Includes an incentive for ensuring extension compatibility with Android in the form of a free t-shirt.
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It's about time. This has been a much needed feature since Firefox Android was first released. It basically is the only mobile browser that allows extensions.
What's really annoying is that a lot of existing extensions already work. Mozilla just makes it unreasonably difficult to install them.
Change your user agent (using Firefox Nightly and the user agent switcher extension, which is supported) and you can install extensions exactly as on desktop.
Installing directly from an .xpi is still seemingly impossible though, annoyingly.
That's only telling half the story because often features silently failed for many extensions because of the great idea to switch from proper Firefox to the GeckoView based one which actually did not implement many APIs used by extensions.
I mean, sure. That's not at all unexpected. But not even allowing the user to try at all, or making it unreasonably difficult to try, is very frustrating.
Place the option behind developer mode, with a disclaimer that features may fail and Mozilla makes no promises or guarantees.
But just flat-out denying the option, or making the user jump through ridiculous custom collection hoops is nonsense. In my case the custom collection method still failed, but the extension I was looking for does in fact work just fine, after installing it with the modified user agent string.
There is a fork called Smart Cookie Web Preview that lets you sideload extensions with no rigmarole, no Custom Collection nonsense, I have yet to find an extension that does not work. Even things like Behave and Jshelter work fine. I have no idea why Mozilla has been dragging this out for so long, lack of extension support on Android is a very common complaint.
Actually, Firefox on Android did originally support desktop extensions when it was first released. But then they did a major rebuild of the app back in 2020 and lost its addons as a result.
https://www.androidpolice.com/firefox-bringing-back-full-extension-support-android/
BTW, Kiwi browser (Chromium based) has had full extension support since 2018.
Yeah. I was horrified when they basically broke extensions on mobile. And had no urgency to fix it. I personally would have said it's not ready to replace the previous revision until it supports extensions..
A 3-year gap in software is awful, it's only forgivable because nobody else supports extensions. Except apparently kiwi browser
Kiwi browser is also open souce and supoorts extensions. But yeah, it's very rare
Kiwi browser hasn't been updated in a long time, I wouldn't recommend it to people anymore, security updates and all that.
That's not the case anymore. Play Store build is updated periodically and the GitHub has auto rebased releases: https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next