Solved Support Extensions

BoneTone

I just wanted to take the time to express my thanks for you taking the time

Bitte schoene. That's very kind of you. I appreciate the note and am happy that it has been helpful.

I think that having tracking and adblocker included, apart from using Blokada and Quad9 DNS, privacy is already covered, at least in a basic way as far as possible in an OS controlled by Google.Naturally it is desirable to be able to add more filters as in Vivaldi Desktop and use other extensions, but for the moment and in view of the obvious difficulties, at least I have patience

I'm not a programmer by profession, the code I used to write for pay was mostly state modeling and automation, on the QA side of the development process. Even there, comments and other forms of code documentation were essential to making your code maintainable, by yourself or whomever would have that task I'm the future. One west coast MNC I worked for liked to sat your code should be half comments. They shouldn't describe what you're doing, the code should be written such that the how & what your doing is clear; comments document any interfaces and explain *why* your doing something or why it's being done that way.

20+ years later and I still write my code like this, even for personal scripts. I may want to make a change to something but haven't looked at the code in years, when my skills & thinking, and technology, were different; that practice makes it easy to pick up the code and start working.

Agreed, Vivaldi now has a baseline of blocking to help protect the user's privacy and security. Our patience with the Vivaldi dev team in the past has been rewarded with rather stable and complete initial releases when we do get our requests fulfilled. I've been very pleased with the Android browser, and I guess those few years of waiting and never really feeling at home with any browser I tried only served to increase my appreciation when Vivaldi Android became available as a public beta.

There are a few extensions beyond blocking that have become indispensable to me on the desktop and I simply would not use a browser without them in that environment. But even with respect to blocking, nothing really does what uMatrix does, that I've tried at least. The most secure way to run a browser is with a default deny-allow exceptionally policy, and uMatrix makes that very easy to administer and provides a great level of granularity -- and it requires no filter lists, third party or otherwise, making it a lightweight solution to boot. No other approach can replicate the control or experience.

BoneTone

@sdoering

My reading of that issue is that there is no new functionality being upstreamed, no UI, and no API. The changes being upstreamed are fixes to things that are weird and wrong and make it more difficult to implement support for extensions in a Chromium-based browser, not the implementation itself. Once all those changes are upstreamed, every Chromium-based browser won't gain extension support just by picking up the changes, they must still develop their own implementation. It just means that the implementation of extension support doesn't have to account for all these historical quirks, incorrect assumptions in the logic, etc. that shouldn't be in the code.

This is a good thing of course, as it is removing road blocks that unnecessarily complicate and make extension support less reliable. But it doesn't change the things I wrote -- the code being brought into Chromium is different than the code I was talking about in my previous post. Browsers wanting to support extensions need an implementation. That can either be done wholly in-house, or by trying to merge the changes from the open sourced Kiwi browser, or another open source implementation.

We're right back to the beginning of my previous post and all the caveats of trying to make someone else's code conform to a different project's standards, trying to understand the code in the first place, and rewriting any code that functionally doesn't fit. This refactoring of the code is nontrivial work, it takes a significant amount of time, as anyone whose had to work in an agile shop will attest. But no doubt the changes being upstreamed are a good thing that will only help, but more like making it how it should be without absurd additional bugs to program around, rather than a magical key to turn on extensions.

One other issue I didn't mention is the license that is used. The term "open source" just means the code is accessible but doesn't speak directly to how that code van be used. Depending on which license is used to open source the code, various limitations can be present, or people make us of the code may be required to do certain things in terms of distributing and licensing their own code. There are entire websites dedicated to this aspect of OSS, and I won't get into specific details here because it's a bit beyond my knowledge and experience, but it's something to be aware of. Vivaldi has code in it fron various entities which isn't open source, and their licensing of that code may prevent them from utilizing certain OSS projects due to the sticky nature of the OSS license. Just a possibility to be aware of, but the technical issues I discussed previously lead me toward the conclusion that the best approach in an inhouse solution regardless.

Zalex108

@Gurmeetim said in Support Extensions:

@Zalex108 How to down load this version
CAN U SEND LINK

ScreenShots are from the PlayStore one but on GitHub are newer updates.

rodrigoswz

The project Ungoogled Chromium has a build with extensions working! Thanks to Kiwi patch code.

But this is still experimental and WIP.

This should be useful for Vivaldi Team because unlike Kiwi, Ungoogled is based on the same Chromium version (v83.x) of current Vivaldi Snapshot.

Davy49

@rodrigoswz ,
That's what I'm hoping as well, I figure if the developer of the kiwi browser can do it the developer's of vivaldi should be able to as well. But at least for me, I can wait for them to take their time and do it correctly.

uglysuprith

@Hadden89 yes, but kiwi browser support is now ended and hence it has been unstable lately, with many extensions not working and glitching. the chromium version is not updated from many days and hence many websites are not loading properly. hence i'm using firefox mobile only reason being the extension support, even though I like the kiwi browser's chromium and other features , I can't help but to use firefox.

Catweazle

@uglysuprith , on the other hand, just as Vivaldi advances in its functionalities, it will reach a point, when it no longer needs extensions before supporting them.
In the PC version, most Chrome Store extensions are already redundant.

BoneTone

@Catweazle That's a nice thought, but I seriously doubt that any browser is going yup advance in functionality enough that they don't benefit from extensions. I don't think Vivaldi is likely to implement blocking functionalit that is equivalent to uMatrix, and for that alone extensions will always be necessary for me (there are of course a few others that are essential or nearly so as well). There is just so much extended functionality, and every user has their own definition of necessary, even projects as large as Chrome, Edge & Firefox will always be lacking functionality that a great number of users have come to expect as part of their browsing experience; they will always benefit from an active and healthy extensions ecosystem.

Catweazle

@BoneTone, true, each one needs specific functions and there will always be those that the browser does not have. On the mobile personally I would be satisfied to be able to add blocking lists, as on the PC. By its very nature, the functionalities in the mobile will always be more limited.
But as I said before, Vivaldi already includes many functions that make 80% of Store extensions obsolete.
Of course, there are still extensions that need to be supplied by an extension, such as the uMatrix, Trace or Privacy Badger, among others, but I think that these functions may be included in the future as well.
Another separate thing is in the case of a more professional use of the browser it is possible to add functionalities or extensions that can fully satisfy these needs. An example is the screenshot tool that Vivaldi has, it is good that it has it and avoids having to install corresponding extensions, but neither one nor the other can compete even remotely with a desktop application, such as ShareX.
The same also happens with other extensions of the Store, they will always remain in a only basic functionality compared to corresponding applications.
For this reason I think of moving in a direction that can make us independent from the Chrome Store, perhaps with its own repository with the extensions that may still be needed, or making it possible to add them from GitHub or others, as it is possible in Vivaldi PC.

jesus2099

@Catweazle It doesn't feel like "modern browsers" will include user scripts and user stylesheets support, any more, like genuine Opera used to.
Extensions (Violentmonkey, Geasemonkey, Tampermonkey, Stylus, etc.) are required for this.
Such extensions that are adding themselves thousands of scripts that are like extensions for websites.

And extensions can provide pretty niche features.

Catweazle

@jesus2099 , in principle any FOSS resource can be included, the question is whether it is reasonable to do so.

jesus2099

@Catweazle I don't understand you're reply but what I meant is that, no, browser integrated features will never cover the infinity of what you can get with extensions.

Furax31

Bump.

We still do not know if the extensions are planned? There are 3 browsers that already have them: Kiwi, Firefox, Brave (it is coming soon for Brave)

jesus2099

@Furax31 said in Support Extensions:

There are 3 browsers that already have them: Kiwi, Firefox, Brave (it is coming soon for Brave)

You may want to deactivate auto-update for Firefox for Android in the Play Store as there are only a few extensions/add-ons (including uBlock) supported now in their new version 79.

If you stay in version 68, you can still use Violentmonkey, Stylus and all extensions.

BoneTone

@jesus2099 said in Support Extensions:

If you stay in version 68, ...

... you won't be picking up any bug fixes which can (will) leave your browser & system exposed to critical security flaws. One must consider if the convenience of whatever unsupported extension is worth the risk.

pyrrhic

Would just like to add my support for full extensions support. It'd be a no-brainer move to Vivaldi on Android at that point for me - but until then it's really just another mobile chromium skin.

EpicMaker

it is been nearly two years since this request started and there is browsers like Kiwi browser and Firefox browser which achieved this already , Why we are so late ?

Catweazle

@EpicMaker , it is true that Kiwi supports extensions, but not very well and it is not without problems when installing them. It is one of the reasons why I have left it as a second

BoneTone

@EpicMaker dude, Vivaldi Android was only released less than 4 months ago. The beta version wasn't even out 2 years ago. So while this thread may be that old, the browser itself isn't. Firefox has enormous resources at its disposal in comparison to Vivaldi, so expecting Vivaldi to develop at a similar pace is not managing your expectations well. Kiwi sat on an ancient version of Chromium for the better part of a year because it wouldn't work with an up-to-date version. I also wouldn't use that as an example of good product development. I'll deal without my favorite extensions before I choose to use an insecure browser.

It's a very small dev team that builds Vivaldi. Yet they've pretty much always released stable software. I was very impressed with the beta version of Vivaldi Android in that respect -- some novel features and a fairly bug free beta. You just gotta exercise some patience, but if past results are any indicator of future performance, that patience will be rewarded. It took some time for Vivaldi Android to become publicly available; but when it did, it was already good enough to become my daily driver on my phone.

But yeah, Vivaldi Android was released on April 22, 2020, not 2 years ago.

m.e.

Bump

Since Firefox fucked bookmarks Vivaldi is my only hope.

But I'm between a rock and a hard place Use the god awful firefox but have ublock origin. Or use Vivaldi and be stuck with their awful pseudo blocker