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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>Chrome doesn't allow installation of ad-blockers

That is not accurate. The Android version of Chrome does not support web extensions at all. It's not like Google has a switch somewhere that they can flip and make web extententions work. Supporting web extensions on Android would be a brand new feature and would need significant development time.

Not even Firefox properly supports web extensions on Android. They tried, but then seemingly gave up and just whitelisted a select few extensions from developers they could trust not to abuse the security of it.

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> Supporting web extensions on Android would be a brand new feature and would need significant development time.

Kiwi Browser, a Chromium fork for Android with a small development team manages to have extensions, and successfully runs almost all extensions for desktop Chrome.

Google doesn't have extensions in Android Chrome because it doesn't want them. I'm not surprised; many popular extensions make Google's business model less profitable. Firefox also significantly crippled extensions in its Android version, and I'm more puzzled as to their motivations.

Did Google reject an effort to upstream this support? The priorities of a small browser trying to have unique features to offer people to use it are different from a large existing browser which isn't trying to attract new users, but are more focused on more impactful changes.

It appears they accepted changes to make it easier for third-party projects based on Chromium to enable extensions, implying they are actively choosing not to enable it on Chromium or Chrome.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=107471...

I use 8 extensions on firefox nightly on Android. They work quite well.

You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to use them, to the point that only a handful of people do it, which decreases the motivation for anyone to put effort into supporting Firefox for Android in their extensions.

It really seems to me like Firefox wanted to prevent a healthy extension ecosystem on Android, but they have not been transparent about their reasoning.

What hoops do I have to jump through to get some extensions on Chrome on Android?

Whataboutism isn't a particularly useful response. Firefox used to have thousands of supported extensions and allow users to install unsupported extensions. Now it doesn't, deliberately, and I would like them to reverse that decision. The fact that a more popular browser has a worse situation is irrelevant.

You can run a fork of Chromium that supports most desktop Chrome extensions: Kiwi Browser. That's not so different from having to run an unstable build (nightly) or fork (Iceraven) of Firefox.

If I say your chevy doesn't allow you to travel the friendly skies in your car this covers both lacking wings and a lock on the throttle keeping you from achieving sufficient lift. They chose not to port that pre-existing feature from desktop chrome when they built mobile chrome and I think arguably for an ad company not supporting ad blockers is a feature.

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