Mozilla announced the general availability of five additional extensions for Firefox for Android last week. The five extensions, Firefox Relay, Tampermonkey, Read Aloud, Adnauseum and ClearURLs, may now be installed in Firefox Nightly for Android. While not mentioned explicitly, it seems as if these will become available in Beta and Stable versions of the browser for Android eventually.
This is not the first time that Mozilla extended support for more extensions. Back in 2020, Mozilla added five more extensions to the list of supported extensions in Firefox for Android.
Mozilla restricted access to browser extensions in the new Firefox for Android mobile browser that the organization launched in 2020. Even today, less than 20 extensions are available officially for the mobile browser. Beta and Nightly versions of Firefox support custom extensions lists, which users may use to make other extensions available.
Mozilla has not added that option yet to Firefox for Android Stable. You may check out our guides for Firefox Beta for Android and Firefox Nightly for Android that explain how to add custom add-on collections.
For a long time, it looked as if extensions would remain limited in Firefox Stable for Android. Mozilla's recent announcement about the addition of the five extensions hints that this may change in the not-so-distant future.
"Indeed our goal is to design MV3 for mobile in such a manner we’re able to open up the discoverability of mobile extensions beyond the short list available today."
It is a vague statement but it confirms that Mozilla has plans to bring more mobile extensions to Firefox for Android. Whether that includes unlocking most of the extensions available or just a careful selection of compatible extensions remains to be seen.
Work on Manifest V3 adoption in Firefox for Android begins in 2023, and this is a prerequisite for improving extensions support.
Firefox for Android has been downloaded more than 100 million times on Google Play. The browser has a rating of 4.6 currently, which beats Google Chrome (4.1) but not Microsoft Edge (4.7).
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