The Mozilla Foundation says it will stop distributing a version of its Firefox browser for certain Amazon devices by the end of this month.
The announcement affects users of Amazon’s Fire TV and Echo Show devices who choose to use Firefox as an alternative to Amazon’s own Silk browser.
Starting April 30, Mozilla says it will stop supporting Firefox on those devices and will no longer distribute the browser in Amazon’s app store.
“If you have Firefox set as your default browser on Echo Show, you will be redirected to Amazon Silk for web browsing [from] April 30, 2021,” the company said in a statement.
Amazon Fire TV users will still be able to browse the Internet using Firefox if they choose, but they won’t receive security updates, nor will users be able to re-install the app if they remove it or perform a factory reset on their device.
The Firefox app was once a popular choice for Amazon device users in that it became one of the few ways to access YouTube when Google yanked their apps from Amazon’s app store in 2018. Google and Amazon made amends the following year, with YouTube and other Google-developed apps eventually returning to Fire TV.
YouTube still isn’t natively supported on Amazon’s line of Echo smart displays, but users can access YouTube videos through the Silk browser just as they would on a computer.
