One more reason to stick with Firefox
That’s nice, maybe they can finally re-enable about:config in the damn thing too. They removed it from mobile Firefox years ago and the lack of it aggravates the hell out of me.
It’s available in nightly (and I think dev) builds
If you don’t want to use the potentially unstable Nightly, Dev or Beta, you can use Fennec (stable builds with dev features).
probably in normal Firefox too, it’s just hidden in all of them
Fennec still supports it, just as it supports add-ons from the official Mozilla store. Don’t see any reason why I should go back to the official app.
How do I make use of this? I can’t see a way to install them on my Fennec from F Droid
You have to add a custom addons collection. That’s how.
I haven’t gotten around making them and using them, and it seems every guide online is vastly out of date
Is there an easy way to migrate from the official app to Fennec? Keeping accounts, extensions and settings?
If you have enabled the sync feature in Firefox, it seamlessly works with Fennec; as does the integration between Fennec and Firefox Desktop. Simply log on with your Firefox account in Fennec, and you won’t even feel the difference.
Mobile FF is already awesome with UBlock Origin and YT background playback extensions. I wish to install an auto redirect extension. (Twitter to Nitter) I know it is doable on beta w/ extensions etc. but I want to see them on normal Firefox.
Have a look at YouTube ReVanced if you want a much better YouTube experience on Android. :)
use Newpipe, it’s free software, unlike revanced.
I used to have an app to do the redirection on several sites automically but afair the Nitter thing was just so unstable that I removed the app.
It might have been some time ago, because even the main instance has been consistently working for me as of recent
Yeah this winter and spring
Same, like 30% of the time it worked, the other 70% it would be very slow or not load at all
Cool! So many useful extensions that I couldn’t use on android.
Doesn’t it already support them ?
~~edit: yes it already supports them, but it seems that now there will be more focus on mobile ~~ edit3: as pointed by the comment below, only on nightly and certain forks
edit2: also they forgot about kiwi, but then it’s not a major browser (and is it still maintained ?). still would’ve been cool if they corrected this
Yeah, kiwi is still supported and got an UI update a month ago. But it’s chromium based if remember correctly.
oh I didn’t know, pretty cool
at least both chromium and Firefox get a version with add ons
This article was weird for me also I have all my extension already installed like bitwarden for passwords and all kind of adblockers and scriptblockers
Nightly versions and Fennec.
Mull too
Everyone forgets Kiwi Browser :(
Have been using it for years.
Kiwi is a mobile only browser if I’m not mistaken. This article is about DESKTOP extensions working on mobile. Firefox already supported a limited set of (mobile) extensions for a while.
Edit. Sorry. I stand corrected. Might try kiwi even.
Well yes, Kiwi supports Chromium extensions, it’s the same concept
I would kill for this on iOS. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty happy with my Safari Extensions, but I’d rather have uBlock Origin, Stylish etc.
They already support uBlock origin and that’s all I need.
On android I find its also a good idea to have a system wide ad blocker solution because android and all their apps are so inundated by ads, so I recommend dns66 (which can be found on fdroid) which has multiple blocklists you can subscribe to. This will cover some ads thats are built directly into apps and almost all ads that would appear in websites on a browser. This helps a lot since some apps will open a browser window for -reasons- and they sometimes have their own internal browser or they will just use chrome by default, not respecting your default browser choice, and in those cases you cant have ublock installed to protect you and those pages are so ad-overloaded that finding what you are looking for is next to impossible.
I’ve got a Pihole set up running on my NAS but unfortunately it’s really difficult to find ad tracking lists that both 1) block ads effectively and 2) don’t break a large portion of webpages
Yeah I wish I could edit my hosts file for example so it blocks all advertisement websites.
Try Blokada
I’m using dns.adguard.com as private dns provider in Android s network settings. Am i doing it wrong? I never see ads in any apps or browsers though… they are blocked everywhere
Seems like many people aren’t aware that’s an option
On iOS or just Android?
Oh on Android for me.
Whoa 🤯. Never realized this somehow. That’s awesome. No ads on mobile.
Dark Reader too
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I’ve been using the nightly build, using the desktop extensions for a while now. It’s SO worth it. In particular, the YouTube “SponsorBlock” is super convenient.
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I’m trying to make the switch over to FF, but Vivaldi just has so many features I find useful.
Any reason to switch from Fennec?
Wont Feddec support mobile extensions in the future?
About time. I’m tempted to switch back to Mull from Bromite, but I’m worried about the security of Firefox compared to Chromium (that’s why I switched in the first place), I’ve heard that particularly Mobile Firefox has awful sandboxing and bad security, I’m pretty sure it was the GrapheneOS team saying this? I’m no security expert though…
Yes it was the GrapheneOS team who said that. See the paragraph just above Camera. I literally just skimmed their guides and saw this yesterday while considering getting a Pixel.
I use Mull and Vanadium on Graphene OS, and the experience on Vanadium is just okay by comparison. It is true that not having extensions does decrease the attack surface, and Vanadium does have a built in ad blocker, but it simply isn’t as all encompassing as ublock’s list.
I use Mull mainly but don’t log into anything with it, and have noscript extension on by default.
I also turn off JS by default in Vanadium. Both browsers have ways of making exceptions for certain sites in this case, but NoScript has more granular control.
I remember reading on reddit a convo that basically the GrapheneOS team was much more concerned with security than privacy. This isn’t to say they don’t care about privacy at all, just that they will always prioritize security first.
This makes sense considering their decision to only officially support the Pixel line of devices. You still are supporting Google by giving them your money (and a bit of your data in the process of purchase). Additionally, the decision to default to using the Google Play Store and sandbox the apps, rather than use the Aurora Store, also points to these underlying values.
Posted this above, but it might interest you as an alternative to Vanadium:
Bromite hasn’t been updated in a while, so you should at least switch to Cromite if you’re not switching to Mull. It’s a fork by a previous Bromite contributor and includes some improvements, like a bottom toolbar and adblock plus (so normal block lists, not Bromite’s less customizable ad blocker.
Is Vanadium just Bromite under the hood? I thought they were separate projects…
They’re different, but according to its readme, Cromite includes “security enhancement patches from GrapheneOS project”, so I assume it contains Vanadium’s changes as well as other improvements.
Thanks for the clarification! I’ll investigate.
The more extensions you install in your browser, the more easier is to track your behavior on internet.
No, no, no! It was supporting all the desktop extensions. For years. Until the damn buggy rewrite for no good reason. And then we were suddenly left with like 5 of them.
For a year after that I was still running the last stable release. But unfortunately the web evolves too fast.
At least with firefox beta, you can create your own collection of extensions and use those. That’s what I do and I can install any extension.
More here: https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
I have it on Firefox Nightly with the dev stuff. It’s pretty great tbh
