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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

Ok, but where the hell are my Android extensions? It's been years, what possible excuse is there? Either admit you just don't care about extensions so I stop wasting my time, or stop wasting resources on pointless vanity projects and get your shit together. Every new random thing like this is an insult to longstanding users who are still wanting for the baseline experience they had years ago.

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Please don't fulminate on HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You may not feel that you owe deprivers of Android extensions better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

Or iOS extensions. All browsers should stop calling them “Web Extensions” if they arr never going to be available to the majority of the web users.

> Or iOS extensions.

Because Apple doesn't allow Firefox on iOS, it's just a Safari skin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587191.

Since all browsers on iOS are forced to use Webkit, I don't see how Mozilla can add Firefox extensions to their iOS browser.

It's nice that iOS 15 added WebExtensions support to Safari. It's not so nice that the feature only works with Safari, and that other browsers like Firefox are excluded even though Apple mandates that they use Safari's browser engine and does not allow them to "download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app".* It's also not so nice that a developer must pay Apple's $99/year developer fee to keep a browser extension for Safari in the App Store, the only way to publish browser extensions on iOS.

* https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

I'm not sure if it's a policy issue here, there's an existing browser[0] that seems to support them.

Subscribe here for updates: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/9155

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/jm/app/kagi/id1484498200

Kagi was last updated in September 2020. If it manages to get an update approved by Apple and set a precedent in the App Store, I'll be glad to see it.

I just use this feature and it works for most of the extensions that I want to use: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Yep, that's the provided workaround. If you don't want to use Firefox Nightly, these Firefox forks based on the stable channel have access to all of https://addons.mozilla.org through the same steps:

- Mull: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/

- Fennec F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

- Iceraven: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

Still can't believe we live in a world where iOS has web extensions before Android does

Firefox for Android does support (proper) browser extensions. I have uBlock Origin, for example. The problem is that by default Mozilla only allows a small number of extensions since the redesign/new Firefox.

There's a way to use the other extensions, but it requires FF nightly and our own list of extensions:

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

Firefox on Android has had extensions for a while now. I'm using them everyday. It's just that you can't use all extensions on it as of now.

> It's just that you can't use all extensions on it as of now.

This is so incredibly misleading I struggle to take it seriously. They had _thousands_ of add-ons on firefox and any remotely popular add-on had a firefox-for-android release. If I open Nightly right now and disable custom add-ons I see a woping _18_ add-ons available and this is _3_ years after the first release with GeckoView.

They made the design decision to change to GeckoView engine in firefox 79.

They made this decision with the awareness that it would break all of these add-ons. They have made a very low design effort in the last 3 years to resolve this.

Users went went from hundreds of add-ons and stabilished workflows to 18 add-ons after 3 years of rolling updates.

Power users won't be stopped by this, as Celso mentioned you can add your custom collection on AMO, but it speaks volumes about how much lack of focus there is in FF and the lack of user voice in the current design decisions.

They did have thousands of add-ons in theory, but the vast majority of them didn't work or had major issues.

I agree that it's an issue, but the situation really wasn't great beforethen either.

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