They're finally moving what was in nightly to the beta. I'm currently on the nightly just for this feature, which has been stable enough that I see no reason to switch.
Sadly its still a pain in the ass to enable developer mode yet still be limited to a custom AMO.
I'm exactly the same way. I have had one issue with nightly once but overall it has been good (I keep stable synced and logged in just in case something goes wrong on nightly).
I'll probably wait until this hits stable then switch away from nightly.
One of the most important thing I miss about having an Android. I moved to iPhone 2 years ago and still use Firefox as my primary browser. But due to the Firefox's lack of addons support on iOS, I have to rely on a self-hosted OpenVPN setup with Pi-Hole[0] installed to get rid of ads and trackers.
FYI, I used to use openVPN but eventually switched to Wireguard (via pivpn) for two reasons:
- Wireguard is allegedly more efficient... I'm not 100% sure about that, but it does seem to connect faster, and my battery metrics report < 5% battery usage from WG, compared to ~8% for openVPN. YMMV ofc.
- Wireguard can automatically connect to the VPN whenever you're not using a whitelisted Wi-Fi SSID. It's nice that my phone doesn't use VPN on my home wifi, but the minute I leave home, the VPN automatically updates.
Not that you're doing anything wrong, but I just figured I'd shared because I put off the switch to WG for a long time and I've had a positive experience since.
FWIW I really really wish I could run FF + ublock origin on my iphone.
< FWIW I really really wish I could run FF + ublock origin on my iphone.
I feel the same.
I have one OpenVPN setup and one wireguard setup, both with Pi-hole in them. Since some OpenVPN don't work in some networks/countries(I am looking at you China!), it helps to have an alternative.
I have a self-hosted bitwarden which is accessible only via my VPNs. So it's important to have a backup VPN to access my password manager and to block those pesky ads/trackers.
> if it doesn’t leak your Wi-Fi connection information.
I don't think I understand. I run my VPN at home on a raspberry pi. So all of my network traffic, at the end of the day, goes through my home ISP.
I've considered shelling out for a VPN service to shield my traffic from ISP snooping, but at the end of the day you can only hide so much from your ISP, and I'm hesitant to introduce another failure point to my network (my SO will only take so much downtime!).
I mostly use the VPN as a convenience to ad-block on all devices at the DNS level and access self-hosted services like my Jellyfin server even when I'm not at home. The security benefit is also nice when I'm away from home on any WiFi network other than my own -- you never know what's going on behind the scenes.
Overall I don't worry too much about ISP snooping. But I probably should.
Were you using VPN in the original meaning of the term as a tunnel to a non local network? I was using it in the modern sense of what we used to call a proxy in the early 2000s. So services like NordVPN etc.
I think you definitely need to not give your ISP any chance to snoop. I’m sure they can’t look into your packets but just knowing which sites you visit is crucial info. As is exposing your Wi-Fi info for apps on your phone which use it as a correlation data point.
Obv since we’re on this forum, we both likely know how deep the privacy rabbit hole goes but in my experience, a good vpn service can do a ton of stuff together like dns filtering, traffic shielding from the isp, location shielding, ad blocking etc. Quite a one stop shop in a lot of cases.
in iOS, firefox really don't have any choice as they can't even use their own engine due to Apple egregious appstore policy.
One thing ff can do is make andriod like browser that supports ublock using altstore. That being said, this may not justify the time spent by developer.
> in iOS, firefox really don't have any choice as they can't even use their own engine due to Apple egregious appstore policy.
Funny you said that, out of the top of my head:
- Brave have a full featured adblock built in on iOS;
- Edge(!) have adblock plus extension built in as well;
- iCab have adblock capabilities built
As you can see, there's plenty of options even with Apple engine restriction. They just don't care enough to give iOS users a good experience, see the frustration on these threads[1][2]. It's all fair, I just gave up using Firefox on iOS and stopped caring about Firefox as well. Surfing the web without a proper adblock is just a rollercoast of frustration.
You could consider using NextDNS [0] instead of PiHole for this purpose. It seems like a good fit if you aren’t using the vpn for local network access as well (even then, I would consider switching to Taiscale, and then using the NextDNS integration with Tailscale).
It's good, but I get occasional sites that refuse to load at all. I get a blank screen. Oddly though, if I look in the dev tools, network tab and see the response, the page is there. It just doesn't get rendered. When I go through Cloudflare DoH, it works fine.
I keep a second browser linked to Cloudflare DoH for this reason. The OS and my router go to NextDNS, Firefox also set to NextDNS DoH, Chrome NextDNS as well, and then Firefox Nightly and Chrome Canary are set to DoH to Cloudflare for testing or one off workarounds. I do the same thing on my phone too.
Really? I've just installed it and the addons list looks identical on Firefox and Fennec. I just tried to install Connie Auto Deleted from the addons webpage but the install link isn't active.
Using custom add-on collections isn't as straight-forward as installing an add-on. While it's not rocket science, it's annoying enough that I haven't bothered doing it. I'm pissed that I can't just log into my Firefox account and have all my shit work
I don't know why you're downvoted. On a phone, the environment is more tightly defined/controlled and the error you saw is less likely to be unique to your configuration.
But in any case, you provided useful information. I've been an Android Firefox user for many years now - love it.
You can add any addon to your collection, including those that have no place on a phone. Some addons that aren't tuned for phones actually work just fine, even if one needs to zoom in on the settings screen. Some others work ok, but the settings screen glitches.
The default is to only present a limited selection of addons that are reviewed by Mozilla for mobile compatibility and user experience. The way this is implemented is by constraining the user to installing extensions that are in a particular Mozilla-managed addon collection. On Nightly (and now on Beta), you can use a debug-menu feature to override the ID of this collection with your own.
Here's what bugs me: I have a Firefox account. When I log into Firefox on a new machine it automatically installs all my addons and syncs stuff. So why do I have to do this crap to get the same effect on mobile? Why isn't my existing list of browser add-ons not considered a collection, that I can just use? Why do I have to jump through this hoop? It's extremely irritating when things don't "just work" and I have to suddenly care about wtf a collection is and figure out how to create one.
Edit: not ranting at you, just ranting about this stupid extra hoop
At one point I thought collections were shared publicly on Mozilla's add-ons website but I don't see how anymore. They still mention that as the use-case however:
> Collections make it easy to keep track of favorite add-ons and share your perfectly customized browser with others.
I'm not sure collections changes anything in the case of Firefox mobile, the add-ons are still bifurcated.
I've been using uBlock Origin on the Nightly build for a while and it has been an absolute godsend. I only wish it were easier to try out new add-ons without having to mess around with the collections.
Oh cool, they finally reverted their mobile-user-hostile approach and allow for ublock origin now. Hopefully they fully revert their breaking changes circa summer 2021 that drove a lot of users away.
Interesting -- a lot of folks don't like my comment above. But rather than discuss, downvotes. No complaints here, people will vote their agreement or disagreement on the internet. Just a curious thing overall. Do people generally think Firefox Mobile had a _good_ vision when they overhauled the UI, decreased accessibility, and disabled extensions, making the app more or less unusable for many folks?
Wrong on the remembered year, perhaps wrong on the ublock origin integration (extensions were turned off which was how I used UO), not wrong on the overall experience.
My review of firefox from September 2020 was very consistent with the ratings drop and other reviews of the time -- there is a reason that 4.6 stars persists when it used to be virtually 5 stars:
> I keep waiting for a way to override text size defaults. As an example, old.reddit.com always renders as tiny text no matter what phone I try on (pixel, Blu). It would be very nice to just be able to override default text sizes or at least make the size human readable like Chrome, Vivaldi, and Brave do. Further, the new UX is a downgrade from before. No speed dial, everything moved around. Doesn't appear to have about:config, and so forth.
why? why can't they let people install addons from the store and see what breaks and only fix those things? by this rate and how nightly can run addons, why not the regular folk?
Because (1) add-ons are known to have performance and compatibility issues (e.g. breaking websites - I recall hearing that the vast majority of website breakage reports for FF were just due to addons) on desktop, (2) these problems would almost certainly be worse on mobile, (3) even though it'll be the addon's fault that'll still result in a bad reputation for Firefox, and (4) Mozilla cares more about the reputation of Firefox than user freedom.
I think that #4 is bad, but I believe it to be true, with moderate certainty. I believe 1-3 to be true with high certainty.
I believe bureaucratic organizations to be incapable of this in general. See the Signal Foundation and its recent braindead decision to remove SMS from Signal instead of putting it behind an advanced setting or using a warning message.
Definitely among the tech-savvy - but, unfortunately, I believe that it still ends up being a net positive for them for the average non-tech savvy users. Think of how many people switched from Firefox to Chrome when Chrome started being faster and more stable - despite how much less customizable it was, and how many fewer addons it had.
I believe that this is a problem that should be fixed with tech education - but until then, the above hold, as sucky as it is.
I know 2 non-technical users who use Firefox on Android and they use it because I recommended it.
Their reputation with technical users is almost everything they have left and they're doing their best to destroy it further and further. This decision looks to be a rare exception, but if you still need their dumb account effectively nothing will have changed...
There are rumours that Google told them running arbitrary code in Firefox is forbidden, because they can't audit that. I have never been able to find a confirmation for that though.
Which is a ridiculous opinion, of course, since the whole point of a browser is to run arbitrary code.
Never heard that before. Sure you're not thinking of iOS, where that is indeed the (stated) reason for not allowing alternative browser engines and requiring the use of the system webkit.
If that's the reasoning, then hiding add-ons not ratified for mobile behind a flag that normal users won't ever touch should be an acceptable solution.
Off topic rant: why on earth does Firefox for Android not let me move my open tabs around? It used to be possible before the recent redesign. Why would one remove such an essential feature? It's just baffling!
I had no success finding a higher level doc stating the reasons for hiding Addons behind collections for mobile firefox. I searched the MozillaWiki and github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix. Battery Optimization and Performance come to mind, but I'd like to read more into it if somebody can give me pointers
The just need to stop it with their collection nonsense and let people install extensions without the hastle... So what if some are broken? In my experience most still work anyways.
Sadly its still a pain in the ass to enable developer mode yet still be limited to a custom AMO.