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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Addon collections? Does it also allow any single addon like firefox for android used to until a few years ago?

Does it require an account now to add any addon? Why would they require such a thing?

You can add any addon to your collection, including those that have no place on a phone. Some addons that aren't tuned for phones actually work just fine, even if one needs to zoom in on the settings screen. Some others work ok, but the settings screen glitches.

The default is to only present a limited selection of addons that are reviewed by Mozilla for mobile compatibility and user experience. The way this is implemented is by constraining the user to installing extensions that are in a particular Mozilla-managed addon collection. On Nightly (and now on Beta), you can use a debug-menu feature to override the ID of this collection with your own.

> Why would they ...

Mozilla.

Collections are created and maintained out on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/

You can one-click install an entire collection, streamlining the setup process.

Here's what bugs me: I have a Firefox account. When I log into Firefox on a new machine it automatically installs all my addons and syncs stuff. So why do I have to do this crap to get the same effect on mobile? Why isn't my existing list of browser add-ons not considered a collection, that I can just use? Why do I have to jump through this hoop? It's extremely irritating when things don't "just work" and I have to suddenly care about wtf a collection is and figure out how to create one.

Edit: not ranting at you, just ranting about this stupid extra hoop

At one point I thought collections were shared publicly on Mozilla's add-ons website but I don't see how anymore. They still mention that as the use-case however:

> Collections make it easy to keep track of favorite add-ons and share your perfectly customized browser with others.

I'm not sure collections changes anything in the case of Firefox mobile, the add-ons are still bifurcated.

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