<story><title>A grim outlook on the future of browser add-ons</title><url>https://palant.info/2020/08/31/a-grim-outlook-on-the-future-of-browser-add-ons/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>IainIreland</author><text>Mozilla employee here (albeit not on the mobile team):&lt;p&gt;Relax, everybody. Fenix is a major rewrite. It takes time to reimplement all the WebExtension APIs. Nevertheless, the intent is to eventually add support for all the APIs that make sense on mobile. (See here, for example: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1632626#c1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1632626#c1&lt;/a&gt;, or just scroll through the list of bugs here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;buglist.cgi?product=GeckoView&amp;amp;component=Extensions&amp;amp;resolution=---&amp;amp;list_id=15396111&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;buglist.cgi?product=GeckoView&amp;amp;c...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;If you go back and read old HN threads from the first public release of Fenix, people were afraid that the lack of extension support was a sign that Mozilla had given up on adblockers. I hope it&amp;#x27;s clear by now that&amp;#x27;s not true. (From what I recall of lunchtime conversations, back when those were a thing, the plan for extensions was &amp;quot;well, we&amp;#x27;re &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; not shipping without uBlock Origin, and we&amp;#x27;ll see what else we can get working from there&amp;quot;.) Similarly, the fact that parts of the  WebExtension API are not currently available doesn&amp;#x27;t mean Mozilla has given up on it. It just means that things take time. (If it were easy, other mobile browsers might support add-ons!)&lt;p&gt;It takes a lot of resources to support two parallel codebases. At some point you have to rip off the band-aid. The sooner Fennec is cut loose, the more effort we can dedicate to Fenix improvements (like improving WebExtension support). The transition was always going to be a bit bumpy, but things should hopefully get better from here.</text></comment>
<story><title>A grim outlook on the future of browser add-ons</title><url>https://palant.info/2020/08/31/a-grim-outlook-on-the-future-of-browser-add-ons/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>causality0</author><text>&lt;i&gt;no technical reason why none of the other add-ons are allowed any more, it being merely a policy decision. I already verified that my add-ons can still run on Firefox for Android but aren’t allowed to&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That makes me almost incoherently furious.  I understand if you rebuild the foundation of a browser for better performance and that breaks all the extensions until the developers can rewrite them for the new model. I get it if one of my favorite extensions is no longer under active development and will never have a version released for the new model.  But how fucking dare you gatekeep what I install on my own browser?  Freedom from this walled-garden bullshit is the &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; reason I run Firefox instead of Chrome.  Google&amp;#x27;s twice as good at UI as you. They&amp;#x27;re faster, look better, and miraculously I never have to swipe five times trying to dismiss a Chrome tab.&lt;p&gt;I get that Mozilla is drowning, flailing around trying to create a future where they aren&amp;#x27;t irrelevant.  This is just ugly, though.</text></comment>