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Comment by TheAdamAndChe | Hacker News Reader

Holy cow - I am a regular user of Firefox on Android, and I just installed Firefox Preview - it's obviously a stark improvement. The lack of noscript and darkreader kept me from trying it before, but now I'm wishing I had tried it earlier.

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Seconded. It's great - old Firefox for Android was clunky and slow. The new one I am using as my primary browser with full sync enabled and with uBlock Origin and NoScript and apart from the occasional crash (they seem to fix it quick) it's great.

It is certainly great, but I'm confused.. I use Badger, uBlock and Sync for a long time already on my Android.

Firefox supported this with the normal Android app already. It is the new Firefox Preview that was limited in that regard.

I was using it with old Firefox for Android too, just that it was too slow and clunky compared to the new rewritten Firefox for Android, which being a complete rewrite in Kotlin, only recently started supporting extensions.

Mine has an annoying quirk. When I switch to Firefox and type something in the address bar it doesn't work. It still seems to be trying to load the page from last time I was in the browser and forgets my query entirely until it has finished whatever is on its todo list then I can use it. Hopefully this is fixed soon, it makes casual searches annoying.

Mine was lagging when typing anything into the address bar till recently it was painful. I assume they fixed it since I havent had it happen in a while. I assumed it was my phone crapping out on me.

This happens to me _all the time_ on my Android tablet :(

I had this problem as well. After I cleared out my old tabs (99+) it disappeared. Might have been correlated.

Unfortunately this has happened since I installed it, and I rarely open many tabs on my phone. It's mostly for quick lookups when I'm out or cooking which makes it a problem.

In a lot of role-playing games, people sometimes end up using low-level gear that can’t keep up because there are perks on that gear that they don’t want to lose. Sometimes it’s necessary to set aside perks and see if it’s better with more advanced gear without the perks is worth it, but there’s an emotional attachment to them that alters the evaluation of value.

It’s interesting to see a relative to that sentiment show up about browser addons. Thank you for sharing!

But noscript is like some sickness and poison immunity perk while your whole campaign is set in a swamp. Trading it for some bag of holding does not feel like a good thing.

Weighing the perk "grants poison immunity" versus the perks "increased armor bonus, durability, and resistances" is indeed the crux of the problem. When is the general improvement in quality of life from replacing armor so great that it outweighs temporarily losing immunity?

Lack of NoScript support was the only thing holding me back. Mozilla really called my bluff here, I was super whiny about them not supporting NoScript, but here we are :) Time to eat crow and upgrade. Great work, Mozilla.

I still have issues with the back button. Sometimes I have to open the location bar before being able to press back (and then back again to go where I want), but otheriwse I am a huge fan

That bug has been around for a while. Issues:

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/8180

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/8282

I’m using it as my main mobile browser but the lack of amp redirector hurts quite a bit.

Kiwi Browser for Android has extension support plus built-in AMP removal.

> it's obviously a stark improvement

I really wish people would say what they mean when they make comments like this. It's extremely vague and some of the obvious meanings are either subjective or can be easily shot down:

* It has more / better features? No, it seems to have fewer features, at least if add-on support is a good indication.

* The GUI is better? Subjective at best, I find it worse.

* Web pages load faster / JS execution is faster? This is also subjective unless objective measurements are used, but this is what people most often mean.

I've attempted to measure the objective speed of the browser myself. I've consistently found: Javascript performance is not significantly improved by the new browser. As measured by Speedometer [1], the new Firefox is less than 10% faster than the old one, and both are barely half as fast as Chrome on the same device. The performance of the GUI is also lacking: it takes so much more time to open menus and use GUI features that the difference is actually clearly visible to the eye. [2]

Basically, I think it's very easy to be deceived by placebo effects when what we're talking about is the apparent performance of a browser. The objective metrics I've been able to capture often show the new FFA to be as slow or slower than the previous version, and when it's faster, it's not by much, at least (in my opinion) not close enough to catching up to Chrome to justify a complete browser rewrite, with everything that has entailed.

[1] https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/

[2] See: multiple open issues for animation jank. I found these with a quick search. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/10065 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/7797 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/8863 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/9746

You could reliably say that the addition of NoScript(?) would drastically improve page load times, but of course, that only goes to show how slow most website JS is.

That's right, though of course NoScript etc ran on the previous FFA, so it's presumably not relevant to the comparison.

An extension that replaces every response with <html></html> will also drastically improve load times.

In human communication, speech is generally categorized into either conveyance of information or conveyance of emotion. My comment was the latter. I wasn't trying to write a dissertation on exactly how much faster or slower Firefox Preview is. I installed an app, perceived it as faster, and conveyed my emotional response, as indicated with my choice of language such as "holy cow" and "I wish I had tried it earlier."

Perception is all that matters with software anyway. Even if it isn't technically faster, it can still be better if it feels faster, which it does to me.

For sure - I'm glad you're enjoying the new Firefox. One issue, though, is that you didn't use the word "faster" in your comment, you just said it was "a stark improvement".

I guess what I'm concerned is illustrated by the following thought experiment. Suppose you took the old Firefox for Android code base, and re-released it as "Firefox Preview" with a prominent badge "now 20% faster!". Would you see glowing reports by users on forums talking about how much better it is? I think you would. The only way around that (as far as I can see) is to try to do objective measurements or screen recordings and find out if there's a real difference.

Again, not intending to put a damper on your personal experience with and enjoyment of the new browser. Just some thoughts about what's a fairly common comment on articles like this one.

Kinda funny that a bunch of accounts came through and downvoted everything I said, in this thread, whereas my comments were previously highly upvoted. I'll take the fact that no one has bothered giving any kind of counter-argument as strong confirming evidence that I'm right, but touching a nerve someone has. So thanks for that!

If I argued with everyone willing to argue with me, I would never stop typing. I explained how my comment wasn't a technical comment yet you still tried to talk technicalities with me, so I disengaged.

Btw if you take "nobody argued with me" as evidence that you're right, you're gonna end up with a warped worldview.

Its UI performance, specifically scrolling is hugely improved. Not quite on a par with Chrome/Brave still unfortunately. But it's greatly improved.

Do you have any objective evidence of this? Like, a screen recording comparing the two?

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