Firefox for Android now supports over 450 add-ons

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 905 points –
Firefox for Android now supports over 450 add-ons - gHacks Tech News
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So, aside from the ad block everyone loves and I don't have the characters to type, what do we recommend?

Consent-O-Matic (has to be downloaded from the main website, and not the android sub category)

And what you wish to have other than that depends on your needs.

I myself have an extension to unlock Bing AI on Firefox android.

Google Search Fixer (for when I need a Google service)

TWP - Translate Web Pages

And more.

Web archives Bypass Paywalls Clean ClearURL View Page Source (I'm seriously surprised it's not a basic feature.)

A bit niche, but I love Shinigami Eye. It highlights trans-friendly sites and profiles in green and transphobic ones in red.

Dark reader

Dark reader was already available before this.

Dark reader is amazing but I have seen a noticeable impact on page load times from time to time.

Not only load time, some sites have really bad performance with it, i just stop using the handful i've come across.

Not having dark mode implemented and having trash code is a good reason to stop being used.

Simple Gesture. Now i don't have to go through a ton of menus or aim tiny UI elements for a simple action. I use similar addon on desktop as well.

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Now do iOS. (Yes I know Apple has to release their stranglehold on the browser first.)

Yeah that's never gonna happen, unless the EU forces them by law.

One of the many reasons I'm so so happy to be back with an Android phone after having to use an iPhone for work for a few years

The Eu has forced them: Digital Markets Act --> alternative app stores.

iirc apple doesn't allow apps that are able to download and run extra code. I know this was the reason the game mindustry didn't have mod support on iOS. I could be wrong tho

a long-overdue and very welcome addition to mobile.

Writing from a privacy perspective remember, browser add-ons can potentially make it easier to fingerprint or recognize an individual. But still, I can't help but love this new FF feature.

Also you can put the url bar on the bottom 😍

That's possible for quite some years, good that you've found it though.

Isn't that the default location when you first install? I remember always having to move it back to the top where it belongs.

I guess time to switch to Android!

Bah, no sign of "Save webP as PNG or JPEG" yet.

what's wrong with webp? it's a significantly more efficient file format (like 20% less file size for the same quality) and is supported everywhere by now. if anything, the default should be webp for image types that can be both lossy and losslessly compressed

Lots of platforms, even image editing don't support webp

I haven't come across a single image or video editor that doesn't support webp nowadays. I use paint.net, krita, aseprite, inkscape, ibis paint x, opentoonz, and davinci resolve, plus libreoffice if you count that, they all support importing/exporting and editing webp just as any other image file format. I'm pretty sure GIMP and Photoshop do too but I don't use them so I can't say for sure

I feel like a majority of people have to go out of their way to make webp an inconvenience in the modern day.

Besides, if it for some reason doesn't work in a specific situation you need it you can just manually change the extension to ".jpeg" or ".png" and Windows/Linux/Android file managers will automatically convert it. But I can guess most people don't actually face a situation like that.

you can just manually change the extension to “.jpeg” or “.png” and Windows/Linux/Android file managers will automatically convert it

Thank you for the suggestion, but that's not how it works. Changing a file's extension doesn't change the file type; it just changes the name.

When I take an image file and change its extension from webp to png it converts the binary data, so I imagine your OS' default file manager would do that too. Maybe not tho.

What OS & version are you using that automatically converts file types when you change the filename via the default file manager interface? I have never heard of this function before.

Some file managers on linux can do this, but it's definitely not a default on most.

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Surprisingly not everywhere yet, some messaging apps don't support webp yet

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Didn't they already support all addons a few years ago, and then limited it to the hand-picked ones?

Yes. It was restricted since they moved to web extensions. They removed the restrictions on this release.

over 450 add-ons

But no Cookie AutoDelete among them. Firefox Nightly is still better

It is, but only if you go on the main website, and not the android sub category https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/

And yet still no tablet support 😭

what? i run it on my tab a7.

Yes as a bloated phone UI. It doesn't support tabs which almost every other browser does.

Of course it can run in a tablet but it's not a great use experience

it never occurred to me that I might want a different UI on my tablet. I also never used Chrome or any other browser on my tablet.

My tablet is my laptop replacement so I tend to use it on the same way with a mouse and keyboard and want AC close to laptop functionality as possible, pretty much all other browsers have that functionality, except firefox.

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this is my first android tablet. my first "internet tablet" was the n810, and i did'nt get an android until around 2018, unless you count the blackberry q20

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Now, when will Firefox be on the F-Droid Store? (By Mozilla, no one else)

What's your problem with the Fennec?

Nothing. If Mozilla claims to love OSS, then why haven't they released it on the F-Droid Store?

Because to put a build in F-Droid you need to write a build script to build the whole app from source on F-Droid's VMs. You can't, for example, fetch binary dependencies from Maven. You need to build them from source as part of your build process.

Android Firefox fetches a bunch of stuff from Maven as part of its build, some of which is proprietary libraries from Google to e.g. talk to Google Play Services or to Google's trusted-hardware stuff, and some of which is the whole Gecko C++ source tree. Mozilla doesn't want to pay their people to maintain two separate build systems for Firefox, one of which has to jump through a bunch of hoops.

Then it just shows that they don't "love OSS" as much as they say they do.

When will they fix their mobile version though? As much as I want to use Firefox as much as possible, some websites just refuse to open in mobile Firefox, or not work properly. I have even made a simple website with fixed element on the bottom of the page, and it jumps like crazy when scrolling for whatever reason.

I believe it's because firefox's UI is placed on the bottom of the screen per default. To account for that, I believe they adjust the viewport's height to either exclude the bottom of the screen (when the symbol bar is displayed) or include it (when you scroll down and the symbol bar is hidden).

Because they use a slide-out animation based on scrolling within the web page, the viewport changes a million times in height and causes elements fixed to the bottom of the viewport to jump and adjust a lot, causing weird behavior. And nobody tests for that.

All of thse are my assumptions by the way, please test for yourself, I might well be wrong.

If it really bothers you, try placing the symbol bar above and see if it works. It's in the settings.

My UI was actually on the top, and by changing settings it looks like it's actually other way around. When UI is on the bottom the fixed element on page moves semi-smoothly (there is still a gap during animation), but when UI is on the top it is fucked up completely. When scrolling down the fixed element also scrolls down for a bit before appearing where it should be, and when scrolling up the reverse happens. So it looks like they didn't account for that users actually use UI on the top and that it can affect fixed elements on the bottom of the page or it's just bugged because they don't test their stuff. I guess I need to send a bug report.

Edit: This bug seems to be at least 3 years old: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/16264

Edit 2: There's actually a (I think) relevant issue on bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1797964

Ah, interesting. Well, if you create a bug report, post the link here and I'll vote it up for visibility :)