Mozilla has added three new extensions for its Android web browser. Firefox only has a limited number of extensions on Android, and today’s new extensions add features and improve privacy. These extensions can hide the user’s email address when they log in to a website and remove tracking elements before sharing a URL. Another extension allows you to listen to articles.
The first extension is Mozilla’s own 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 much different from Sign in with Apple, which doesn’t reveal your real email address. Mozilla introduced a Firefox Relay premium service last year, which offers more than five email aliases and custom domain names.
Mozilla has also added the ClearURL extension to the add-on store, which cleans and shortens tracker URLs. When you share a product on Amazon or a post on social media, there are often characters and numbers in addition to the core URL that are meant to track you.
Image Credits: Mozilla
In addition, Firefox for Android gets an extension that reads articles to 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 the podcast player of your choice.
While Mozilla updates Firefox for Android with these new extensions, it is 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. That could change, as European regulations could force Apple to scrap this rule and allow browsers with different web engines.