Google Testing a Version of Chrome for Android With Extensions Support

Google is developing a version of Chrome for Android that supports browser extensions, a feature long absent from mobile versions, AndroidAuthority reports. The report adds: Specifically, the company is experimenting with "desktop" builds of Chrome for Android. These "desktop" builds are currently intended for Chromebooks as they transition to use more parts of Android, but there's hope the work will benefit mobile devices, too.

Ad blocking

[bbcisdabomb]

What's the point of having extensions on mobile if I can't use uBlock or the like? They're really just going to take out support for the really useful stuff and shove it out to phones?

Re:Ad blocking

[bartoku]

I would recommend Firefox for Android for using uBlock, and only using Chrome to access Google web apps.
I enjoy customizing Gmail and other Google Web Apps through extensions on Chrome desktop, so this will be great on mobile for Chrome.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I've been testing Firefox for Android for years. uBlock is unfortunately a battery killer, probably due to the fact that Firefox's filtering and regular expression handling are done in Javascript. Chrome does them with C++ code, although I expect that uBlock is probably still going to be quite heavy on your battery.

I've been testing out uBlock Lite for Firefox, and it barely touches the battery at all. It blocks about 80% of the stuff that the full-fat version does, which is still vastly better than DNS blo

Re:

[Himmy32]

The article explicitly calls out that this announcement isn't for mobile (ChromeOS shares the code base) and they also calls out that the suspected reason of no extensions for mobile is adblocking. From the article:

• Google finally appears to be working on a version of Chrome for Android that supports browser extensions, but there’s a catch: it likely won’t be available for mobile devices.

• That’s because Google decided way back to not add extension support to mobile versions of Chrome, likely to limit the number of people installing Chrome extensions to block ads on their Android phones.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

It's probably not adblocking. If Google wanted to kill that they would have done it years ago, and e.g. by not going to all the effort of creating a brand new API to let Manifest V3 extensions block ads.

It's because of UI issues. Most extensions are designed for desktop, and their UIs break on mobile. Firefox had the same problem, and it took years for extensions to get updated with mobile compatible UIs, and most of them are still quite rough around the edges.

Re:Ad blocking

[narcc]

This is yet another reason why FireFox is important for the web. uBlock works just fine on mobile and will continue to do so. If you haven't done so already, make the switch. It's liberating.

Re:

[_merlin]

Hell, even the Samsung Internet browser provides specific support for ad-blocking extensions. Chrome is the worst browser.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I wouldn't say uBlock works "fine" on mobile. It's very heavy on battery, partly because Firefox's filtering API code is written in Javascript so performance is quite poor.

By contrast the uBlock Lite version, which uses a newer C++ filtering engine, barely touches the battery. I speculated that that was the reason for Manifest V3 introducing a new filtering API, and it looks like I was right.

too late to win users back

[FudRucker]

Chrome on android has been a neglected piece of crapware for so long that it sits unused and disabled, under the hood the browser engine webview seems to be okay so i am always on the lookout for alternative lightweight frontends that use it like Berry browser is a good one, Tiny browser is the best of the bare-bones browsers, but lately i been using Vivaldi and more recently Firefox, okay back to Chrome on android = I think it needs a complete rewrite, and get rid of the sponcered links! google makes enough money that they should not be shoving unwanted links into other people's browser experience

This has already been done.

[Flownez]

Kiwi browser [kiwibrowser.com] has done this for a while. I've used it for a while and It's pretty stable, even ublock works fine. Some things are a little clunky like trying to use dev tools, but it's far superior to Chrome on Android.