Mozilla Firefox for Android now offers one of the best experiences you can have on a mobile browser, following its redesign not long ago. However, with the redesign came the limitation of only being able to install a limited number of pre-approved add-ons.
You can get any add-on on the Firefox nightly version if you want, but since the nightly version is notoriously unstable, and the developers never actively made the effort to bring the capability to the Beta and stable versions, most Firefox users have had to do without most extensions until now.
Firefox Beta version 107.0 b1 finally makes it possible to install more than the pre-approved extensions. Frustratingly, you will have to jump through a few hoops and settings before you can enable the unapproved add-ons. The procedure for doing this is exactly the same as in the nightly builds.
To get started, you will first need to create what Firefox calls a custom add-on collection on the Firefox add-ons website. You will need a Firefox account for this. Second, you will have to enable the debug menu by heading to Settings > About Firefox Beta and then tapping the Firefox icon five times in quick succession. A new custom add-on collection will appear in settings which you can then import to your Firefox by adding the User ID which you will get in your collection’s URL and the respective name that you gave it.
Now since you will be adding add-ons that are not pre-approved by Firefox, some of them will inevitably look out of place on the mobile version of Firefox, or not work at all. This is the reason Firefox has stuck with a small list of curated extensions. However, for those power users that need more customization on their mobile browser, it is certainly better than nothing.
On the positive side, the rest of the add-ons finally finding their way from the nightly builds to the Beta version indicates that Firefox is hard at work to bring the flexibility that the desktop version is known for to Android. It might only be a matter of time before we get the custom collections on the stable version, where hopefully, it will be much easier to get going and have better compatibility.
