Mozilla hints at unlocking more add-ons for Firefox for Android
Mozilla announced the general availability of five additional extensions for Firefox for Android last week. The five extensions, Firefox Relay, Tampermonkey, Read Aloud, Adnauseum and ClearURLs, may now be installed in Firefox Nightly for Android. While not mentioned explicitly, it seems as if these will become available in Beta and Stable versions of the browser for Android eventually.
This is not the first time that Mozilla extended support for more extensions. Back in 2020, Mozilla added five more extensions to the list of supported extensions in Firefox for Android.
Mozilla restricted access to browser extensions in the new Firefox for Android mobile browser that the organization launched in 2020. Even today, less than 20 extensions are available officially for the mobile browser. Beta and Nightly versions of Firefox support custom extensions lists, which users may use to make other extensions available.
Mozilla has not added that option yet to Firefox for Android Stable. You may check out our guides for Firefox Beta for Android and Firefox Nightly for Android that explain how to add custom add-on collections.
For a long time, it looked as if extensions would remain limited in Firefox Stable for Android. Mozilla's recent announcement about the addition of the five extensions hints that this may change in the not-so-distant future.
"Indeed our goal is to design MV3 for mobile in such a manner we’re able to open up the discoverability of mobile extensions beyond the short list available today."
It is a vague statement but it confirms that Mozilla has plans to bring more mobile extensions to Firefox for Android. Whether that includes unlocking most of the extensions available or just a careful selection of compatible extensions remains to be seen.
Work on Manifest V3 adoption in Firefox for Android begins in 2023, and this is a prerequisite for improving extensions support.
Firefox for Android has been downloaded more than 100 million times on Google Play. The browser has a rating of 4.6 currently, which beats Google Chrome (4.1) but not Microsoft Edge (4.7).
Now You: which mobile browser do you use, and why? Which extensions would you like to see added?
Only 20 extensions compared to a former total of what, hundreds, thousands ? Extensions support should be considered as removed on mobile in practice since 2020, with the exception of important ones like ublock origin that they did not dare to remove at that time. And two years later, we’re still at the same point. Attacking extensions to cripple user control against corporate aggressions is a consistent policy across operating systems and browser companies. And for the same reason that spyware behavior is on average more violent on mobile, because user resistance is weaker there on average, Mozilla is exploiting that weakness like any other corporate player.
Why don’t they do more than “HINT” and just do because they are pretty good at removing stuff. Why limit myself to just referencing their android browser when their desktop browser addon system is still a far cry from what it was and can be.
I have lost count as to how many times I have read comments from extension/addon developers lamenting that certain API’s are not supported or Mozilla refuses to come to the table.
It’s pretty clear the Mozilla is drunk at the wheel and also lost and in need of directions.
I use Fennec (via F-Droid) which allows you to install add-ons from any known collection on AMO (where you can also create your own collection). No need to wait for Mozilla to do us any favours.
@ShintoPlasm
Firefox up to and including FF 68 on Android used to support any and all extensions that desktop Firefox could run. Then they castrated it, and now their users are happy that they unlocked 5 extensions or something.
The Kiwi Browser has support for all Chrome extensions, you can also get around the Firefox limitations by using modified builds like Fennec F-Droid, as you mentioned.
Not every extension is designed to run on the mobile browser, there are cases where only
they work on the desktop browser.
That’s so… CUTE!
It’s possible to install any add-on with firefox nightly. You do have to make your own add-on collection and you need to unlock the developer option. I’ve done this to use the bypass paywall clean add-on with firefox nightly for android.