Firefox has supported extensions on Android for several years now. The current state of support is a rather significant step down from where it used to be.
Surprisingly, that's not enough to be competitive with the browser that's already installed on people's phones.
I just tried installing an add-on on my android and the "Add to Firefox" button is still grayed out. Searching for "compatible" extensions yields only 15 results.
So no, Firefox still doesn't support extensions on android and hasn't since they disabled them years ago.
THIS is why people like me don't use firefox on android and use chromium-based browsers instead. At least, they let me install the add-ons I want.
>Searching for "compatible" extensions yields only 15 results.
That's the complete list, yeah. It's utterly ridiculous and insulting.
You can get around it by making an online collection of extensions with a Mozilla/whatever account, but you can't install from files.
I largely agree, it doesn't meet my bar for "supports extensions" :/ hence at the very least "significant step down" - that much is at least not contentious.
The old version of Firefox on Android was awful. The UI was laggy, and the scrolling was so slow it could actually take over a minute to scroll up long pages.
Never forget that concurrent with the decision to move to a native Android UI for the non-Web parts of the mobile Firefox app (whereas previously it was using Gecko for the browser interface itself, just like on desktop), the powers that be were announcing/hyping Firefox OS—an entire mobile operating system that would "boot to Gecko", and where all apps would be required to implement the same type of UIs, a strategy that Mozilla knew had substantial downsides, since they were actively abandoning it themselves.
Left hand, meet right hand.
To this day, swathes of people who were involved in this effort (some of them very prominent) are utterly convinced that it wasn't the demonstrably bad idea that it really was, but more like a case of just plain bad luck in the marketplace. Meanwhile, they sat by ineptly as ChromeOS became much more successful for the laptop form factor than FirefoxOS ever was on any device and Electron started charting its ascendancy with more and more non-mobile apps jumping aboard over time.
So congrats to the corporate geniuses who pissed away the head start that Mozilla as a project already had and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing even when it became clear that there, in fact, was tons of interest in a cross-platform framework for desktop/WIMP apps, contrary to management's insistence otherwise. It's a masterclass of incompetence that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should.
B2G and Firefox OS did some legitimately cool things - they still have a better blended app+web experience than anything mainstream that I've touched. Android's crappy instant apps are laughable in comparison. There's plenty to learn from that experiment(?).
The rest of it, yeah. Absolutely agreed. Electron not having a Firefox equivalent in particular strikes me as a major, multi-year... not oversight, that's far too polite. Self-ostriching? I'm continually astounded beyond words. The market is massive, and nauseatingly ripe for competitors.
Surprisingly, that's not enough to be competitive with the browser that's already installed on people's phones.