A few weeks ago, Mozilla had announced that it would soon support Open Extensions on Firefox for Android. The good news is that the waiting period is over, the mobile browser now supports over 450 add-ons.
While Firefox has supported extensions on Android devices for a long time, the experience has thus far been somewhat underwhelming, because it only allowed you to choose from among 2 dozen add-ons. Basically, this was a curated experience of add-ons hand-picked by Mozilla. There was a workaround for the Nightly and Beta channel versions of Firefox, you could create a custom add-on collection, which would allow you to install any extension that you liked. But the steps were a bit complicated, and also required a Mozilla account, which many users may not be comfortable with. Users had been requesting the browser maker to open up its ecosystem to support more extensions, which is exactly what it has done.
Open Extensions, as Mozilla terms them in its announcement, have been available in Firefox for Android Nightly and Beta channels for a while. Now, the extensions are available in the stable version of Firefox for Android.
In order to install the extensions on your mobile phone, update Firefox for Android to the latest version from the Google Play Store or get the APK for Firefox 120.1.1 from Mozilla's servers.
Once you have updated the app, you can browse the official Firefox for Android add-ons repository at this page.
Note: Tap on "see more trending extensions" to browse the full catalog of extensions.
It currently supports 491 extensions for mobile devices, and the list will likely grow larger in the future. Get an ad blocker like uBlock Origin, Sponsorblock and you will be able to watch videos on YouTube without being bothered by ads, or Google's anti-ad block prompts. Want to translate web pages quickly? You may find Simple Translate useful. Here are some notable add-ons that you can install now: I still don't care about cookies, OneTab, Old Reddit Redirect, SteamDB, Group Speed Dial, etc.
You can tell whether an add-on will work with the mobile browser, if the extension's page has a label that says "Available on Firefox for Android". One Reddit user pointed out that not all extensions that have been marked as available for Firefox for Android, are actually showing up on the mobile add-ons repository. They quoted Consent-O-Matic as an example, though it's worth noting that the add-on has not been updated since February.
Another user mentioned that you can actually install add-ons that are not yet marked as compatible with Android. In this case, you will need to visit an extension's page, tap on the browser's menu and switch to the desktop page view. This will let you install the extension on Firefox for Android. But, it is possible that such extensions may not work properly because they were not designed for the mobile browser, YMMV.
Adding support for hundreds of extensions could convince users to switch over from other browsers to Firefox for Android. It's a shame that Firefox on iOS won't get support add-ons, but you can thank Apple and its ridiculous walled-garden for that, because it forces browser makers to make their app using WebKit, instead of custom browser engines such as Google Chromium's Blink or Mozilla Firefox's Gecko. This could change in the future.
What are your favorite add-ons on Firefox for Android?
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