I switched to Iceraven [0] last year and never looked back. It is a fork of the new Firefox for Android but with a much longer list of extensions and about:config support. I specifically need the latter to route traffic through a local proxy before.

[0]: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

Oh and it is written in Kotlin. Maybe I should learn it just to try hacking more features in.

You can install whatever add-ons you want on Firefox for Android (as long as they're compatible), you're not limited to the default list.

See here [1] for instructions (these were written for Nightly but they work on the stable channel now).

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

"It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.‘"

Sorry, I could not resist posting this quote because that's very much what that guide for using custom addons in Firefox reminds me of.

Previously, you would just go to the addons page and install the addon, like on desktop.

Now since the Android Firefox rewrite you need to:

- use nigtly, not normal Android firefox - do some funky clicking on logos to enable a hidden setting - create a Mozilla account - create an addon list for that account - finding the addon list id and manually typing it into my specially configured nigly version of Android Firefox

THEN finally I can run than one addon & I can probably repeat most of that process every time I want to add another addon or enable this on another device. Perfect!

If I really wanted to kill an annoying feature while still technically providing a an almost impossible way for people to use it, that's exactly how I would do it!

This also makes sure the amount of users of any non-blessed extensions (that are on an official list and can be installed easily) will be so small as to brush off any bug reports and feature requests.

Even extension authors will likely not prioritize Android support in their projects due to the horrendous UX preventing users from actually installing their extensions.

> - use nigtly, not normal Android firefox

As I mentioned, this is not necessary anymore.

But I agree with the rest of your post.

Thank! That is at least some progress after so long. :P

Interesting, thanks! Will definitely try it out as well! :-)

Still, sad that people have to invest their time to do this, instead of Mozilla providing it as default functionality by default. :P

Why not use Kiwi Browser? No limited list of extensions, all extensions just work.

That's also one of the few options if you want to run a browser with web extensions on Android, yeah. Most extensions do work, but its not 100%. Also its Chromium/Blink based, so one needs to use the Chrome extensions + at least for a while it looked like its not maintained, but I might have missed something.

it was abandoned for while, now regularly updated

Thanks for the heads up - tried it yesterday and it indeed looks much better now! :-)

> no print support

Um, somewhat tangential, but I built a statically generated CV in html, presuming that I could effortlessly print that to a PDF using a browser. Not so. Web page printing is extremely broken in every browser, and I tried them all. And, every browser had different defects. Chromium seemed to have the least horrible print functionality, but it was still really really broken. It's probably ok if you want to have a copy of some article content where presentation doesn't matter, but if it's something that you want to have a specific layout or design, tough luck.

Silly question, but did you just use the same CSS as for the screen, or also make use of the various `@media print {...}` related CSS properties (for things like page breaks, switching to more traditional print units instead of px and rem etc)

I didn't switch distance units, but I did try out more or less everything else. Print-specific css properties weren't well supported or well implemented. Dealing with page breaks was particularly annoying.