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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget

- Removing browser features (tab groups) by factoring them out into extensions, then

- Breaking the extension API such that such extensions are no longer possible, then

- Say you'll add new extension APIs to allow such features but actually don't implement anything for several years (https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding / https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447)

- Separately, break all extensions on the mobile version of firefox and then decree that the only extensions allowed on mobile must be specifically whitelisted by Mozilla

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The number of tested extensions supported in Firefox for Android is growing and in the meantime you can install any extension from addons.mozilla.org in Firefox Nightly for Android:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Average user here. Not really interested in jumping through hoops to get addons that seem like they were arbitrarily taken from me. The mobile rewrite shouldn't've been released until it was actually ready, because average users _do not care_ about Mozilla's development convenience.

> in the meantime you can install any extension from addons.mozilla.org in Firefox Nightly for Android

That was done after much screaming, and there are no plans to ever bring that out of Nightly.

Good tip, but it should never have become necessary.

Its just as if someone paid them good money to not compete with Chrome!

(I'm not saying that is part of the deal but I don't know what more Google could realistically hope for...)

I tend to believe that it is naive to think that Google would want Firefox to die.

So... with the huge caveat that I don't actually believe this... if we're going full conspiracy theory, Google probably benefits the most from Firefox being as weak as possible while staying technically alive. That is, Firefox needs to stay technically an option to stave off antitrust issues, but evil-google doesn't want anybody to actually use them, so it's preferable that Firefox is as buggy and feature-poor as possible.

Again, not something I actually believe, but the presented position is at least internally consistent/valid.

It's reasonable, thanks.

This is starting to look more and more realistic :-/

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