It was more complicated than that. Yes, GeckoView needed a separate WebExtension implementation, but that work was pretty much at parity with Fennec (the previous Firefox for Android that supported more extensions) when I left in 2021.
It was a product management decision that held off on more complete WebExtension parity with desktop, as well as any artificial limits as to which extensions were supported in release.
It seems to me projects like Iceraven demonstrated years ago that a great many extensions were usable without any changes. Why not just slap a "here there be dragons" warning on untested extensions and let users have at it?
To be clear, I'm not asking you to justify decisions you didn't make, just to provide some visibility into the process if you can. Mozilla was pretty opaque about it.
We essentially had that as part of pre-release builds. Same with about:config.
The argument we'd then hear from people is, "but I want the stable channel with the 'here be dragons'" stuff. The reality is, though, that the "here be dragons" stuff probably affects stability more than running beta does anyway; people who shat on us for that wanted to have their cake and eat it too, and it just doesn't work that way.
Also I wonder where do those decision makers work now.
- Google pays Mozilla more than 400m per year.
- Its in Google's interests to not have good Firefox add-ons. (For both Ads and Chrome's market share).
Google's negotiator could easily added some incentive for Mozilla's management to set the focus somewhere else.
In fact, given what Google's team is likely earning, they wouldn't be doing a good job if Firefox's mobile strategy wasn't discussed before signing such deals.
There is a much simpler potential explanation for such a product management decision. Suppose Mozilla determines that 90% (made-up number) of users want addons because they want uBlock Origin. It then seems sensible to prioritize that addon and not others when determining how to spend limited engineering resources. Reasonable people can of course disagree with that decision, but there's no need to bring conspiracies into it.
(NB: Even though I worked at Mozilla I have zero insight into this particular issue; it's entirely speculation.)
