Firefox for Android is getting 400 new browser extensions - and you can try some now

AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world to Android@lemmy.world – 523 points – Firefox for Android is getting 400 new browser extensions - and you can try some now
zdnet.com

Also from the official announcement (https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/28/open-extensions-on-firefox-for-android-debut-december-14-but-you-can-get-a-sneak-peek-today/ ):

Starting December 14, 2023, extensions marked as Android compatible on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) will be openly available to Firefox for Android users.

“We’ve been so impressed with developer enthusiasm and preparation,” said Giorgio Natili, Firefox Director of Engineering. “Just a few weeks ago it looked like we might have a couple hundred Android extensions for launch, but now we can safely say AMO will have 400+ new Firefox for Android extensions available on December 14. We couldn’t be more thankful to our developer community for embracing this exciting moment.”

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shows image of iphone

I don't get how the EU is not in arms about this. How is Apple able to get away with offering various browsers in the Store, when in the End they all are the Safari-Backend and therefore do not allow for competition in this ecosystem? How can a competitor stand out with a remarkable/better product, when he is not allowed to use his own engine? Or in this case: Prohibiting user from using Extensions like uBlock? Firefox is only a shell of their original performance when castrated by apples webview engine.

The EU is up in arms and the browser question is going to be handled through the DMA. The legal process has been going on since the summer and it's hilarious.

Apple argues 'Look, those Safaris on iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, TvOS, WatchOS are TOTALLY DIFFERENT PRODUCTS and none of them have enough users in the EU for you to even think about regulating us, alright? We’re a tiny startup! Will nobody think of the children?!?' (I paraphrase somewhat)."

lol

And their ads literally say "Same Safari Different Device".

Ive been waiting for this day ever since Apple announced that you wouldn't be able to install any software you want on your own piece of hardware. I'm glad that someone has finally started cracking down on this. Just wish it had happened 15 years earlier.

Let me guess. You still bought the iPhone, right?

It helps that Apple doesn't have such a huge marketshare here.

uBlock is already available on Firefox mobile as well as Tampermonkey, I'm not hating but what other extensions should I be excited to try? At the moment that's all I need to use.

What are you going to install?

Consentomatic is the only other one I can think of, cookie popups are so much worse on mobile

I think there's a filter for cookie popups in uBlock. I'm still using the I still don't care about cookies extension tho.

The "annoyances" filters in ublock stop the cookie popups

I don't want to just block them though, I want to deny cookie use automatically and hide the popup

You haven't consented to cookies until you click agree, so there shouldn't be any difference if the website is GDPR compliant.

That's a pretty big if. I've seen sites with banners at the top that say something along the lines of, "by dismissing this banner or continuing to use the site you're consenting to cookies"

That's a good point, but in that case I wouldn't think Consent-O-Matic would be able to do much about it.

I would like to install the bring back youtube dislike extension. Otherwise I'm happy with what I have already

Midnight Lizard, it's better than Dark Reader. Skip Redirect is also pretty handy to fast-forward those pesky url shorter page redirections.

What about it is better?

The main benefit is that it's lightweight and doesn't have some of the performance issues that Dark Reader has. Also, if has a bunch of different themes (so you can have more color schemes, similar to any modern text editor), finally you can also create your own theme for a particular site, if the built-in themes don't look good.

I installed it and gave it a whirl. I'm not sure if I'm just doing something wrong, but every time I disable it for a specific website (like with discord or lemmy, since those already have dark themes), I get a popup that says, "Settings application failed. Refresh the page and try again. Midnight Lizard has been updated. Please refresh the page." It also seems to make the extension popup switch to light theme, which is pretty atrocious lol.

Is there a more updated fork that you use? The last update for Midnight Lizard was ~3 years ago.

The current one works fine for me, haven't really had any issues. There is an updated fork on Github, but they haven't made a release yet (and they haven't changed/fixed anything major yet).

Could you tell me what you do with tampermonkey/greasemonkey?

I use it to run automation on a website where there's lots of pointing and clicking. It's pretty cool you can do quite a lot with it.

It's about time. With Google being more and more hostile to AdBlocker on mobile, having Firefox taking an open approach to extension is welcomed.

Been using Firefox Android for quite some time already. It's been my perfect browser pretty much. I'm glad more extensions are coming, so others can enjoy it as well, but I'm happy with just Dark Reader + uBlock Origin lol.

I've been using extensions on the Nightly build and love it.

Good step forward, but this will again flood people with duplicate extensions, useless adblockers, or even harmful ones. And there are quite a lot, even on AMO

I mean...... it's not like the app stores are any better.

but this will again flood people with duplicate extensions, useless adblockers, or even harmful ones. And there are quite a lot, even on AMO

But doesn't the best "float to the top" and are what is mostly installed though?

Most is not all. Would be great if Mozilla limited Addons like Ghostery

Hope there's one that can let me control the browser media player by double tap, it's quite annoying feature that's lacking

That t-shirt would be cool, but don't have time to properly test our extension before then

I'm looking forward to December when I'll have time to work on it. I'll try to attend some office hours, I didn't know that was an option

After the latest update of Iceraven browser (a fork of Firefox Mobile), it now allows to load add-ons offline as well as some browser addons directly from Firefox addons site.

Might help me move to Firefox eventually now that there's more than just the few from before. Not many things keeping me back compared to before.

Did they ever fix the connection through proxy servers issue. Ff was literally unusable at my work, and such. I had to uninstall it

Weeelll if they load the same as currently I wonder if that doesnt crash the browser

You have been able to use a custom repo for extensions for over a year.

Whilst true, this has only been available with Firefox nightly. I've found some extensions break the collection where none of the extensions load until you remove the one that breaks it.

Rats, still no TamperMonkey lol. Prob asking for a lot to expect that to ever happen, though.

TamperMonkey is one of the "recommended" add-ons when I look at the list on my Android version of FF and I am not on a beta or dev build.

This is nuts but desktop firefox is already like that. Imagine /usr/bin/sudo getting 400 new extensions. Browsers are a security nightmare even without extensions. That said, we can't live without ad blockers any more.

What kind of comparison is that? sudo is setuid while Firefox and its extensions run as the user you started it as.

Also sudo has just one very specific and limited use case, while Firefox is more of a platform for web content. I could argue that sudo itself is an 'extension' to a Linux system, like every application.

You also don't have to install all of those extension, you can choose which you trust, similar to a Linux system, you don't have to install every application in the repository.

If you say that the Firefox add-on repo should be more managed like a repository of a Linux distribution, where developers cannot simply upload their own software, but need to find a trusted maintainer first, I could agree to that. But that would mean more work and overhead.

For most people, firefox touches a lot more private information than sudo does. For example, once the malware extension gets your email password, it can reset your passwords to everything else, and take over all your accounts on everything everywhere, rather than just one machine like sudo.