this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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why it was restricted in the first place?
Because there were enough incompatibilities to make it a hassle. But when they were sorting out the Web Manifest v3, they designed it with desktop and mobile in mind, so new extensions won't have problems.
It makes less sense since extensions actually ran on Android, e.g. via Nightly and creating your own list of exceptions. Also if you downgrade and install in an old Fennec version, extension will continue to function if you then update to the latest.
I think the move was an attempt to create a walled garden and paid store. But for whatever reason, they have now decided against it. Thank goodness.
Maybe they couldn't guarantee that the mobile version could run well with all of them? That's what I've always assumed.
The mobile version did actually run all addons up to Firefox 68. Quite well, actually! There were some issues with addons that assumed a certain part of the UI existed that wasn't present on mobile, but those have become irrelevant since Firefox dropped the old XUL addons.
Then they rewrote the entire browser, with only a few functioning addons on a whitelist, and did basically nothing for addon support for four years. I think they added two or three addons to the standard whitelist over the years, but that's it. The rewrite also introduced some silly bugs (still can't paste an IPv6 URL into the address bar to visit it, no https://[2000:1234:4566::]/ for you unless you click on a link to it) but development seems to have mostly been focused on themes and design from what I can tell.
I know there was the whole XUL-to-webextension thing going on around that time, but I never found out why the rewrite restricted users so much. The rewrite also included the change to make about:config available only on unstable (beta/nightly) versions. You can install other addons on Firefox (you create a collection on addons.mozilla.org, open the secret settings in the beta, and point the browser at your own whitelist) and most of them work quite well, actually.
Because the addons themselves mostly worked, I always assumed they stopped caring about addons. People would riot if they removed uBlock Origin so there are a few addons in there, but I thought they killed the concept on mobile.
Which I think is kinda weird decision since they could've just hidden a setting that unlocks all addons in the options. But maybe they were so incompatible at the time that it wasn't worth the headache.
If you use Beta or Nightly, you can turn on dev tools and use a custom addon list from a collection in your user account. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/
There is a hidden way to activate more extensions and most - if not the vast majority - extensions work fine.
There is a hidden setting for essentially that. It might be exclusive to Nightly though, idk since all I need is UBO