Quotes from the blog post:
We’re taking a steady approach to opening up the mobile extension ecosystem to ensure Firefox for Android maintains strong performance standards while a vast new array of extensions are utilized for the first time in a mobile environment. If testing continues to progress well, we anticipate unveiling a fully open Firefox for Android extension ecosystem sometime in December.
We anticipate strong interest from users excited to explore all the new ways they can customize Firefox for Android. Current trends indicate we’ll have at least 200+ new Firefox for Android extensions on AMO when open availability debuts in December. And while a couple hundred extensions is more variety than you’ll find on any other mobile browser, it is significantly fewer than the nearly 40,000 desktop Firefox extensions on AMO. So the opportunity for heightened discoverability with new users may be intriguing to some developers.
I’ve really enjoyed having Firefox and Ublock on my phone. It’s so nice :) I’m hoping for augmented Steam and Unpinterested extensions to get added too.
About fucking time. It would be nice to have Old Reddit Redirect, so I don’t have to put up with that crappy redesign whenever I need to Google something.
old.reddit.com days’ are coming to an end. You can’t really squeeze the last drop of ad revenue on the old UI.
Shame because the new UI is objectively shit. Autoplaying videos, less dense UI and worst of all, RES works best with old UI. I didn’t need to touch my mouse to navigate Reddit all these years thanks to RES. Now, thanks to Spez, he has broken something that didn’t need to be fixed.
It’s not only shit, it’s incredibly slow. On my Thinkpad T480, the CPU fans immediately turn on and get really loud when browsing on the new Reddit UI. Those of us who knew the internet pre-“web 2.0” know that it’s complete nuts for a website to bring a 4 cores/8 threads CPU to its knees just to render mostly text and a few pics, we’re not even talking about sophisticated content with videos.
The reason is that the new UIs are full of Javascript which does way more than just adding a bunch of effects (which normally even a Pentium 4 should be able to handle with no issues): tracking. They’re doing a bunch of stuff like collecting every few milliseconds the locations where you tap, how long you’re staying on a given page, “eye-tracking” (basically building heatmaps of where you “look” the most on a given web page so that they can decide whether to show some ads there etc…), a bunch of A/B tests for marketing purposes + the associated data collection that is done on your browser etc… and that’s what’s wasting your CPU cycles.
Any ETA on when the old UI will be retired?
I’m guessing I’m not alone in this but the redesign + API restrictions are why I’m here on Lemmy
Nice! Looks like it’s time to switch to Firefox, I’ve been using Chrome for close to a decade since it integrates well with Android.
Made the switch a year ago. Works like a charm. Ad-less mobile browsing is a blessing
Unless they drastically open up the browser, this is nothing new.
Its simply “not an antifeature” anymore. Currently Firefox on Android has a veeeery small extension set.
This is already possible, using a custom Addon Collection. Check out mine, it includes everything you should need.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/collections/17446767/Fenix-Addons/
Hooray, it includes SingleFile!
Of course XD
Yo a few days ago I had the urge to look at every single damn addon from Iceravens messie collection… its a total mess full of addons that dont work for sure, and some weird ones you should just ignore like Honey.
Wrote a biiig issue report that day.
But I actually found some nice ones, they are at the top, like this autoscroll thing.
I actually went from “nothing changing my UA” to webGL randomization, canvas randomization and UA randomization. I am pretty sure most sites use that to track, so its best to randomize everything.
Can you add ublock origen to it?
It is. Since the beginning
I looked at it and only saw ublock origin lite, is that the same thing ?
Ublock Origin Lite is a fancy new version without needing any permissions, at least in the weakest setting.
The real Ublock Origin is the first entry of the list, just sort by oldest
Ok thanks
Firefox on Android is so underrated, it’s practically the perfect browser for me.
Agreed. Although there is a bug where the current tab won’t respond to any input (such as refreshing or new url entry) and you need to close the tab… it hasn’t yet been annoying enough to open a new issue though…
I uninstalled it because of this bug. Just kept occurring again and again on two separate phones to the point it was totally useless. I hope they fix it.
I submitted a bug report about it, but I was never able to reproduce it reliably - seemed like it was due to leaving the tab around for a long time.
If it happened that frequently, I would definitely see if you can reproduce it while recording logs so it can help them track it down!
Too bad it slow as molasses on my older phone, while Cromite is a snappy endeavor.
I would prefer Firefox than chromium on phone as well, but it’s just a bad experience.
Hoping I can ditch Iceraven then. Not because there’s anything wrong with it, really, but because it’s a pain to keep updated.
Use Obatanium to update GitHub apks. You can add other sources too.
I do these days. It’s a great thing to have, but I would like it to be a bit easier to use.
I have Firefox as my main browser on Android, but I still use the Google app for certain searches/news/weather, but it opens the articles in chrome. Anyone know a good alternative to the Google app that uses Firefox?
@R00bot @AlmightySnoo You can configure the Google app to open links in Firefox (or whatever browser is configured as default)
Find this control in the Google apps Settings and turn it off
(You may also need to set Firefox as the default browser on the Android settings, if you have not already find do)
Oh nice. Thanks. I looked in the settings before but must’ve missed that one. Much better now opening articles without being assaulted with ads.
you can also use linksheet to get a prompt or set a default
This is great, though I really wish they would finally prioritize supporting site isolation and enabling isolated process on Android.
A big part of why a lot of us use add-ons is for privacy and security, but even with more robust extension support, it still won’t be as secure as Chromium-based alternatives on mobile until they address that.
So what’s everyone’s favorite addon besides ublock?
DarkReader
Tampermonkey
LibRedirect
SponsorblockDecentraleyes
Stylus to apply your own CSS overrides to certain websites. Also DownThemAll as a download manager and to download stuff on a webpage based on filename patterns.
I installed Firefox the other day but small at it might be the lack of immersive mode (aka hide the status bar on scroll) was a deal breaker for me. After a couple of years using Samsung Internet I got too used to it. Hopefully there will be an extension for this.
