Mozilla tells extension developers to get ready to finally go mobile

• GeckoView-Playground

  1 3 4.4 Kotlin

I don't really know much about it, but there is already GeckoView, allowing you to package a better browser in your app: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/

I have noticed it in Allan Wang experimental/toy repo https://github.com/AllanWang/GeckoView-Playground and with a few changes, I created a trivial "app" for Facebook Messenger (wrapping its web version to a mobile app).

• BrowserBox

  43 3,152 9.9 JavaScript

  🌀 Browse the web from a browser you run on a server, rather than on your local device. Lightweight virtual browser. For security, privacy and more! By https://github.com/dosyago

  

If you're interested in browser extensions on mobile, we're building a way to deliver any extension to any mobile device, without any download.

The way it works is the extension runs on a browser on the server, which is then streamed to the device, and usable through any regular mobile browser, such as Safari, Chrome, Brave, Firefox, etc.

This browser technology removes the restriction on extensions on mobile, as well as limits some (but not even close to all) of the security risks of extensions.

While it sounds promising, it suffers from at least four major drawbacks.

1. We still need to build a shim of the Chrome extensions API: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/242

2. Rather than having many extensions on a single browser, this effectively serves a single extension from a given web endpoint, but crucially permits you to browse anywhere from there with that extension loaded.

3. While he have future plans for a "store", there is currently no store. This means there is no central place to discover extensions, and also no central authority to vet and restrict them regarding security.

4. You have to consider infrastructure, at least for now before we launch a managed service for this. While the application is easy to set up, maintaining a large fleet could bring additional workload that may limit your distribution, or increase your costs.

If you believe there is something worthwhile in exploring these avenues beyond existing browser technologies, and pushing the applications of the browser and the web further than they have been pushed before (at least in this meta sense), I encourage you to come get involved. We're open source and happily accept contributions that align with the project's goals: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

But it's good to see Firefox is finally implementing their long held goal to do this! This will probably cause other vendors to do the same, I imagine? What would be the reasons that vendors would resist bringing extensions to mobile?

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• LinkSheet

  15 904 9.9 Kotlin

  Restore link control on Android 12+

  

LinkSheet [1] can do that. It's a small app that you set as the default browser and shows a prompt when you open a link to allow you to choose what to do (eg. open in browser, open in app, share link, remove tracking URL parameters, etc.).

If you don't care about any of the extra functionality, you can configure it to always open your preferred browser and convert Custom Tabs intents to regular ones. No root access required.

[1] https://github.com/1fexd/LinkSheet

• Fenix

  750 6,681 7.7 Kotlin

  Discontinued ⚠️ Fenix (Firefox for Android) moved to a new repository. It is now developed and maintained as part of: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android

  

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.

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