Prepare your Firefox desktop extension for the upcoming Android release

nealoverbay@lemmy.world to Android@lemmy.world – 273 points –
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Firefox will become the only major Android browser to support an open extension ecosystem

Shots fired! Mozilla is serious about taking Chrome's crown, especially after Google's shameful WEI.

But Chrome on Android has never supported extension, if I remembered correctly.

Yup, the idea here is that Firefox will also support many desktop extensions in addition to the small subset it supports right now (which is already cool since it includes uBlock Origin) and Mozilla is making that a big selling point (that and being a refuge from Google's WEI).

This is great news. I switched completely to Firefox earlier this year. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was Chrome killing Manifest V2, which would break a lot of adblockers. Now that Mozilla is adding full extension support for mobile? I'm glad I switched.

I use the desktop version and it works really good but the phone version is soo slow. You have to wait for the UI elements to load each time an UI element appears so something that would take 200ms takes 2 seconds because it takes so long

Was that recent? I use Firefox exclusively and haven't had those issues.

Yes, it used to work fine but since pages sometimes bugged I updated and it fixed some bugs but added others and slow UI is one of them, can you share a video of you moving between pages UI? I dont know if it is just me but it is anoyingly slow. I love the desktop version and it works perfectly but the phone one have to work with that

awesome! I hope they'll add a search bar to the addons list when this is fully released

What are good Firefox extensions? I've only used ublock origin (which is already available)

Consent-o-matic automatically answers cookie pop-ups for you, so saves heaps of time. It also works fine on mobile if you load it into Firefox nightly with a custom collection.

does it accept all cookies or only necessary cookies?

By default it refuses everything, you can set it to accept different kinds of cookies though. I set it to accept functional cookies for example.

Sponsorblock is another great one (provided it works on mobile).

Stylus is really cool for CSS overrides

Can you give an example of when CSS override would be useful?

Changing the look of a website. Remove elements you don't like while formatting the rest in a more pleasant style.

In addition to what jayandp said, it can also be useful to correct some "bugs" if you know your way around CSS. For example something I really hate about the default Lemmy themes is that they stretch the videos to the full width of the page, so I made a CSS override to fix that:

video {
    width: 25vw !important;
}

I don't want to, but I'm thinking about switching to FF since Edge and Chrome have been having freezing issues for the past six months or so.

Native ad blocking via extension would definitely help nudge me over. Especially since I'm considering getting a OnePlus Open and a web browser would be a vital part of the Foldable experience.

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I already have a few that I developed and use all the time. It's just difficult to get them set up currently.

For example I've developed a small Add-on which makes Android Firefox open PDF directly, just like the desktop browser does.

If you mean the embedded pdf viewer: that exists in the android Version as well. I think they added it a few weeks ago.

Ah. Didn't know that. But they really limited functionality. I'll give this a try to see if that's all I need. Will continue to support my Add-on otherwise.