What’s really annoying is that a lot of existing extensions already work. Mozilla just makes it unreasonably difficult to install them.
Change your user agent (using Firefox Nightly and the user agent switcher extension, which is supported) and you can install extensions exactly as on desktop.
Installing directly from an .xpi is still seemingly impossible though, annoyingly.
What’s really annoying is that a lot of existing extensions already work. Mozilla just makes it unreasonably difficult to install them.
Change your user agent (using Firefox Nightly and the user agent switcher extension, which is supported) and you can install extensions exactly as on desktop.
That’s only telling half the story because often features silently failed for many extensions because of the great idea to switch from proper Firefox to the GeckoView based one which actually did not implement many APIs used by extensions.
I mean, sure. That’s not at all unexpected. But not even allowing the user to try at all, or making it unreasonably difficult to try, is very frustrating.
Place the option behind developer mode, with a disclaimer that features may fail and Mozilla makes no promises or guarantees.
But just flat-out denying the option, or making the user jump through ridiculous custom collection hoops is nonsense. In my case the custom collection method still failed, but the extension I was looking for does in fact work just fine, after installing it with the modified user agent string.
There is a fork called Smart Cookie Web Preview that lets you sideload extensions with no rigmarole, no Custom Collection nonsense, I have yet to find an extension that does not work. Even things like Behave and Jshelter work fine. I have no idea why Mozilla has been dragging this out for so long, lack of extension support on Android is a very common complaint.
What’s really annoying is that a lot of existing extensions already work. Mozilla just makes it unreasonably difficult to install them.
Change your user agent (using Firefox Nightly and the user agent switcher extension, which is supported) and you can install extensions exactly as on desktop.
Installing directly from an .xpi is still seemingly impossible though, annoyingly.
That’s only telling half the story because often features silently failed for many extensions because of the great idea to switch from proper Firefox to the GeckoView based one which actually did not implement many APIs used by extensions.
I mean, sure. That’s not at all unexpected. But not even allowing the user to try at all, or making it unreasonably difficult to try, is very frustrating.
Place the option behind developer mode, with a disclaimer that features may fail and Mozilla makes no promises or guarantees.
But just flat-out denying the option, or making the user jump through ridiculous custom collection hoops is nonsense. In my case the custom collection method still failed, but the extension I was looking for does in fact work just fine, after installing it with the modified user agent string.
There is a fork called Smart Cookie Web Preview that lets you sideload extensions with no rigmarole, no Custom Collection nonsense, I have yet to find an extension that does not work. Even things like Behave and Jshelter work fine. I have no idea why Mozilla has been dragging this out for so long, lack of extension support on Android is a very common complaint.