#microsoft #edge is now supporting some desktop extensions on their Android browser in their main branch.

/begin browser rambling
So, on mobile, I've got two browsers. My default browser - Fennec - always clears cookies upon being closed and has most of the features I'm looking for. It's 'usually' compatible with most sites, and yoinks all the Mozilla junk out of Firefox while still supporting extensions and not being part of the chromium monopoly. Things like SponsorBlock, webpage archiving (SingleFile, Brave's mht feature, etc), and Nostr signing extensions are nice, but I'm looking for three specific things:

* Good adblock
* Decent privacy
* A read aloud feature/extension

I've also got a second browser, Brave, which I remain signed into stuff and sync bookmarks & cookies via the E2E sync feature. I also use incognito on it sometimes - especially when sites break in fennec - but on mobile if you want a no cookies browser you almost need two since you can't ctrl + N upon start or open clicked tabs in incognito.

Anyway, #Fennec has broken on a couple of websites as of late. So far it seems to have dodged the memory leaks and incompatibility that had me move away from Firefox forks on desktop - but there's been a few breakages lately. Could be a one off, or could be the staggered development finally hitting #Firefox for mobile. Am planning on continuing to use fennec for now, but beginning to wonder if I should scope out alternatives.

Edge actually has built in adblock + support for further adblocking extensions. Though unlike Brave/Fennec which have manifest v2 style adblock support (built in & extensions respectively) it'd still presumably be fairly close in actual effectiveness. Archiving pages and TTS can be done through extensions which'll presumably be supported soon if they're not already supported via extensions and/or internal features.

As crazy as it is to think, Edge - or better a de-Microsofted fork of Edge - might actually be something I seriously consider using. That, or maybe Brave can finally introduce a TTS feature and/or yoink the extension compatibility from Edge or the ChromeOS extension support (could do regular+beta for effectively two profiles).

/end browser ramblings

tldr: To my surprise, Edge for Android seems to be shaping up to be a decent option of a browser (minus some telemetry)