It's "the new generation of Tablet for simplicity and privacy..." according to its Kickstarter page. "Top-tier performance, lightweight design and completely Google-free." And it's already reached its funding goal of $53,312 — climbing to over $75,000 from 115 backers with another 26 days still to go. 9to5Linux reports: Volla, the maker of the Volla Phone smartphones, has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for their first tablet device, the Volla Tablet, which will also support the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS.

Featuring a 12.3-inch Quad HD display with 2650Ã--1600 pixel resolution, the Volla Tablet uses a powerful MediaTek Gaming G99 8-core processor, 12 GB RAM, and 256 GB internal storage. It also comes with a long-lasting 10,000 mAh battery, 2G/3G/4G cellular network support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 13+5 MP main camera.

By default, Volla Tablet ships with Volla OS 13, Volla's in-house operating system based on the free Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but users will be able to buy the tablet with Ubuntu Touch featuring built-in convergence and support for Android apps with WayDroid container.
"Users will also be able to use desktop apps like Firefox or LibreOffice thanks to the help of the Libertine container," according to the article. ("Volla says that Volla Tablet with Ubuntu Touch is ideal for Linux enthusiasts and minimalists seeking a simplified, efficient, and familiar operating system experience.")

Its Kickstarter page points out the tablet even offers options like "hide.me VPN" and private speech recognition that's "cloud-independent for secure, confidential interactions."

("For U.S. users, please note that only roaming SIM cards from abroad can be used.")

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Mozilla has announced Firefox Nightly for ARM64. This release will cater to the growing demand for support on ARM64 platforms, commonly referred to as AArch64. Feedback from the community has led Mozilla to expand the availability of Firefox Nightly. Users can now access the browser as both .tar archives and .deb packages, depending on their preference and requirements for installation.

For those who favor traditional methods, the .tar.bz2 binaries are accessible through Mozilla's downloads page by selecting the option for Firefox Nightly for Linux ARM64/AArch64. Meanwhile, users looking to utilize updates and installation through Mozilla's APT repository can follow specific instructions to install the firefox-nightly package.

"After taking a look at Floorp Browser, I was left wondering whether there was a Chromium-based web browser that was as good, or even better than Chrome," writes a "First Look" reviewer at It's Foss News.

"That is when I came across Thorium, a web-browser that claims to be the 'the fastest browser on Earth'." [Thorium] is backed by a myriad of tweaks that include, compiler optimizations for SSE4.2, AVS, AES, various mods to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, and more. The developer shares performance stats using popular benchmarking tools... I tested it using Speedometer 3.0 benchmark on Fedora 39 and compared it to Brave, and the scores were:

Thorium: 19.2; Brave: 19.5

So, it may not be the "fastest" always, probably one of the fastest, that comes close to Brave or sometimes even beats it (depends on the version you tested it and your system).

Alexander Frick, the lead developer, also insists on providing support for older operating systems such as Windows 7 so that its user base can use a capable modern browser without much fuss... As Thorium is a cross-platform web browser, you can find packages for a wide range of platforms such as Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows, Android, macOS, and more.
Thorium can sync to your Google account to import your bookmarks, extensions, and themes, according to the article.

"Overall, I can confidently say that it is a web browser I could daily drive, if I were to ditch Chrome completely. It gels in quite well with the Google ecosystem and has a familiar user interface that doesn't get in the way."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep's CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years. Mozilla only began bundling Onerep in Firefox last month, when it announced the reputation service would be offered on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep's Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story.

But on March 21, Shelest released a lengthy statement wherein he admitted to maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 -- around the same time he launched Onerep. Shelest maintained that Nuwber has "zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep," and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him. "I get it," Shelest wrote. "My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn't taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn't have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I'm aiming to do better in the future." The full statement is available here (PDF).

In a statement released today, a spokesperson for Mozilla said it was moving away from Onerep as a service provider in its Monitor Plus product. "Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep's CEO do not align with our values," Mozilla wrote. "We're working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first." KrebsOnSecurity also reported that Shelest's email address was used circa 2010 by an affiliate of Spamit, a Russian-language organization that paid people to aggressively promote websites hawking male enhancement drugs and generic pharmaceuticals. As noted in the March 14 story, this connection was confirmed by research from multiple graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University.

Shelest denied ever being associated with Spamit. "Between 2010 and 2014, we put up some web pages and optimize them -- a widely used SEO practice -- and then ran AdSense banners on them," Shelest said, presumably referring to the dozens of people-search domains KrebsOnSecurity found were connected to his email addresses (dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com). "As we progressed and learned more, we saw that a lot of the inquiries coming in were for people." Shelest also acknowledged that Onerep pays to run ads on "on a handful of data broker sites in very specific circumstances." "Our ad is served once someone has manually completed an opt-out form on their own," Shelest wrote. "The goal is to let them know that if they were exposed on that site, there may be others, and bring awareness to there being a more automated opt-out option, such as Onerep."

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla Firefox 124 looks like a small update that only updates the Caret Browsing mode to also work in the PDF viewer and adds support for the Screen Wake Lock API to prevent devices from dimming or locking the screen when an application needs to keep running. The Firefox View feature has been updated as well in this release to allow users to sort open tabs by either recent activity (default setting) or tab order. Also, Firefox 124 expands Qwant's availability to all languages in the France region along with Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.

This release also adds support for using HTTP(S) and relative URLs when creating WebSockets, as well as support for the AbortSignal: any() static method, which takes an iterable of abort signals and returns an AbortSignal (more details are available here). For Android users, Firefox 124 enables the Pull to Refresh feature, which is now more robust than ever, by default and adds support for the HTML drag and drop API when using a mouse, which accepts plain text or HTML text by the drop operation from external apps.

For macOS users, this release uses the fullscreen API for all types of full-screen windows, promising a better match to the expected macOS user experience for full-screen spaces, the Menubar, and the Dock. If you want to disable this feature, you'll need to set the full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen preference to false in about:config. For Windows users, this release adds the ability to populate the Windows taskbar jump list more efficiently. According to Mozilla, this change should allow for a "smoother overall browsing experience."

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Apple's iOS 17.4 update is now available, introducing new emoji and a cryptographic security protocol for iMessage, alongside some major changes to the App Store and contactless payments for the iPhone platform in Europe. Apple is making several of these changes to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), a law that aims to make the digital economy fairer by removing unfair advantages that tech giants hold over businesses and end users. iOS 17.4 will allow third-party developers to offer alternative app marketplaces and app downloads to EU users from outside the iOS App Store. Developers wanting to take advantage of this will be required to go through Apple's approval process and pay Apple a "Core Technology Fee" that charges 50 euro cents per install once an app reaches 1 million downloads annually. iPhone owners in the EU will see different update notes that specifically mention new options available for app stores, web browsers, and payment options.

The approval process may take some time, but we know that at least one enterprise-focused app marketplace from Mobivention will be available on March 7th. Epic is also working on releasing the Epic Game Store on iOS in 2024, and software company MacPaw is planning to officially launch its Setapp store in April. iOS 17.4 allows people in the EU to download alternative browser engines that aren't based on Apple's WebKit, such as Chrome and Firefox, with a new choice screen in iOS Safari that will prompt users to select a default browser when opened for the first time. While no browser alternatives have been officially announced, both Google and Mozilla are currently experimenting with new iOS browsers that could eventually be released to the public.

Apple is also introducing new APIs that allow third-party developers to utilize the iPhone's NFC payment chip for contactless payment services besides Apple Pay and Apple Wallet in the European Economic Area. No alternative contactless providers have been confirmed yet, but users will find a list of apps that have requested the feature under Settings > Privacy & Security > Contactless & NFC. While Apple previously revealed it was planning to drop support for progressive web apps (PWAs) in the EU to avoid building "an entirely new integration architecture" around DMA compliance, the company now says it will "continue to offer the existing Home Screen web apps capability" for EU users. However, these homescreen apps will still run using WebKit technology, with no option to be powered by third-party browser engines.

Less than a week after naming Laura Chambers as interim CEO, Firefox's maker Mozilla said it is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5% of its workforce. The cuts are primarily in the product development organization. Bloomberg reports: "We're scaling back investment in some product areas in order to focus on areas that we feel have the greatest chance of success," Mozilla said in a statement. "We intend to re-prioritize resources against products like Firefox Mobile, where there's a significant opportunity to grow and establish a better model for the industry."

Mozilla last cut a significant number of jobs four years ago at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The not-for-profit company, which competes with Alphabet Inc.'s Google Chrome, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Microsoft Corp.'s Edge, has been grappling with sliding market share of its Firefox web browser in recent years. So far in 2024, the tech sector has cut 32,000 jobs.

Remember "Servo," Mozilla's "next-generation browser engine," focused on performance and robustness?

"The developers of Servo are starting 2024 by going all in..." reports It's FOSS News, citing a social media post from FOSDEM. "[T]he Servo Project team were there showing off the work done so far." If you were not familiar, Servo is an experimental browser engine that leverages the power of Rust to provide a memory-safe and modular experience that is highly adaptable. After Mozilla created Servo back in 2012 as a research project, it saw its share of ups and downs over the years, with it making a comeback in 2023; thanks to a fresh approach by the developers on how Servo should move forward.

Even though there are plenty of open source Chrome alternatives, with this, there's a chance that we will get some really cool options based on Servo that just might give Blink and Gecko a run for the money! Just a few months back, in September 2023, after The Servo Project officially joined Linux Foundation Europe, the existing contributors from Igalia stepped up their game by taking over the project maintenance. To complement that, at Open Source Summit Europe last year, Manuel Rego from Igalia shared some really useful insights when he presented.

He showcased stuff like the WebGL support, cross-platform support including mobile support for Android and Linux, among other things. They have experimented with Servo for embedded applications use-cases (like running it on Raspberry Pi), and have plans to make advances on it. As far as I can see, it looks like, Servo is faster for Raspberry Pi compared to Chromium. You can explore more such demos on Servo's demo webpage.
2024's roadmap includes "Initial Android support, that will see Servo being made to build on modern Android versions," according to the article, "with the developers publishing nightly APKs on the official website some time in the future."

One fun fact? "Even though Mozilla dropped the experimental project, Firefox still utilizes some servo components in the browser"

Another FOSDOM update from social media: "Thunderbird is also embracing Rust."

Mozilla, which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found. Fortune: Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust. "We want to offer an alternative for people to have better products," says Baker, who wants to draw more attention to policies, products and processes to challenge business models built on fueling outrage. "What are the connections between this global malaise and how humans are engaging with each other and technology?"

Chambers says she plans to focus on building out new products that address growing privacy concerns while actively looking for a full-time CEO. Prior to being recruited to the Mozilla board three years ago, Chambers says she was feeling "pretty disillusioned" about society because of the influence of money in politics and the growing power of the tech giants. "I was confused about what to do and this felt like a genuine way to make an impact." Chambers says she won't be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons. "I think this is an example of Mozilla doing the right role modelling in how to manage a succession," says Chambers.

Apple is making changes to iOS in Europe to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act cracking down on Big Tech gatekeepers. The act demands interoperability, fairness and privacy measures including allowing competing browser engines on iOS. Despite better browser choice, Google and Mozilla are unhappy with Apple's proposed changes. Mozilla says restricting browser engine integration to EU apps burdens rivals to build separate implementations. Mozilla's comment: "We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple's proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps. The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations -- a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear. Apple's proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari. This is another example of Apple creating barriers to prevent true browser competition on iOS." Google's VP of engineering for Chrome, Parisa Tabriz, commented on DeMonte's statement, saying, "Strong agree with Mozilla. Apple isn't serious about supporting web browser or engine choice on iOS. Their strategy is overly restrictive, and won't meaningfully lead to real choice for browser developers."

Mozilla has rolled out a new $9 per month service called Mozilla Monitor Plus that automatically scrubs personal information from over 190 data broker sites. The tool builds on the free Firefox Monitor platform, expanding monitoring capabilities and proactively removing exposed details to protect user privacy. Subscribers will also receive data breach alerts under the new service.

Mozilla claims in a new 74-page research report that Microsoft "repeatedly uses harmful design" and "dark patterns" to push users toward Microsoft Edge and away from rival browsers like Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome browser. PCMag: "Microsoft uses the harmful preselection, visual interference, trick wording, and disguised ads patterns to skew user choice," the report argues, adding that "Microsoft's harmful design practices mean users are unable to download, install, use, or set as default an alternative browser without interference." The researchers claim this harms consumers because they can experience "distortion of choice," lose trust in the broader tech industry, and even possibly experience "emotional distress" as a result of Microsoft's efforts.

For the study, user experiences were tested on Windows 10 Home and Windows 11 Pro as well as the Windows 11 Home Insider Preview Version. The UK-based testers did not attempt to use a VPN to change or hide their IP addresses during their investigation. While Microsoft recently said it will allow users in the European Union to uninstall Edge as part of its efforts to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), it's unclear whether US, UK, or other users around the globe could ever get the same option. Some Windows 11 users can remove five other apps that come preinstalled, however.

Apple's new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS. Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it's "extremely disappointed" with the way things turned out. From a report: "We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple's proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps," DeMonte says. "The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations -- a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear." In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that powers Safari. The change opens the door for other popular engines, such as Blink, which is used by Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, as well as Gecko, the engine used by Firefox. It also means third-party browsers could become fully functional on iOS without any of the limitations that come along with WebKit.

prisoninmate shares a 9to5linux report: Flathub is currently one of the most popular app stores for Linux serving 1.6 billion downloads of over 2,400 apps in the Flatpak format, of which more than 850 apps have been verified by their original authors. And now, Flathub proudly announced today that it surpassed 1 million active users of Flatpak apps. The team believes that the recent growth in users comes from several factors, including the availability of some very popular apps (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Spotify, OBS Studio, Google Chrome, Telegram), support for new and verified apps, the inclusion of Flathub as the default app source for the Steam Deck's desktop mode, as well as the growing adoption among many popular GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora Linux, Linux Mint, KDE neon, and others.

Linux Mint 21.3 is now available to download, reports the blog OMG Obuntu.

It's the first version to offer Wayland support in its Cinnamon desktop: Following a successful bout of bug-busting in last month's beta release, Mint devs have gone ahead and rubber-stamped a stable release. Thus, you can reasonably expect to not encounter any major issues when installing or using it... [I]t's based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and continues to use the Linux 5.15 kernel by default, but newer kernels are available to install within the OS...

In my own testing I find Cinnamon's Wayland support to be well-rounded. It's not perfect but I didn't hit any major snafus that prevented me from working (though admittedly I did only attempt 'basic' tasks like web browsing, playing music, and adding applets). However, Cinnamon's Wayland support is in an early state, is not enabled by default, and Linux Mint devs expect it won't be good enough for everyone until the 23.x series (due 2026) at the earliest. Still, try it out yourself and see if it works for you. Select the 'Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)' session from the login screen session selector, and then login as normal...

Additionally, the latest version of Mozilla Firefox is pre-installed (as a deb, not a Snap)
Among the new features are a whole new category of desktop add-ons — "Actions" — which upgrade the right-clicking context menu. (So for .iso files there's two new choices: "Verify" or "Make bootable USB stick".)

The article says there's also "a raft of smaller refinements," plus "a bevvy of buffs and embellishments" for Linux Mint's homegrown apps.

Any Linux Mint users reading Slashdot? Share your thoughts or experiences in the comments...

"For the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox," writes TechCrunch, citing startup investments like Mastodon's client Mammoth and the Fakespot browser extension that helps identify fake reviews. But Mozilla has also launched Mozilla.ai (added a bunch of new AI-focused members to its board).

In an interview with TechCrunch, Mozilla's president and executive director Mark Surman clarifies their plans, saying that Mozilla.ai "had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI opportunities and build a business around them." "Quickly, Moez [Draief], who runs it, made it about how do we leverage the growing snowball of open source large language models and find a way to both accelerate that snowball but also make sure it rolls in a direction that matches our goals and matches our wallet belt...." Right now, Surman argued, it remains hard to for most developers — and even more so for most consumers — to run their own models, even as more open source models seemingly launch every day. "What Mozilla.ai is focused on really is almost building a wrapper that you can put around any open source large language model to fine-tune it, to build data pipelines for it, to make it highly performant."
While much work is in stealth mode, TechCrunch predicts "we'll hear quite a bit more in the coming months." Meanwhile, the open source and AI communities are still figuring out what exactly open source AI is going to look like. Surman believes that no matter the details of that, though, the overall principles of transparency and freedom to study the code, modify it and redistribute it will remain key... "We probably lean towards that everything should be open source — at least in a spiritual sense. The licenses aren't perfect and we are going to do a bunch of work in the first half of next year with some of the other open source projects around clarifying some of those definitions and giving people some mental models...."

With a small group of very well-funded players currently dominating the AI market, he believes that the various open source groups will need to band together to collectively create alternatives. He likened it to the early era of open source — and especially the Linux movement — which aimed to create an alternative to Microsoft...

Surman seems to be optimistic about Mozilla's positioning in this new era of AI, though, and its ability to both use it to further its mission and create a sustainable business model around it. "All this that we are going to do is in the kind of service of our mission. And some of that, I think, will just have to be purely a public good," he said. "And you can pay for public goods in different kinds of way, from our own resources, from philanthropy, from people pooling resources. [...] It's a kind of a business model but it's not commercial, per se. And then, the stuff we're building around communal AI hopefully has a real enterprise value if we can help people take advantage of open source large language models, effectively and quickly, in a way that is valuable to them and is cheaper than using open AI. That's our hope."
And what about Firefox? "I think you'll see the browser evolve," says Mozilla's president. "In our case, that's to be more protective of you and more helpful to you.

"I think it's more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet."

Mozilla closed out 2023 with a report that dodges its flatlining browser market share and Mozilla.social beta in favor of calls for a faster pace from its highly paid CEO. From a report: According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 to $6,903,089 in 2022. It's quite the jump considering that revenues declined from $527,585,000 to $510,389,000 in the same period. Despite the executive payout, Firefox continues to trail Google and even Microsoft in desktop browser market share. While it has not suffered any catastrophic losses, neither has it made any significant gains.

Baker, however, would very much like to speed things up and says in the State of Mozilla report: "The pace is not enough, the impact is not enough." Unsurprisingly for a technology company, the report is heavy on AI going mainstream where Mozilla reckons it can make an impact in the technology, particularly with regard to open source developers and privacy. Mozilla's adventures in AI? The organization says it has 15 engineers working on open source large language models and is working on use cases in the healthcare space. Moez Draief, managing director of Mozilla.ai, said: "There's a lot of structured data work in that industry that will feed the language models; we don't have to invent it."

They create a dedicated desktop icon for your favorite web-based application — a simplified browser that opens to that single URL. Yet while Linux usually offers the same functionality as other operating systems, "Peppermint OS's Ice and its successor Kumo are the only free software versions of Site-Specific Browsers available on Linux," according to Linux magazine.

"Fortunately for those who want this functionality, Peppermint OS is a Debian derivative, and both can be installed on Debian and most other derivatives." Since SSBs first appeared in 2005, they have been available on both Windows and macOS. On Linux, however, the availability has come and gone. On Linux, Firefox once had an SSB mode, but it was discontinued in 2020 on the grounds that it had multiple bugs that were time-consuming to fix and there was "little to no perceived user benefit to the feature." Similarly, Chromium once had a basic SSB menu item, Create Application Shortcut, which no longer appears in recent versions. As for GNOME Web's (Epiphany's) Install Site as Web Application, while it still appears in the menu, it is no longer functional. Today, Linux users who want to try SSBs have no choices except Ice or Kumo.

Neither Ice or Kumo appears in any repository except Peppermint OS's. But because Peppermint OS installs packages from Debian 12 ("bookworm"), either can be installed to Debian or a derivative... To install successfully, at least one of Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, or Vivaldi also must be installed... Because both Ice and Kumo are written in Python, they can be run on any desktop.
The article concludes that Site-Specific Browsers might make more sense "on a network or in a business where their isolation provides another layer of security. Or perhaps the time for SSBs is past and there's a reason browsers have tried to implement them, and then discarded them."

Firefox 121 has arrived with Wayland support to be used by default on modern Linux desktops. Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: Some Linux distributions and package builds have been using the native Wayland path for a while but now it's great to see the upstream builds make this default change as we get ready to embark on the 2024 Linux desktop. With my testing of Firefox 121 on Wayland, it's been working out well. X.Org/X11 support remains in place for those not using a Wayland-based desktop environment.

Firefox 121 also adds Voice Control command support on macOS, adds an option to always force-underline links within websites, Firefox now includes a floating button to help in creation within PDFs, various CSS feature additions, and other developer enhancements. Firefox 121 also now supports tail call elimination in WebAssembly for enhancing support for functional languages. You can download Firefox 121 via archive.mozilla.org.

Firefox's Android browser now has over 450 new extensions available on Mozilla's Firefox Browser Add-ons page. "These extensions allow users to customize the mobile browser to their needs, whether that involves adding anti-tracking privacy tools, content blockers, productivity tools or other features that introduce new experiences, like streaming music, or those that allow users to personalize the browser's user interface -- like switching all websites to a dark mode or offering a better way to manage tabs," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The lack of extensions has been an issue for Firefox for Android users for years following the 2020 launch of a rebuilt version of the mobile browser that replaced the app's previous codebase with "GeckoView," a new, faster and more customizable browser engine. At the time, the company said it made a decision to limit the supported extensions to only those within the "Recommended Extensions" program -- meaning those that were commonly installed by end users. This choice allowed Mozilla to quickly get the new browser into consumers' hands, but squashed the long tail of extension development -- and opportunity for software developers focused on this market.

While Firefox's nightly builds later enabled more extensions, the publicly available Firefox for Android browser did not have access to these hundreds of extensions, meaning most of Firefox's mainstream users were also without. In August of this year, Mozilla said it had finally completed the infrastructure needed to bring the open extension ecosystem back to Firefox for Android. It then began to test and make hundreds more extensions available to Firefox for Android users, culminating in today's news that there are now 450+ extensions available.