Mozilla has added three new extensions for its Android web browser. Firefox only has a limited set of extensions on Android, and today’s new extensions add functionality and improve privacy. These extensions can hide the user’s email address when logging into a website and remove tracking elements before sharing a URL. Another extension allows you to listen to articles.
The first extension is Mozilla’s Firefox Relay, which lets you hide your real email address and lets you enter a proxy email address that redirects incoming emails to your inbox. The idea behind it isn’t too different from Sign in with Apple, which doesn’t reveal your real email address. Mozilla introduced a premium Firefox Relay service last year, which offers more than five email aliases and custom domain names.
Mozilla also added the ClearURL extension to the add-ons store, which cleans up tracker URLs and makes them short. Often when you share a product on Amazon or a social media post, outside of the main URL, characters and numbers are meant to follow you.
Picture credits: MozillaComment
Additionally, Firefox for Android is getting an extension that reads articles for you so you can do other things. The ReadAloud extension uses text-to-speech technology to let you listen to articles. However, this is not unique to Firefox. Chrome offers to read web pages through Google Assistant. Alternatively, you can also use a tool like Listening.io to convert articles into podcasts and listen to them through your podcast player of choice.
As Mozilla updates Firefox for Android with these new extensions, it’s also experimenting with a new iOS browser. The organization is working on an experimental Gecko-based browser for iOS – Gecko is the open-source web engine that powers Firefox on all other platforms. At the moment, Apple only allows WebKit-based browsers on its platform – Safari uses the WebKit engine. This could change as European regulations may force Apple to drop this rule and allow browsers with different web engines.
