It also works on the Fennec branch for people who want a fully stable build that has full addon support, but yeah this is going to open it up to a lot more people, so hopefully more people will use Firefox
That’s just regular Firefox with the addon restrictions and trademarks removed,. That doesn’t just magically spawn API support. I thought you meant the 68.x branch which actually had broad extension support and received one additional update over Firefox 68 because the ESR branch was further updated for a bit: apkmirror.com/…/fennec-f-droid-68-12-0-release/
I was a bit hung up on the term ‘branch’ because in my understanding Fennec F-Droid falls more under patch set. Mozilla used Fennec as code name for Firefox Mobile before the GeckoView migration and I had hoped the old Fennec branch would live on in some shape or form.
Yeah I’m aware of that name’s origins. People use “branch” to describe Waterfox and Mull as well. If you ask about “Fennec branch” in current year, it’s what I’ve linked. Nearly anyone who talks about it is referring to that. Just a heads up.
Its current poor extension support is the reason I’ve been using Kiwi Browser, which is a basic Chromium build with full extension support, including loading from local storage.
Same here. I use custom collections on Fennec F-Droid but the inability to properly sideload keeps me on the auto rebased builds of Kiwi Browser. That and support for the black OLED theme and night mode website retheming built in.
Very glad to see this come to Firefox though! Hopefully they can also get those other bits added in.
At least when using Kiwi in desktop mode (via Samsung DeX), Kiwi doesn’t fill out passwords for me. There also is no interest in supporting Firefox Sync.
It was until FF68, when Mozilla decided that it would improve their market share if they rewrote the whole browser and kicked all their advantages down the drain.
Not really. They announced how to add any extension ages ago, but I’m glad they’ve taken time to get things working properly so it doesn’t feel like a beta anymore.
Yes, if you run beta/nightly, create an account on their system, and add the extension to a collection there. That’s a lot of hoops to jump through, and it reduces the possible audience for an extension developer to a tiny fraction, so nobody has put any effort into building extensions for Firefox on Android.
They had issues with battery optimization and parity for a while now, but with both those issues being fixed (see: latest nightly) they can finally begin the preparations to rolling out support for ALL extensions :D
Just add a custom addon collection. The most useful one for me so far has been Mozilla’s translation extension, which they’ve adapted to mobile very well. Oh and libredirect, works perfectly even tho it has the desktop UI
Yep, after I found this out I ditched Chrome immediately once they started rolling out Google Search ads that couldn’t be blocked via DNS. Firefox mobile feels a little less smooth than Chrome admittedly, but the ability to add extensions like ublock/darkreader/consent-o-matic make is a no contest in terms of overall user experience.
The one knock is that they took bypass paywalls out of their extension store and the workaround to install it is somewhat cumbersome, so now I’m annoyingly using Kiwi browser for paywalled content and Firefox for everything else. Hopefully this update will make it so I only need one browser again.
So you can! That’s awesome, thanks. For anyone who wants to know:
You can create a custom addon collection on addons.mozilla.org
Then to add your custom collection in mull (or ff nightly, I guess) enable debug mode by going to settings > about mull and tapping the logo 5 times. Then go back and under the advanced section you can find “custom add-on collection”
Didn’t Apple announce that they were going to remove restrictions on 3rd party browsers on iPhones and iPads? You might be seeing a Gecko based Firefox soon.
I doubt they’d limit it by country, but the question of how soon is very valid. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t use Apple products. Their stranglehold over the ecosystem is highly annoying.
I’d be happy with Firefox for Android if it didn’t hang on loading 3/4 of pages. Its been an ongoing bug for years that my partner has also mentioned to be an issue.
They didn’t disable it, they rebuilt the entire browser from scratch to re-base on their current desktop-grade rendering engine, and as a result had to port a lot of things and optimize in regards to android’s battery optimization.
They’ve finally finished doing that and can now begin the preperation for releasing this to the public.