• Firefox for Android is reintroducing an open ecosystem of extensions, set to be available on December 14, with a dedicated extension page for easy discovery. • Mozilla has released a preview of the upcoming extensions, including popular ones like Bitwarden’s password manager and AdGuard’s ad blocker. • Firefox aims to gain an advantage over rivals like Google Chrome by supporting a wide range of third-party extensions on Android, while Firefox extensions availability on iOS remains uncertain.
This is a bit of a weird justification given that they haven’t made any significant changes to extensions on desktop. Why should mobile be different?
They refactored the app in 2020 and they decided that they didn’t want to build robust support for the extension architecture that they were going to migrate away from. And the new architecture was going to be more open and more secure.
It wasn’t that they were intentionally disabling a feature because of a security vulnerability. It was that they didn’t want to rebuild the old busted thing when a better solution was on the roadmap.
Although, the planning around this was shit. A three year gap wasn’t great.
I’m not sure that passes a sanity check. Third-party builds and nightly (after jumping through some arbitrary hoops) have been able to install extensions from AMO that aren’t officially supported on mobile since fairly shortly after the refactor. While it was possible for extensions to have performance, battery consumption, and compatibility problems specific to Android, that was also true prior to the refactor.
Maybe there’s something I’m missing - I’d welcome a link to something rich in technical details.