Hacker News Reader

Comment by Snuupy | Hacker News Reader

What about the default setting to have Pocket forced down my throat, an inability to install custom/self-made extensions (permanently, not temporarily), and an inability to install any extension outside of the default mozilla provided one on mobile (besides fenix nightly)?

Good thing librewolf/iceraven exist.

View on HN

Yeah, Mozilla does some great things for privacy while at the same time pushing all kinds of new problems on Firefox users that have to be carefully disabled on each install. As long as they continue to give us the option to disable all the insecure and privacy violating features they add to Firefox, I'll continue using it. There's nothing better out there right now. but it does make articles (and headlines) like this a real problem.

At best we're left to assume that they're so disorganized that Mozilla has put out this article calling out a toxic practice they themselves are happy to continue participating in.

At worst we could look at this as Mozilla violating their user's privacy while also knowing that it's wrong and trying to trick Firefox users into thinking that Mozilla is looking out for the them and that Firefox wouldn't do the harmful things it's actually doing.

I very much wish Mozilla would either stand by the message in this article and disable the harmful defaults in their own browser or stop pretending to hold values they refuse to respect themselves.

In the end, the change being discussed in this article/advertisement is still a good thing for user's privacy and I get why they'd want to promote it as a feature of their browser often missing from others, but they could do that without the dishonest/contradictory messaging.

> There's nothing better out there right now

Safari :)

I have to buy a Mac to use it.

You won’t regret it, you’ll get MacOS too.

Safari is the Internet Explorer of this age. My company spends huge amounts of time working around limitations & bugs of Safari.

They are likely limitations for privacy/security reasons.

They really did ruin extensions on Android and have shown zero interest in fixing it in the past couple years.

Iceraven helps a bit, but there's virtually no incentive for someone to develop an extension for Fenix now. The pool of potential users would be small enough for Firefox itself, but its vastly smaller for Iceraven. I've been using Kiwi most of the time as it can use just about every extension available for desktop Chromium.

inb4 manifest v3 ruins chromium

What did they do to ruin extensions? I use Firefox on Android but I think the only extension I have is an adblocker, which I think is still working.

You can only install a very limited selection of extensions.

There were thousands of extensions available a couple years ago. Some of them weren't optimized for mobile and didn't provide a great UX. A few were outright broken. Users could install extensions from local storage, and installation from addons.mozilla.org was only blocked if the extension developer marked it as incompatible with mobile. In other words, it more or less had parity with the desktop experience.

Now, only recommended extensions, of which there are 18, can be installed on the release version. The nightly build makes it possible to install more extensions from the official site after jumping through a bunch of hoops[0]. Loading extensions from other sources is limited to a debug/development process that isn't viable for daily use[1].

Attempts by users and extension developers to communicate with the project about this issue have been deferred and stonewalled for the past couple years.

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

[1] https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/developi...

Thanks

...an inability to install custom/self-made extensions...

What? Can't I make an extension and install it in my own browser? Or do you mean that it's not possible with default settings?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com