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Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

I cannot speak for Mozilla, but just from my gut feeling: That probably got grandfathered in and since people are used to it for a "long time" no one would change it. But if Firefox was rereleased today I wouldn't bet on it being there. Expectations have changed.

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> Expectations have changed.

Yes, people have come to accept shitty software. You'd think that software developed for the public good would try to be better though and at least retain the old standards for power user tools.

What? You are saying that the `about:config` feature only exists in Firefox for historical and backward compatible reasons? And Firefox rather actually doesn't want to provide people the ability to easily override advanced configs? I think this feature is one of the things that sets Firefox apart from other browsers, that you have more control if you want it. And I am saddened it's also never been implementes in Firefox Android.

> `about:config` feature only exists in Firefox for historical and backward compatible reasons? And Firefox rather actually doesn't want to provide people the ability to easily override advanced configs?

I don't think it's unfair to say that that's basically correct.

Pre-rewrite FF for Android supported about:config. Actually, Fennec F-Droid and the Beta version of Firefox support it just fine, too. It exists in stable FF but is cordoned off for some reason.

> It exists in stable FF but is cordoned off for some reason.

See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657971

I say that I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't implement it in non-dev, non-nightly versions if they made Firefox again today. But I know nothing about what the thoughts of Mozilla or the people working on Firefox are. It's just an idle speculation.

Firefox for Android was around for 8 or 9 years with full support for extensions and access to about:config. I think that's a long time in this context.

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