> Supporting web extensions on Android would be a brand new feature and would need significant development time.
Kiwi Browser, a Chromium fork for Android with a small development team manages to have extensions, and successfully runs almost all extensions for desktop Chrome.
Google doesn't have extensions in Android Chrome because it doesn't want them. I'm not surprised; many popular extensions make Google's business model less profitable. Firefox also significantly crippled extensions in its Android version, and I'm more puzzled as to their motivations.
Did Google reject an effort to upstream this support? The priorities of a small browser trying to have unique features to offer people to use it are different from a large existing browser which isn't trying to attract new users, but are more focused on more impactful changes.
It appears they accepted changes to make it easier for third-party projects based on Chromium to enable extensions, implying they are actively choosing not to enable it on Chromium or Chrome.
Kiwi Browser, a Chromium fork for Android with a small development team manages to have extensions, and successfully runs almost all extensions for desktop Chrome.
Google doesn't have extensions in Android Chrome because it doesn't want them. I'm not surprised; many popular extensions make Google's business model less profitable. Firefox also significantly crippled extensions in its Android version, and I'm more puzzled as to their motivations.