I just tried installing an add-on on my android and the "Add to Firefox" button is still grayed out. Searching for "compatible" extensions yields only 15 results.

So no, Firefox still doesn't support extensions on android and hasn't since they disabled them years ago.

THIS is why people like me don't use firefox on android and use chromium-based browsers instead. At least, they let me install the add-ons I want.

To use more extensions on Android, install Firefox Beta and follow this tutorial: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... (the title says Nightly but it works on Beta too now).

>Searching for "compatible" extensions yields only 15 results.

That's the complete list, yeah. It's utterly ridiculous and insulting.

You can get around it by making an online collection of extensions with a Mozilla/whatever account, but you can't install from files.

I largely agree, it doesn't meet my bar for "supports extensions" :/ hence at the very least "significant step down" - that much is at least not contentious.

The old version of Firefox on Android was awful. The UI was laggy, and the scrolling was so slow it could actually take over a minute to scroll up long pages.

The performance of Fenix (the new version) is at least as bad as Fennec (the old version) for me.

Never forget that concurrent with the decision to move to a native Android UI for the non-Web parts of the mobile Firefox app (whereas previously it was using Gecko for the browser interface itself, just like on desktop), the powers that be were announcing/hyping Firefox OS—an entire mobile operating system that would "boot to Gecko", and where all apps would be required to implement their UI with this strategy that Mozilla knew have substantial downsides since they were already abandoning it themselves for performance reasons.

Left hand, meet right hand.

B2G and Firefox OS did some legitimately cool things - they still have a better blended app+web experience than anything mainstream that I've touched. Android's crappy instant apps are laughable in comparison. There's plenty to learn from that experiment(?).

The rest of it, yeah. Absolutely agreed. Electron not having a Firefox equivalent in particular strikes me as a major, multi-year... not oversight, that's far too polite. Self-ostriching? I'm continually astounded beyond words. The market is massive, and nauseatingly ripe for competitors.