Right, I think it's pretty close to parity! I vaguely recall seeing some odd API that wasn't supported in Fenix that was in Fennec, but they're pretty rare. Fairly sure you could access history in Fennec via a webextension, and I think that's not supported in Fenix.
I think what's generally missing in these discussions is that the whole project to bring extensions into Fenix was extremely user-driven - whatever people actually use in any significant volume on Fennec, Fenix supports. And the actual UX of installing extensions is just so much more streamlined and nicer in Fenix.
If you purely look at it from the "most value for most users" perspective, Fenix extensions are a great success. And, it's also a success in purely engineering terms - code that's not bringing a lot of value but yet creates an overall maintenance drag is omitted.
What may have been missing from it is the ideological bit - for a platform to be truly open - and to be a viable platform!, it can't have a restricted "whitelist". And I agree with this. But it's not clear that "mobile-browser-as-a-developer-platform" is a sustainable long-term pitch for an organization as small and as resource constrained as Mozilla.
So, there's a tension between these two perspectives. In purely "rational" terms, what's there is good, and there are a ton of other much more pressing issues to work on for the small teams - bugs, performance, missing functionality that can actually "move a needle", etc.
You can make an argument that in this case, the rational, data-driven engineers won. Which is the opposite of what HN seems to think of Mozilla!
What's probably needed for full webextension support is a strong, perhaps not purely rational leader that will rally folks and actually push the teams to do the work that may be useless, or useful to a tiny percentage of the user base, in a belief that it'll produce a better future. Which may or may not pan out!
(Also a former Mozilla developer, worked Fennec and Fenix)
I think a more nuanced perspective here is that roughly 80% of the work was done, and the remaining 20% require significant effort and organizational energy.
Not all of the WebExtension API surface is currently supported; there's a long tail of infrequently used extensions that require non-trivial engineering effort and often cross-team coordination to implement. However, the actual usage of these APIs in Fennec was very, very low, so the actual bet and the organization sales pitch for this work must be on building a platform, and evidently that's not happening. You can argue that this type of platform work and extensibility is why people use Firefox for Android. You can also look back at the actual usage telemetry (current whitelist is basically what vast majority of people used) and wonder if that additional investment will move the needle.
There's also front-end/back-end engineering required to fully expand existing UIs into a proper "store" experience.
Personally, I think as a matter of principle Firefox for Android should be fully open in terms of what extensions it allows installing.
I believe that will eventually happen - it's where the prevailing winds are blowing inside the org, too! but it may take time for the stars to align, people to have energy to fight through the internal malaise, to pitch work that may not immediately help with any OKRs and is mostly about building community goodwill and sending a message, etc.
As always, it basically comes down to lack of strong leadership.
Senior at a lot of the larger companies I've interacted with is often a kind of a "terminal level", meaning that you're not expected to rise above it, and can comfortably spend most of your career at that level.
Staff, sr staff, principle and other monikers are usually about affecting change at the scale larger than your team, operating at larger scope, and growing people around you.
When I explain various aspects of concurrency and multi-threaded programming to non-programmers, using analogy of people doing some tasks really helps.
I've picked this up from Feynman's lectures on computing - highly recommend them!
I use passpack to generate/store passwords, remember them in Firefox, and let Firefox Sync get them onto my different devices. Works pretty well!
My host of devices includes multiple laptops (Linux, OS X) and many different phones - both Android and iOS. Since Firefox runs everywhere, this works nicely. Firefox Sync has end-to-end encryption, but data stored at-rest on devices is guarded purely by physical access, which is fine for my use cases.
We also finally turned on "offline cache" support in Firefox For Android (for 50+ releases) - if you have a page in your cache, and you're attempting to load that page while offline, it should "just work". See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1232867
Thinkpad W541 (i7, 32gb RAM, SSD), running Fedora, often connected to an external monitor, mouse and keyboard.
For travel, I use Thinkpad X1 Carbon (3rd gen), also running Fedora.
Nowadays I mostly work on native Android dev, so environment is primarily just AndroidStudio, vim, terminal (Guake) and what seems like hundreds of open tabs.
It used to be all Macbooks for many years though. I still have a 2012 tricked out Air and a 2013 rPro, which I need to sell off.
> It might be a requirement for non-techies but no-one surely clicks the back button or drags the scroll bar, at least no power user does.
IIRC, back button is one of the most used UI elements of a browser.
I'd probably consider myself a power user (I work on browsers for a living), and I use and most of the features you've described. Especially scrollbars, they're a great "read progress" indicator.
On a side note, we so often forget how small is the bubble of the so-called "power users".
I think what's generally missing in these discussions is that the whole project to bring extensions into Fenix was extremely user-driven - whatever people actually use in any significant volume on Fennec, Fenix supports. And the actual UX of installing extensions is just so much more streamlined and nicer in Fenix.
If you purely look at it from the "most value for most users" perspective, Fenix extensions are a great success. And, it's also a success in purely engineering terms - code that's not bringing a lot of value but yet creates an overall maintenance drag is omitted.
What may have been missing from it is the ideological bit - for a platform to be truly open - and to be a viable platform!, it can't have a restricted "whitelist". And I agree with this. But it's not clear that "mobile-browser-as-a-developer-platform" is a sustainable long-term pitch for an organization as small and as resource constrained as Mozilla.
So, there's a tension between these two perspectives. In purely "rational" terms, what's there is good, and there are a ton of other much more pressing issues to work on for the small teams - bugs, performance, missing functionality that can actually "move a needle", etc.
You can make an argument that in this case, the rational, data-driven engineers won. Which is the opposite of what HN seems to think of Mozilla! What's probably needed for full webextension support is a strong, perhaps not purely rational leader that will rally folks and actually push the teams to do the work that may be useless, or useful to a tiny percentage of the user base, in a belief that it'll produce a better future. Which may or may not pan out!