditching a potential CEO because his religious beliefs meant he felt he had to fund anti-equal marriage organisations. It all seems like echoes of that to me. 8 years of boring whiney echoes.
Yes. Humans make decisions based on feeling and intuition, and most people then check the decision for any glaring errors by using rules of thumb, and, in rare cases, reasoned logic. But nobody makes decisions based on logic. We all just have opinions, and later, when pressed, find “reasons” to keep them.
See also this discussion about how to choose a phone:
Let's talk about forging hammers for a moment: I could just be a blacksmith forging nice hammers to put nails into stuff and try to make them high quality - nicely weighted, comfortable handles, durable, repairable etc, make some decisions about quality/price etc.
I could also sing Erika or the Internationale at the top of my lungs or rant about the modern art market at the same time. These aren't very related at all to my actual job of forging hammers. I could also have opinions about something at least somewhat related, like constantly telling people they shouldn't use my hammers to build modern architecture because it's a steaming pile of ugly garbage. Let's say modern buildings use a specific kind of nail. I could make the hammers so they're by default kinda garbage for working with those nails, though adjustable to work with them if the user so wishes.
This evaluation of modern architecture is a valid opinion! But it's still really unsightly to advocate for simple tools to not be used for general purposes, or to try to build features into the hammer to make them a pain to use for making ugly buildings. It's simply not really my job as a hammersmith to do that.
And it's that attitude that we've generally losing as a society - a craftsman's attitude to just do our jobs well and leave the unrelated politics elsewhere. We literally have spice merchants' websites with menus that go "Spices - Gift bags - About Republicans". Your job was to sell me chili and nutmeg so I don't end up in those plain toast meme pictures and not political commentary about how one party is the source of most everything wrong in America.
Think about something like Christian rock. Most of it is pretty dull. Why? It tries to be Christian first, good music second.
I'd like there to be more craftsmanship-type organizations and less political activism with a job on the side.
Sincerely, one of your "vaguely fascist users".
EDIT: Apologies to dang for talking about hammers and pepper sellers.
I've seen this one before, a GNOME apologist insinuating that anybody who wants thumbnails in the GTK filepicker is probably a 4chan user. Is this the new trendy way to dismiss criticism of software? Insinuate that anybody making specific concrete complaints about software has invalid political beliefs completely tangential to the feature/bug being criticized? What fun!
Or you can just wait two sentences into their comment when they simply can't stop thenselves saying something about progressive politics. Which you really don't need to mention, and common sense suggests you shouldn't, when criticizing a bit of software or a charity foundation on unrelated matters. Unless of course that is the point.
One person who criticizes Mozilla mentioning politics is not a legitimate excuse for you to paint the entire class of people who complain about Mozilla with that brush. Ironically, doing so is vaguely fascist, in the sense that fascists love to spread the blame for individual crimes across entire classes of people they oppose.
Incidentally, who's comment are you even talking about? I don't see any mention of politics in the comment you responded to.
It's not one user, but it's also reasonably valid: There are browsermakers who just try to make a good browser and don't talk about politics incessantly, and as far as I can tell somehow their products seem to improve a lot in ways Mozilla's just doesn't.
EDIT: As an example, Firefox is discontinuing search keyword sync via bookmarks. Vivaldi just implemented syncing search engines via their sync service, across both desktop and mobile.
There is in fact a way to plug in your own whitelist if you use Firefox Nightly [1]. It's a bit of a hassle though, and it's so obscure that I'm fairly sure almost nobody is aware of it.
then you could try fennec from f-droid, which enables custom extensions and about:config, but unlike iceraven is compiled from firefox stable release, so it is updated shortly after a new firefox stable release.
I take a mental note to try it but I like nightly, I also use it on my desktop and I prefer it to normal Firefox. I doesn't exactly know why but there is something about the regular release that rubs me the wrong way.
Fennec F-Droid does have the same extension whitelist by default, but it also supports the Collections workaround that adds access to all add-ons on addons.mozilla.org:
Since Firefox Nightly is unstable, some users prefer to use Firefox forks like Fennec F-Droid and Mull that are based on the stable release channel, yet also offer expanded add-on support.
Regrettably collections that try to enable everything are cut off at 25 or 50 in Firefox, so it's still not a practical way to recover your disabled addons unless you register with a custom collection.
Unless someone out there made an anonymous collection autogenerator. That'd be nice.
Last time I used Iceraven many, but far from all, extensions were whitelisted.
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.
> "not all work fully, so the whitelist has a purpose"
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.
This sucks because it also means no one is making add-ons for mobile, it's more of an accident that we even have ublock. There's use cases that the Firefox team will not work on for decades that could be filled by add-ons if they just told people to go wild, absolute top of the list being text reflow to prevent having to scroll sideways to read long text. Opera is still the only browser that does it for some reason years on, but it gets worse every update.
Yeah, that's why I still use Opera on mobile. All the other mobile browsers including Chrome and Firefox are broken for me since I have to slide sideways to read texts.
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.
For those who think Mozilla did a good job with Firefox for Android, how do you justify the fact there's still no way to change the User Agent without swapping to Beta? Sure, there's a "desktop mode" button, but not only does that break and force you to reset the browser if you hit the back button but it doesn't actually change the user agent. Sites that bar mobile devices can still tell you're on mobile and stop you from seeing the page.
I've closely been following Mobile Firefox development over the past year - this browser is dead, like totally dead.
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.
There are still loads of things that used to work before the rewrite and now don't, plus a number of bugs introduced during the rewrite, and progress in that area is positively glacial.
I'm starting to think that maybe browsers on Android and iOS just don't matter much anymore, other than as the foundation for in-app web views.
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.
If you use any kind of browser sync, that alone makes the choice of browser important, since you need the same one on all devices that you use for it to work seamlessly across all of them.
(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.)
i havnt got around to trying floccus out fully but i hope its good because i switch between firefox and vivaldi every few years so it would be nice to have something that would work on both
I guess your point is Mozilla would care if they were bigger. Nobody can say. The service documents you are allowed to use it as long as you don't use Firefox/Mozilla branding.
I just checked. Firefox on Google Play is version 101.2.0 from June 8. Fennec on F-Droid is version 97.1.1 from February 26. Maybe it's not abandoned but it doesn't feel that one can count on it for timely bug fixes.
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.
I was writing an extension for Firefox mobile to improve HN a bit to make it work nicer on mobile. Then whoops Firefox no longer does extensions really. *
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)
FWIW, people that want to run extensions can either use Fennec (the F-Droid fork, not the old Firefox for Android) or Nightly versions. There are developers targeting this stuff - I wrote about some here: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2022/01/26/most-wanted-add-on...
I don't think I or my post implied that it was out of the box. You also don't need to create your own collection - one just needs to exist with the extensions you are looking for.
Sure. Wasn't implying anything. Just warning people. It's also why I haven't gotten around to it yet. I've made many accounts with Mozilla over the years and none of them were migrated over to this new system (ditto when they killed off moznet actually). I'm just sick of it. It's just enough friction that I haven't gotten around to fixing the annoyances of the missing addons.
Fenix is basically a whole new browser, and that means that all features need to be implemented again (which takes a lot of time, and I don't think Firefox developers have much of it).
Lots of Fennec features are still missing (view source code, save as pdf, install general addons, the whole about:config...). Why they changed is a mystery, maybe the old browser had a core privacy bug or something that couldn't be fixed, but basically they killed Firefox on android.
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 though that fennec was a monolithic implementation for android of the Gecko engine, while fenix has the ui part and the geckoview part separated (so you could create a different app with the same rendering engine, like webview of android).
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.
Another missing cool feature from old Firefox for mobile was ability to remove a site url from suggest and history just by long touching on it, which seems to have entirely purged it from the places db.
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.
Mozilla doesn't seem to have a clue why people prefer firefox. It's not because of privacy or security, though that's nice. It's certainly not because it behaves similarly to chrome. It was always the extensibility. The power of plugins that allowed adblocking to be invented on firefox. They threw that away in the name of security and supposed clean code. Clean code doesn't get you users.
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.
You shouldn't be afraid to cater to the minority of power users. Power users are the ones that make browser recommendations to an outsized group of people, e.g. friends, relatives and coworkers. They are also the ones that drive new standard adoption.
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 suspect that this actually explains a lot of Mozilla's decision making that seems utterly disconnected from their userbase. They don't seem to realize that compared to Chrome, their userbase is disproportionately tech savvy enough to reject telemetry. They talk about the importance of privacy and security and whatnot, but then make all their decisions based around the behavior of the people that don't care about their privacy.
"userbase is disproportionately tech savvy enough to reject telemetry"
You need data to support that claim. To me, it sounds unlikely. My guess, most users accept telemetry, tech savvy or not.
For instance, I'm tech savvy, and explicitly choose telemetry when on non-work computers because I want to enable companies to understand my behaviors so they can in the best cases deliver better features to me.
I think it's hard to tease out the size of effect. Extensions are only used by a minority of users, but that's mostly the set of vocal power users that are likely to be the go-to tech person within their social circles.
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.
That might have been 20 years ago when Firefox grew from it's grassroot-movement. But Chrome started without extensions and grew more through marketing and Googles fame. Power users have their influence even today, but I'd say it's not as strong as it was in the old days. Most users have emancipated themselves from us, and can choose now on their own, because this kind of information is not arcane anymore.
I'm a decade-long user and am perfectly fine with modern Firefox (plus uBlock), both on the desktop and on Android. In fact, I don't want to go back to the before-times. Speak for yourself.
Don't worry, he's speaking for the majority of long term firefox users. You're the exception. I started using Firefox when it was Gecko/Phoenix in 2002, then Firebird, then Firefox. I started using it because it was so customizable. I stopped using it at version 37 in 2015 because that was when Mozilla destroyed the browser by removing user freedoms to install their own add-ons without Mozilla's approval. And no, using Nightly (alpha renamed aurora renamed nightly) is not an option because it is extremely crashy on non-standard OS/Distros.
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.
Just to chime in, I also started using Phoenix in 2002, but it wasn't because it was customizable. I've never used more than a couple of extensions and I actually have every extension I need on Android, so I'm fully satisfied for my particular use case.
I still think most of what Mozilla does with Firefox is absolutely stupid and I wish it was different because attracting or retaining more users would make Firefox less likely to die, and generally help the web.
I think you got this backwards. Firefox has 362 million users [0], while the uBlock Origin addon has 5,438,169 users [1], which is 1.5% of all users. If you use Firefox addons at all you're probably in a tiny minority of its users.
> There's plenty of users who just want Chrome that's not labeled Chrome and Firefox modern gives it to them.
Firefox isn't Chrome that's not labeled Chrome, though. Less customization doesn't mean it's necessarily more Chrome-like, especially lately where Chrome's implementing things like tab groups and keeping more or less the same UI design. The new Firefox looks more Safari-ish than Chrome-ish. to me.
True. I should have been more clear. I meant it's like Chrome in that it prioritizes being a javascript OS for e-commerce applications from corporate persons over a browser for HTML websites made by human persons. And with those priorities come inevitable design decisions re: ability to customize.
Ditto... For example. They allow NoScript, but they blocked Custom Style Script, Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey, Old Reddit Redirect all of which I used for small tweaks to common sites with poor non-JS CSS defaults to make NoScript more usable.
They also blocked about:config (fixed by using F-Droid Fennec). I also lost functionality that I had relied on (not going to turn this into a rant on that - and that's probably due to the rewrite, but it's still unfortunate).
Here are the addons I'm still miss post change. There's been no modifications to the list since.
"View Source" "Tampermonkey" "Old Reddit Redirect" "Custom Style Script" "Android PDF.js" "uMatrix" "Alt Text Viewer"
The only one they had an adequate replacement for was "Dark Mode" - "Dark Reader" does basically same job with slightly less convenient UI. "Dark Reader" is also an extremely crude alternative for custom CSS.
I'm also a decades-long user, and am very unhappy with many of the changes that Mozilla has made to Firefox (both on the desktop and on Android), and I do want to go back to the before-times.
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.
Firefox decline started long before they switched the extensions-system, In fact they lost majority of their share before that point, and seem to have gained a bit momentum back because of it, temporary.
> And I don't want to hear the "it's chrome's fault" again from the FF brigade,
Sure, who cares about facts when you can have guts-feeling...
> 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.
IE had no marketing at that point, while Firefox did had significant marketing at the time. Chrome then started also with big marketing, while Firefox was busy with dying projects. Coincidence? Seems like marketing is a major factor for success even here.
If you compare the marketshare of firefox a decade ago to the marketshare of firefox now, you can determine pretty precisely how extreme a minority you are in that.
Even worse in what regard? Did you reply to the right comment?
Chrome imitates Chrome far better than Firefox does. I just don't think they can catch up at this point.
edit: maybe you meant addons? Chrome has more addons, with more users, updated more often. Chrome fails at ublock because it wants to, but as long as you're not messing with Google's core business, Chrome is (of course) going to be better off than the product of the endangered company that solely survives from Google's donations.
More addons on mobile and an more flexible add-on api on desktop. Chrome's API does what Google wants it to do, and it doesn't cost them any users which proves that's not what's the issue with Firefox.
Kiwi browser is basically chrome but with full extension/dev tools support. Nothing custom, all stock chrome. But I know the devs behind that browser rely on data collection themselves, so it's less than ideal (you can I think turn all of that off but I'm not sure). But it shows that it is possible to have full add-on support on mobile chromium. Especially considering Kiwi was developed by a single dev initially.
Most open source chromium forks on Android don't have add-ons though, so kiwi is the best option. I guess it's usually because those forks are usually very privacy centric so add-on support is far from a priority. Kiwi on the other hand is basically stock desktop chrome
Edit: apparently they don't outright collect user data!
>The browser is getting paid by search engines for every search done using Kiwi Browser.
>Depending on the search engine choice, requests may go via Kiwibrowser / Kiwisearchservices servers. This is for invoicing our search partners and provide alternative search results (e.g. bangs aka "shortcuts").
>In some countries, the browser displays sponsored tiles or news on the homepage.
>User data (browsing, navigation, passwords, accounts) is not collected because we have no interest to know what you do in the browser. Our main goal is to convince you to use a search engine partner, and this search engine makes money / new partnerships and shares revenue with us.
Am I the minority? To establish that, you'd need to survey a sizable part of the previously FF-using population and determine why they stopped using it. Going from "lost most marketshare" to "it's because techies were forsaken" does not seem logical to me.
And you know, even if I was indeed the minority, so what? I stand by liking FF and I will continue to use it until it's defunct. Because I can :)
Yeah, when they did the big performance rewrite(quantum?) and killed pentadactyl (vim mode), I was really upset. I remember using Firefox 52-esr for as long as I could to keep my workflow the same.
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.
The really galling thing is they lied right to our damn faces about how "the new faster systems breaks the old add-on system" while they were still using XUL behind the scenes. In fact an HN reader compiled versions of Firefox 57 and above with user-installed XUL enabled and they work perfectly well.
Nothing is really stopping people from keeping those extensions compatible. Unsupported doesn't mean impossible - it just means you need to do some tweaks: https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io
I'm not understanding how that relates to the fact that the only thing stopping users from installing their XUL extensions on FF57 was a software switch they weren't allowed to touch without editing and compiling from source.
No editing or compilation needed. You just needed to disable signature checks (xpinstall.signatures.required) and enable extension experiments (extensions.experiments.enabled) in a developer edition version (or nightly) version of the browser.
I feel like if it was that simple, someone would have written instructions somewhere at the time. I remember having to set xpinstall.signatures.required before FF 57. I am not sure about extensions.expirements.enabled.
Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I can't be bothered constantly fucking around with my setup and have resigned myself to just accepting whatever Mozilla wants to shove down my throat.
From what I can tell, the community has forked pentadactyl[0] and are using it on Palemoon[1]. I'm guessing if it could still run on Firefox today, they would do that instead of using Palemoon (but I could be wrong). Anyway, I still hate that they killed what made Firefox unique. Trying to beat Chrome at it's own game seems like a pointless battle.
Download managers/mass downloaders have been similarly rendered impotent (can't download to outside of the Downloads folders without individually prompting for each and every download [1], can't intelligently handle naming conflicts between new downloads and existing files [2], etc. etc.)
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.
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.
>We couldn't deliver a multiprocess browser without doing it.
even if the management understood that advanced extensions were a major factor for choosing Firefox over the alternatives and were willing to dedicate enough time/people/money to tackling the issue?
my presumption of malice was primarily based on what followed - crippled android addons, forced addon signing on non-Nightly, upcoming adoption of manifest v3. put together, the poweruser experience we had in 2015 is better than the one we have now. and unlike XUL, the only explanation I see for all of these is either malice or stupidity.
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.
Mozilla lost the plot the day they decided chasing Chrome was more important than appealing to their actual userbase. That was about the time they started incrementing version numbers every six weeks and rendered the numbers meaningless.
Which is a great justification for releasing updates every six weeks. Destroying the paradigm of "integer release = major revision" instead of "Firefox 5.102" is what makes it a pointless dick-measuring contest with Chrome. One you lost, by the way.
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.
Submitted title was "Firefox addons are still unavailable on Android, two years after Fenix release". Since that language doesn't appear in the OP, it seems a little editorialized and I've replaced it with the page title now.
If there's a better (more accurate and neutral) title that uses representative language from the article itself, we can change it again.
This title change is a complete disservice. It's vague and milquetoast to the point of meaningless now when before it firmly but fairly stated the truth of the situation.
dang, this is a really bad title change. The original title was clear and to the point, the new one is vague and omits the most important fact of the whole thing. At least something like "Lack of add-on support in new Firefox (2021)" would be better.
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.
Most the addons that I use work with collections, but collections are cumbersome to use. Why don't they just have an option to unblock all addons and give you a warning that some might not work?
The day they do that on Desktop, I don't know which browser I'll switch to...
I exclusively use Firefox on Android because of the addons. For me it's the killer feature. Dark mode, ad blocks, YouTube while screen is off. It's made android so much more enjoyable.
To this day Firefox for Android still does not have a tab bar on tablets. Which is double ridiculous since the previous two rewrites both did have one (in fact I contributed to the former...).
I just bought a Galaxy Tab S8 after continually being disappointed with the iPad and lack of user-friendly multi-tasking capability.
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.
Please, pleasepleaseplease use anything but Edge. Edge is a complete privacy disaster, see for example link below. Microsoft does run their own sync backend, but they don't allow end to end encryption for all kinds of content, browser history being one. They do a lot of good things on UI, but would sadly have to be among the last Chromium browsers I'd recommend people.
No idea... I feel like the android one might be a better fit, interface-wise for a chromebook with a tablet mode and touch screen and limited file system access like the one a friend of mine has, but it's also true I don't own a chromebook so I don't know which people prefer to use.
For a year now, I began using DuckDuckGo's (DDG) "Privacy Browser" on Android. By default it removes ads and third-party trackers; no need for add-ons. So far DDG's browser works roughly on par with my older setup of stock Android Firefox plus a couple of usual extensions. I wonder why DDG's Android browser isn't more well-known.
> 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 remember back in late 2018, early 2019 I downloaded the Nightly version, Mozilla had been hinting on a rewrite for a while and I wanted to see what they were up to. This version seemed solid, although a work in progress: you could not customize the listed sites in the home screen, addons were disabled and the settings seemed lacking compared to what we had in the stable release, but work was solid.
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.
I'm confused by this. Yesterday there was an article about how Apple only lets browsers use WebKit for rendering, and that was considered bad because it means that mobile browsers can't support add-ons. But it looks like Firefox doesn't support them anyway, so what's the problem again?
Even though Mozilla's execution leaves much to be desired, Firefox does support a limited number of extensions on Android (including the incomparable uBlock Origin), which is still more than the number of extensions Apple allows Firefox to support on iOS (zero). Forks of Firefox for Android, such as Mull and Fennec F-Droid, gain access to all compatible add-ons on addons.mozilla.org, while an equivalent fork of Firefox for iOS would also be restricted to zero add-ons. So yes, Apple's anti-competitive App Store restrictions are still a problem because they prevent Safari's competitors from implementing an important feature that Safari supports.
Do any of the mobile Firefox forks have a better story for tab management? I've been on nightly for a long time (for its janky addon support) and the way I can't manually sort and group tabs is extremely frustrating to me.
I use bypass-paywalls-clean addon and I'm forced to use Firefox Nightly and deal with all its weird bugs (it's nightly so that's expected) because of this.
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.
After dealing with performance, janky scrolling, and crashing in FF and dealing with weird UI bugs in Edge (keyboard overlaps page instead of resizing page), I've sadly had to return to Chrome on my phone.
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).
[1] https://geckoview.dev