this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Can someone TLDR please ?
Are you a developer? If not then the only thing you need to know is that Mozilla is essentially announcing enabling desktop extensions to be able to work on mobile
Oh cookies auto delete here I come
Sick! I just switched to Firefox nightly so I can use ublacklist on mobile.
I've used Firefox Nightly for ages, and admittedly, it sometimes lets a crashing bug through. But it was worth it for stuff like old.reddit redirect on tablet, lol. I just don't want the stupid "USE OUR APP" banners while searching.
That's awesome. I wish I knew about that years ago.
What's that?
It's an extension that allows you to blacklist certain websites from appearing in search results. So if you wanna prevent for instance facebook links from showing up in search results, uBlacklist can make that possible.
Oh good, now I can do an image search without completely useless Pinterest results
And it's available on Firefox mobile (soon) and it's freaking amazing on mobile.
Ah thanks.
So how have we gotten mobile extensions over the last year? Were those pre-selected by Mozilla, perhaps?
Oh, finally!
They were only disabled... five? years ago?
Firefox Mobile supported add-ons for many years, but due to having to change some things under the hood a few years ago, add-ons got restricted a bit (though you could still use them).
They're basically announcing they finally fixed the issue and they're coming back.
More than just a bit, they only approved a few at all as far as I could tell fron the years of using the browser but yea.
They don't spell this out, but my interpretation is that extension devs will be able to publish extensions for use on Android, without Mozilla explicitly approving each one of them.
Many desktop extensions work as-is on Android, so when this goes live, we'll likely see dozens, if not hundreds, of extensions becoming available in the following weeks.