Quotes from the blog post:
We’re taking a steady approach to opening up the mobile extension ecosystem to ensure Firefox for Android maintains strong performance standards while a vast new array of extensions are utilized for the first time in a mobile environment. If testing continues to progress well, we anticipate unveiling a fully open Firefox for Android extension ecosystem sometime in December.
We anticipate strong interest from users excited to explore all the new ways they can customize Firefox for Android. Current trends indicate we’ll have at least 200+ new Firefox for Android extensions on AMO when open availability debuts in December. And while a couple hundred extensions is more variety than you’ll find on any other mobile browser, it is significantly fewer than the nearly 40,000 desktop Firefox extensions on AMO. So the opportunity for heightened discoverability with new users may be intriguing to some developers.
Shame because the new UI is objectively shit. Autoplaying videos, less dense UI and worst of all, RES works best with old UI. I didn’t need to touch my mouse to navigate Reddit all these years thanks to RES. Now, thanks to Spez, he has broken something that didn’t need to be fixed.
It’s not only shit, it’s incredibly slow. On my Thinkpad T480, the CPU fans immediately turn on and get really loud when browsing on the new Reddit UI. Those of us who knew the internet pre-“web 2.0” know that it’s complete nuts for a website to bring a 4 cores/8 threads CPU to its knees just to render mostly text and a few pics, we’re not even talking about sophisticated content with videos.
The reason is that the new UIs are full of Javascript which does way more than just adding a bunch of effects (which normally even a Pentium 4 should be able to handle with no issues): tracking. They’re doing a bunch of stuff like collecting every few milliseconds the locations where you tap, how long you’re staying on a given page, “eye-tracking” (basically building heatmaps of where you “look” the most on a given web page so that they can decide whether to show some ads there etc…), a bunch of A/B tests for marketing purposes + the associated data collection that is done on your browser etc… and that’s what’s wasting your CPU cycles.