They are demonstrating they have a knack for it.
I‘m a Firefox user on desktop but I see their poor choices around extensions haven’t ended. They’ve borked the extensions on desktop before as well.
The charter should be: we support the browser for dorks first and always, and work on technical problems for dorks second.
Turns out that I was right saying that any corp supporting diversity in tech is a corp that has no business being in tech.
'a bit bumpy' doesn't begin to describe it, until this day there are many ways in which the current iteration of FireFox is behind where 56 was.
Anyway, even if I did, it probably wouldn't make any difference.
> Will add-ons not part of the Recommended Extensions program ever be supported on the new Firefox for Android?
> We would like to expand our support to other add-ons on the release channel. We’re currently evaluating how we can enable general add-on support in a secure way without creating compatibility issues.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/02/11/faq-for-extension...
So, why relax exactly?! Even the extension that would work now are disabled.
It's not that I question the intentions. It's rather that, especially given the execution so far, I have my doubts about what these intentions will lead to in practice.
[0] - Basically anything to do with fixing^W modifying the browser UI itself.
Stable just feels unfinished in its current state, I'm not sure about Nightly. I prefer my browser to not surprise me with much of anything, so I prefer not to be on the bleeding edge.
It's tough to read this in any way other than cynically. If Mozilla actually cared about extension support, they'd at least provide an advanced option to enable it outside of the curated list in Fenix. That they didn't speaks a lot to how much they really care.
At the risk of going too far off topic, Fenix really is a disaster. The walled garden for extensions is just one of the user hostile anti-features. I immediately uninstalled it and switched back to Fennec from f-droid. To be frank, you do not have a large enough user base that you can afford to alienate power users in this way. Pretty much the only reasons to use FF on mobile are its power user features, which have been mostly ripped out in this update.
Relax, everybody. Fenix is a major rewrite. It takes time to reimplement all the WebExtension APIs. Nevertheless, the intent is to eventually add support for all the APIs that make sense on mobile. (See here, for example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1632626#c1, or just scroll through the list of bugs here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=GeckoView&c...)
If you go back and read old HN threads from the first public release of Fenix, people were afraid that the lack of extension support was a sign that Mozilla had given up on adblockers. I hope it's clear by now that's not true. (From what I recall of lunchtime conversations, back when those were a thing, the plan for extensions was "well, we're definitely not shipping without uBlock Origin, and we'll see what else we can get working from there".) Similarly, the fact that parts of the WebExtension API are not currently available doesn't mean Mozilla has given up on it. It just means that things take time. (If it were easy, other mobile browsers might support add-ons!)
It takes a lot of resources to support two parallel codebases. At some point you have to rip off the band-aid. The sooner Fennec is cut loose, the more effort we can dedicate to Fenix improvements (like improving WebExtension support). The transition was always going to be a bit bumpy, but things should hopefully get better from here.