policy-templates VS Fenix

There is no such thing as a "known trusted extension" ever since they killed sideloading extensions and forced auto-updates. 10 years ago not force updating extensions was also a thing they moved behind a flag, and then just dropped.

Also - if you want to blacklist certain extensions from certain sites, you abso-freaking-lutely can already... see: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...

you want the `restricted_domains` field.

It gets worse - Mozilla is the fucking worst at checking submitted extensions. They tried to the play into the whole "app store" thing that Google/Apple were doing, but those are justifiable cost centers at those two companies in a way that just doesn't work for a player like Mozilla.

Mozilla's store checks for extensions are fairly pathetic. You can submit a near empty shell with excessive permissions, get approved the first time, then auto-update to a new release (which will deploy to users immediately thanks to auto-updates). That new version has to pass a battery of useless automatic SAST checks, which will happily highlight all sorts of things it doesn't like (it flags words like "hello" because it contains a curse word) but which won't do shit to check if you're hoovering up credentials, browsing data, tracking users, etc.

If you're unlucky, at some point in the next 24 months you'll trigger a real review from Mozilla and get caught.

To be blunt - I have 15 years experience writing extensions. I don't like Google. If you think Mozilla is better you're wrong.

You can do that with policy templates. Use the Discussion tab at the top of the GitHub page if you need help setting them up.

Policy Templates for Firefox

They very well could do this for a a company that requires really strict privacy and security, but unfortunately in its current state Firefox doesn't have nearly the corporate sysadmin-friendly tooling that Chrome and especially Edge do.

When I was tasked with implementing CIS browser hardening policies at a previous job a few years ago, this was just a matter of enabling some Group Policy template settings for Chrome and Edge, but for Firefox this involved distributing a prefs.js file to all the workstations. In any corporate environment it's very likely going to be point and click Windows admins that are implementing browser standards, who tend to be allergic to anything resembling code and are already used to using GPOs for just about everything.

Yes, Firefox does have GPO templates but it's not nearly as rich as Chrome and Edge. Edge has even more GPO templates than does Chrome iirc, Chrome already had a lot to begin with and then Microsoft added even more of their own on top of that.

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/v4.11/READM...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/configure-micro...

That alone already puts Firefox at a huge disadvantage for corporate deployment, the other thing that makes it even less attractive, even to companies where privacy/security is a huge requirement (like my previous job) is that Edge is already bundled with the OS, and is one less thing that needs to be manually patched. In high security corporate environments, just keeping things patched is always a huge task so it's very hard to convince someone that they need to put in more work to keep an extra piece of software patched (which is already very difficult considering how frequently browsers are updated). To make things even worse, just about all vendors will only support Chromium-based browsers for whatever SaaS they sell you, so Firefox is a nonstarter for getting support, even if it will work just fine 99.9% of the time.

For all these reasons, I lost the battle to keep Firefox around, which is a huge shame because of how much I love it and wanted to fight the Chromium monoculture. So I guess for a corporation to support Firefox despite how corporate-friendliness the alternatives are, they'd have to reaaaally want to.

You can see the relevant JSON code in the changelog. As I said, you can post a comment on this page to remind Mike to update the documentation for policy templates.

This GitHub repository has a Discussions tab where you can ask questions about deploying Firefox: Policy Templates for Firefox.

Check out the official documentation here: Policy Templates for Firefox. You can use the Discussions tab if you have any questions.

It's been that way for years: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20351

I lost hope it and other issues would be fixed and moved to Chromium on Android.

Firefox for Android was rewritten pretty much from scratch circa 2020. Collections are one of its many unfinished and poorly-thought-out features, and they never got around to implementing the ability to sync Collections to desktop. It was a known problem in 2019, while the rewrite was being worked on, and Mozilla doesn't appear to have given it any attention in the years since.

People have been asking for this for over a year via Mozilla's current feedback channels, and for two years on the previous issue-reporting venue, to no avail. It was automatically moved from the old venue to Bugzilla ostensibly because Bugzilla makes it easier to track and work on issue reports, but they haven't actually worked on that issue report at all.

Known issue, not a new issue, and unlikely to be fixed any time soon, unfortunately. I had this before I stopped using the Android version a year ago. It was reported as a bug at least a year ago on their old issue tracker, and later moved to the current one, where last activity on the issue report was three months ago. No apparent progress toward any fix.

Since Fenix's first release they've been saying that the absurd limitations on add-ons support were only temporary, and they would have quickly increased the number of supported ones.

And instead absolutely nothing changed for three years.

Furthermore the insane bugs from which Fenix suffers from its release (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12731) (making it unbearable) have been left hanging, focusing the few resources on dumb ui experiments.

So everything suggested that Mozilla did not care of its Android browser, or actually that they were deliberately sabotaging it.

This news instead represents a huge improvement, hence my bewilderment.

I don't know what people who downvoted my message thought I meant.

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20012 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101865

This was sadly deprecated on Android: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12099

It was such a huge loss for me that for at least a year I used the outdated pre-Fenix. Now they still work on Desktop but they just stopped working on Android (althouth the bookmarks itself are synced-up)