This is a lot of FUD. Making a browser is hard, and making a modular browser is harder. It's clearly on their list of things to do, but it's behind all the other "making a browser" things.
They've made no commitment to extensions, but clearly are targeting this new replacement browser for version 69 in a few months.
What they haven't done is given a clear statement. Nothing about if their replacement is going to drop extension support. But every response from Mozilla has been a sidestep and that I cannot overlook.
> Nothing about if their replacement is going to drop extension support.
That's because we are not yet ready to make public commitments. Honest. We're building the app and its underlying embedding library (GeckoView) from scratch, and as with all new greenfield projects, we're still working on getting the foundation right. It's simply too early to forecast how that specific design and development work will play out.
>> Nothing about if their replacement is going to drop extension support.
>That's because we are not yet ready to make public commitments. Honest.
Surely you can understand how this isn't good enough for most addon users, right? You've already announced Firefox for Android is going to be deprecated. And you're "not ready to make public commitments" about whether the replacement is going to support extensions?? That's obviously not acceptable to addon users.
If Mozilla's policy is that they simply don't care what users think, then whatever, it doesn't matter what's acceptable to addon users. I'm writing this under the presumption that at least someone in the Mozilla org does care about this.
The fact that you won't commit to saying your core advantage on Android will stay has to mean to me, as a user, that I need to be finding an alternative that does have it.
Fenix a.k.a Firefox Preview will not be Fennec 69. There are a lot of decisions the project hasn't made yet, but that one's official. It's an easy decision, too, given that Fenix won't have full feature-parity in three months and maintaining backwards compatibility to super old app versions is not worth it. The expectation is that users will want to migrate to the new store entry in the coming year or two.
As Ricky would say, "It doesn't take rocket appliances."
