2y ago

Prepare your Firefox desktop extension for the upcoming Android release

blog.mozilla.org

blog.mozilla.org | 504: Gateway time-out

164 comments

Woah that’s awesome. So ublock origin on android Firefox? Freaking nice!
- uBlock on Firefox mobile has been out for a while now
  
  From the beginning. Even when Firefox had to restrict the mobile add-ons a few years ago, uBlock was one of the few that remained.
  
  uBlock, Dark Reader, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs, DecentralEyes. They have all been there the whole time
  
  Even tapermonkey!
  
  Or violentmonkey for a FOSS tampermonkey compatible alternative.
  
  Huh, I thought it was FOSS... I'll check that out.
  
  I can't get any tamper monkey scripts to actually work except for YouTube scripts.
  
  ~~Had to use the nightly build version, though~~ I suck and I've been off platform too long
  It's the thing I miss most after intentionally going to 'that other platform' for dev reasons, though Brave Browser is a decent stand-in for FF+uBlock on this side of the walled garden.
  
  uBlock has been available on stable for a long time now.
  
  Really!? Well, shit, I hate life more, then.
  
  What is new, it seems, is the general availability of a lot more extensions. Right now it's just a handful of curated ones. You can't just go to addons and expect to install anything at the moment.
  That said... RES on mobile? I'm intrigued to find out how well that works.
  
  You can find out right now. I've been using it along with old.reddit redirect for years on mobile.
  The truth is Firefox mobile has been able to run desktop add-ons this whole time. All that happened was they had to restrict availability of add-ons from the addon store to only the handful that they had verified work without issues. All the other add-ons could still work if they were maintained, but Mozilla couldn't guarantee they'd work yet, so they wouldn't let you install them directly like the other add-ons.
  But if you used Firefox Nightly, there was a built in work around that would let you use any desktop addon on mobile. Some don't work, some do. Old.reddit redirect and RES both work.
  
  Yeah, that's where nightly was when I still had it, with only a few, if important, extensions available.
  But RES and old.reddit were no-go and made me sad. At least I had RIF (RIP IN PEACE).
  Either way, glad to see it's getting wider support for all. I wish it worked that way in fruitymobileland, but at least there is a browser (Orion) that actually supports both FF and Chrome extensions that tries to make up for things.
  
  https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1be51ad3-b406-41a2-89f9-e03c17d06070.jpeg
  It's really sad after all these years people still don't know about the addon work around.
  You could have been using desktop add-ons on mobile this whole time. It wasn't a secret, either, Mozilla told you how.
  It's crazy that it's been 3 years and this isn't common knowledge among Firefox users.
  
  To be fair I never dug around for a solution for that.
  
  I'm not on nightly and have been using ublock and a few other extensions. It's nothing new afaik.
- you can use ublock origin on android firefox right now.. been using it for years.
- I use it since maybe a year now on Android and it's amazing. The toggeling of the overlay and weird zap objects/overlays function takes some getting used too but otherwise its just like on the Desktop.
  
  Yeah, the way Firefox manages addon interfaces on mobile makes it really unintuitive to use ublock's tools, but you can absolutely use them with some practice and patience. Personal filters makes so many websites usable.
  Hopefully whatever this update is will make using the element zapper/filter easier.

164 comments