Before the end of the year, Firefox on Android will have an open ecosystem for browser extensions. Then the addons from the desktop version could also be used on the go. This was announced by Mozilla’s Scott DeVaney in a blog entry. A more precise date will be announced at the beginning of September. However, if you are developing an extension for Firefox, you can already prepare.
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With the introduction, Firefox will become the only major browser on Android that is so open to third-party extensions. Significant demand is expected. Firefox already supports extensions on Android, but only a small selection of less than two dozen pre-installed add-ons. For the desktop version of the browser, there are over 33,000 in the official directory.
Stand out from the distant competition
According to DeVaney, Mozilla has now built the necessary infrastructure for the extensions under Android. Resources and guides for the developer community are to follow. With a few changes, developers could ensure that their extensions no longer run persistently in the background. This is essential because “Android tends to disable resource-intensive processes such as extensions”. To this end, a new architecture was introduced writes DeVaney. You can test it with Firefox for Android Nightly.
While Firefox still occupies at least fourth place among the most-used browsers on the desktop, it only appears under “Further running” on mobile devices. According to Statcounter, Firefox only has a 0.5 percent market share there – on heise.de it is a bit more, here Firefox for Android has around 4 percent of the mobile browsers used. With proper support for extensions, the mobile browser could stand out more from the competition in the future. Chrome, the most frequently used mobile browser by far, currently does not allow any extensions, but with Chromium alternatives they can be brought to the smartphone in a roundabout way. On iOS, Safari supports extensions.
(mho)