There was a lot of justified complaints when Mozilla rushed the release of Fenix on Android and broke most of add-ons APIs, resulting in a very limited set of allowed add-ons to not risk breaking the browser.

But chrome on android still doesn’t support add-ons.

My interpretation is that to be able to compete with Firefox in the browser, Google needed to implement extensions, however, they don’t want to support them, because they give more power to the user (Ad blocking for example, which they are about to cripple by “replacing” the content blocking APIs in Manifest v2 with those of Manifest v3).

Firefox has never been a real threat to Chrome on Android. So they never even bothered implementing extensions on android. This just blows my mind how such an important functionality can be missing and no one seems to care.

What’s even more ridiculous is that on android there are Chrome based browsers that support extensions.

So whenever someone asks why they should use FF on android, just remind them that you can have an ad-blocker on FF.