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Comment by wtbob | Hacker News Reader

> Almost nobody runs mobile Firefox, so that turned out not to matter much.

FWIW, I love mobile Firefox and I really don't understand why folks use Chrome instead.

Also use Mobile Firefox because Chrome is 'sticky' on android, 'oh you signed in by clicking the dialog when you where tired, let me sign you into everything else and re-enable sending your web history to us as well', I disable it then accidentally turn it back on and they don't have a 'I want to turn this feature of permanently' option its always 'suspend' not 'disable forever'.

So I switched to Firefox on Android, it's not 'quite' as smooth but Ublock Origin works great so on balance I like it better.

As a die-hard FF mobile user....

FF is slow, pages rarely load the first time and I constantly have to manually reload, the interface for making config changes are requires sooooo many clicks. I have no real experience if chrome is better because I never use it, but FF mobile has some real warts

most sites that are slow are also slow on chrome. so doesnt even bother.

the only solution is installing noScript. the only version available is in beta. but it works fine.

you will be suprised how few sites I have to whitelist to see the content I want. and usually besides faster, they get much more usable without Javascript!

I do use noscript. By default on every site. This slowness is different than your typical js-bloat slowness

I use Firefox for Android on a Moto E 2013. It's faster than Chrome. Ditto for my other phone, a Galaxy S3.

Because Firefox is slow and pages are sometimes broken because nobody uses Firefox mobile. I also used Firefox Mobile for the sake of using uBlock Origin. But since I discovered Adguard for Android I can keep using Chrome (beta) which is way faster and it also supports web compression for http content (also speeds up).

Exhibit A: You can't tell the GMail app to use anything but Chrome (at least on iOS).

I'm sure there are more such examples. Even if a default was changeable the initial setting (as we saw in the Microsoft vs. Europe over IE) is very powerful.

and for whatever reason (i'll give benefit of doubt its a bug), every time i open a link it asks me which browser to use, no matter how many times i set the default to firefox.

How do you set firefox as the default? I didn't think that was possible.

i dunno, whenever i open a link it had radio button that says "use this to open links every time?" and i click yes then select firefox. but ya doesnt work so apparently you can't.

Because it syncs with my desktop Chrome install and especially the password manager.

If there's one thing that sucks it's typing secure passwords into a phone.

Mobile Firefox syncs too. For years.

But most important: addons like ublock work on FF mobile as opposed to Chrome. Huge time, functionality and bandwidth saver!

That does not help if you're using Chrome as your main browser, there's no cross-synchronization. Which I do because it's just way faster, and especially rogue tabs can't shoot down the entire browser including its UI.

e10s might be the thing that could save FF, but I fear that it's way too late.

There actually are some cross-sync addons out there, IIRC. Or at least there were; I used to use one when I was still in the process of migrating from all-Chrome to all-Firefox.

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