This is an utter shitshow, and if Google doesn't back down on it, Chrome should be made irrelevant.https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/996836266766303232 …
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They do stuff like this all the time though: https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/03/01/google-explicitly-bans-ad-blockers-from-the-play-store-except-all-those-ad-blocking-web-browsers-apparently/ …. They removed an ad-blocker for Samsung's browser too (not an OS level ad-blocker):https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/3/10905672/google-samsung-adblock-fast-android-ad-blocker-removal …
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Yeah but that's some random new thing from Samsung, not the most popular non-Google browser.
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It seems Samsung's mistake was making it separate from the browser app which Google currently leaves alone, i.e. they'd remove the Firefox extension if it was distributed via the Play Store.
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However, for non-browser apps, they often do hold them responsible for plugins / extensions they officially make available. Firefox has historically gotten away with blatantly breaking the usual rules for plugins/extensions. It's only supposed to be allowed if they're sandboxed.
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If they aren't sandboxed, they're supposed to be distributed via the Play Store. See https://play.google.com/about/privacy-security-deception/malicious-behavior/ … for one place where they state that rule. 'does not apply to code that runs in a virtual machine and has limited access to Android APIs' - i.e. not old-style ffx exts
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Everything in a browser is sandboxed - it has access to DOM/browser APIs, not Android APIs.
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Old-style Firefox extensions weren't sandboxed though. They had full access to all the internals and could call any Java or native APIs. It was just slightly indirect but that was still against the rules. Google just doesn't enforce the rules fairly / consistently for all apps.
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Right. That was a really, REALLY bad idea, and it should rightly have been banned in curated app repositories/stores since it's a backdoor for unsafe/uncurated code to gain privilege.
End of conversation
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