Firefox will soon be a thing of the past on Amazon’s Fire TV and Echo Show devices. Mozilla announced that it’s ending Fire TV support for its browser on April 30, three years after it arrived on Amazon’s streaming devices.
You’ll still be able to use Firefox if you have it installed, but it will no longer receive security updates. As Mozilla is delisting it from the Amazon Appstore, you also won’t be able to perform a fresh install of Firefox, including if you’d previously uninstalled it.
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Mozilla didn’t state a reason for it ditching Firefox on the Fire TV and Echo Show product lines, though it may sadden users who preferred an alternative to Amazon’s Silk browser. As it stands, after April 30 Silk will be the only browser app that the Fire TV and Echo Show devices will support.
Both Firefox and Silk arrived on Fire TV in late 2017, seemingly in response to Google pulling support for the Echo Show’s YouTube app. The two browsers thus offered a workaround that would let users stream videos from the Google-owned platform, even without the dedicated app.
YouTube later returned to Fire TV in the form of the YouTube TV app, which may have contributed to a fall in browser usage — why use a workaround when the real thing is available again?
Granted, there’s still no YouTube app for the Echo Show range, so a browser is still necessary if you want to watch YouTube videos on your Amazon smart display. If you want to brave the lack of security updates, you can still install Firefox on your Echo Show before April 30, though otherwise you’ll need to use Silk to stream any YouTube content.
Tech-savvy Fire TV owners could also try installing Firefox’s Android TV version, using the APK from APK Mirror.
