Firefox’s Android browser now has over 450 new extensions available on Mozilla’s Firefox Browser Add-ons page. “These extensions allow users to customize the mobile browser to their needs, whether that involves adding anti-tracking privacy tools, content blockers, productivity tools or other features that introduce new experiences, like streaming music, or those that allow users to personalize the browser’s user interface — like switching all websites to a dark mode or offering a better way to manage tabs,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: The lack of extensions has been an issue for Firefox for Android users for years following the 2020 launch of a rebuilt version of the mobile browser that replaced the app’s previous codebase with “GeckoView,” a new, faster and more customizable browser engine. At the time, the company said it made a decision to limit the supported extensions to only those within the “Recommended Extensions” program — meaning those that were commonly installed by end users. This choice allowed Mozilla to quickly get the new browser into consumers’ hands, but squashed the long tail of extension development — and opportunity for software developers focused on this market.
While Firefox’s nightly builds later enabled more extensions, the publicly available Firefox for Android browser did not have access to these hundreds of extensions, meaning most of Firefox’s mainstream users were also without. In August of this year, Mozilla said it had finally completed the infrastructure needed to bring the open extension ecosystem back to Firefox for Android. It then began to test and make hundreds more extensions available to Firefox for Android users, culminating in today’s news that there are now 450+ extensions available.
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