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Comment by SECProto | Hacker News Reader

> The bug was fixed so quickly that I wouldn't even have realized it had happened if it hadn't been for the thread here on HN

Maybe this is a timezone thing, but I was in East Asia, and I had to deal with the internet for close to 36 hrs (android) with no ublock. It was almost enough to look for a new browser (but browsers with adblock on Android are few and far between - so instead I just didn't use the internet as much for a day or two.). Part of that delay was play store being slow to push it, as I recall seeing the binaries somewhere a while sooner.

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There's a couple of options of Android; you could use the DDG browser[0] or the Privacy Browser[1] (which I know sounds dodgy but seems legit). They don't have 'adblock' exactly but I think they implement a lot of the same lists such as EasyList.

[0]https://f-droid.org/en/packages/se.johanhil.duckduckgo/

[1]https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser....

Thanks for those! I usually browse on desktop, so hadn't looked into other browsers, but I'll keep these alternative browsers in mind (and comment history) in case a situation comes up again. The only other instance where I considered switching was the whole forced Mr. Robot addon debacle a year or two back.

or Brave

One option would've been to use Nightly and set xpinstall.signatures.required = false in about:config. That's exactly what I did.

I view using nightly to be as much of a barrier to entry that I might as well switch to a totally different browser. If the issue had lasted longer, I would have found (someone on the internet who had found) a solution like that.

I use Firefox Nightly as my primary browser on Android. It works fine. You can get it on the Play Store right alongside where you'd get non-Nightly Firefox for Android. I'd hardly call that a "barrier to entry" at all (certainly no more than there would be for, you know, normal Firefox).

> I'd hardly call that a "barrier to entry" at all

Would I have to sign in to sync again to access my bookmarks, logins, etc? Are there ever issues with syncing between phone and computer (nightly to stable) or would I have to change my desktop browser as well? Does anything ever break at all?

Even if the answer to these questions is "no", the fact that I'm asking them is the barrier to entry. And if any of the answers are yes, there's no reason to change from stable branch - avoiding one issue to get different one(s) isn't a solution.

> certainly no more than there would be for, you know, normal Firefox

Yes, indeed, switching to Firefox from Chrome a couple years ago did have a significant barrier to entry

You do need to sign in to Firefox sync on each version if you install both as 2 unique applications on Android don't share each other's data.

On desktop front there is no problem connecting current and nightly to the same sync account and indeed same profile directly.

The sole annoying thing about nightly is that it naturally updates frequently. It's quite stable and gets legitimately useful features faster and let's you disable signing and run locally built add-ons. I use it as my primary browser on Android and Linux.

> Even if the answer to these questions is "no", the fact that I'm asking them is the barrier to entry.

Fair enough. The answers, for the record, are indeed "yes" (but that takes, what, 30 seconds?), "no", and (at least not severely) "no".

But apparently even non-Nightly Firefox for Android supports xpinstall.signatures.required = false, which is even less of a barrier to entry, so that's good news, I guess. While I understand Mozilla's reasoning for not wanting a bunch of people to set this and forget about it, it's a bit ridiculous that not once did they mention it aside from a "don't do this thing that we're not going to specify because it's a hack" (of course it's a hack, and it's one that got me up and running again long before there was even a fix via Studies).

> The answers, for the record, are indeed "yes" (but that takes, what, 30 seconds?), "no", and (at least not severely) "no".

Yeah, the last two would have been the broader deal breakers. The first one is just an issue for me personally - I don't know my sync password. I have it written down at home, but I'm not there right now.

Gotcha; that would indeed be a problem :)

On Android, you already had the xpinstall.signatures.required option without having to install nightly. Linux too. Took me maybe 30 second to fix all my devices.

This is the first I heard of that solution, and we're what, 5 or 6 days from the issue? I read a number of Reddit posts and the Mozilla blog post and I don't recall seeing this mentioned.

Edit: on second thought, maybe I saw this solution (with or without the mention of nightly) and skipped over it as the Mozilla blog post on May 4th said "There are a number of work-arounds being discussed in the community. These are not recommended as they may conflict with fixes we are deploying."

Huh, never knew that. I wonder if that's because it's harder for Android apps to edit the settings of other Android apps (unless they have root access, but that's much more rare on Android than, say, Windows or Linux or macOS)?

Mozilla's official Linux builds disallow xpinstall.signature.required = false (last I checked), but the unbranded builds (as well as builds provided by at least some repos) do indeed allow signature bypassing.

This depends on your Linux distro. The package maintainer has to set a build flag to allow disabling the signature requirement. This should be set on Debian, and probably distros downstream from Debian, but was not set on Arch Linux last I checked.

You should give Brave a shot. Seriously, every time I open Chrome on my phone on accident, I'm horrified at what the internet has become..

Why? I use firefox+uBlock on my phone, and don't have chrome installed on any devices.

Because, at least on Android, it's an order of magnitude faster. No extensions needed. I do look forward to Fenix, it's -very- nice, but not stable enough for me to drive it just yet.

Fenix sounds neat, I hadn't heard of it. Thanks.

I have no issues whatsoever with the speed of Firefox on mobile. I also prefer to support a non-chromium browser.

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