Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I encourage everyone to use Firefox on Android just for the one killer feature of being able to install the full desktop ublock origin plugin.

View on HN

The recent mobile Firefox is worse in every way that matters to me:

  ° Breaking recent add-ons (for the few add-ons that exist). I added a close-tab icon to compensate for the bad tab-ui. It's gone now.
  ° URL-bar hiding is wonkey. Some overlays disable hiding due to recent phising attacks. Now, for overlays, it is always present and hides the bottom of the page. This is very annoying when links are hidden behind the bar.
  ° URL bar (2): where have my bookmarks gone?
  ° URL bar (3): no more editing the URL if anything was *ever* searched in the current tab. Instead it edits the search. The URL is inaccessible. 
  ° After 'Open in new tab' there is an annoying delay for 'Switch' again hiding links.
  ° Tab selection is just bad now. Preview is broken. If anything is displayed, it is often the image of two sites ago, even if the page has rendered.
  ° Tab selection (2) no more moving the tabs?
  ° Tab selection (3) why waste so much space? Using only 80% of the screen. And every tab wastes two lines and a half of useful space. Why is only the domain shown? Why not truncated or cut in the middle? 
  ° Tab selection (4): newly opened tabs are hidden, you always have to scroll up as the current tab is always first, older tabs are lower.
  ° about:config is broken. Certificate error. Certificate error is broken too. Thus no disabling reader mode.

These are papercuts, every day, every time I use Firefox. /rant

On the other hand, Chrome for Android killing off Duet a few weeks ago has made it actively painful every time I need to switch tabs.

Yes!! When I see other people browsing on Android without uBlock I'm in awe of their patience.

With Blockada, you can block lots of stuff at the DNS level, so it's more tolerable. But it doesn't block everything, uBlock is smarter. Still I keep it running, it's especially great for all the other apps trying to talk to ad or analytics servers. (I'd actually like to combine Blockada and NoRoot Firewall though...)

I use an old phone (until Librem ships...) and I switch back and forth between Chrome Beta and Firefox... they each piss me off. Firefox is slow, I've tried the newer fenix system and it's not really better, plus it crashes a lot. Especially on sites like mobile twitter, probably in part because of the overhead of uBlock having to fix up the DOM; essentially the crash is a failure in handling a system out of memory error in a low level part of the graphics stack that mobile chrome had a long time ago too but managed to fix years ago. Recently chrome pissed me off more because when I tried to take a screenshot of a tweet with a funny google translation, chrome+android colluded to block it because of some issue like "the display contains protected DRM content." Firefox, no issue, apart from crashing 10 minutes later. At least I haven't lost my tabs to a Firefox crash (mobile or PC) for many, many years.

Have you ever tried installing Bromite or vanilla Chromium from F-Droid?

I imagine they'd address at least some of your qualms with Chrome.

I tried. Tab switching was - for me - horrible compared to Chrome (chrome:swipe down, swipe address bar down, select tab you want from carousel).

I kept looking if i missed this obvious feature. I tried to live without it, but Firefox mobile's tab switching just turned out to be a deal breaker for me.

If anyone had some tips: please!! I'd vastly prefer using FF on mobile.

This has been reworked in https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi.... The URL bar is now at the bottom of the screen, including the tab switch button which is now always within reach of your thumb.

On the other hand, I didn't have a problem with tapping the tab select button in the non-beta app, where it's in exactly the same position as it is in Chrome...

Oh how I hate the new Firefox experience on Android. I'll still use it because hey it's Firefox, but it's really eating me up...</digression>

The position is configurable. There is a setting that will allow you to move it back where it "belongs".

Good point, address bar on the bottom may not even be the default. I think it makes great sense though. Looking forward to the current Firefox Beat replacing the main Firefox app so I can free up a lot of space on my phone... :)

URL bar on the bottom sounds amazing :) I'm all in favor of moving all toolbars, search fields, any sort of interactive controls to the bottom on mobile interfaces. So much easier than having to reach to the top of the screen at random, even if it isn't always thumbable.

Tab switching on Firefox Nightly is much better as of a week or so ago. You can now swipe left and right on the address bar to go between tabs, just like in Chrome. It's particularly nice when the address bar is on the bottom.

Cool. Long time firefox user here and that was a useful discovery for me

Thanks! That convinces me to give it a shot.

This is the problem with the whole industry right now.

How Google win - and they do it with many of their products - is that they bother to make their products just superior enough to the competition, that you basically have no choice but to use their product, unless you want a deliberately inferior experience.

It's not just Chrome vs. Firefox, which I'm very sad about. Another big example for me is on my iPhone. Google's GBoard is simply superior to anything else I've ever tried, and yet I know it's spying on absolutely everything I'm typing on the device (pre-encryption), at all times, and it even bullies me into staying online if I want the keyboard to work fully properly. (It's slower and the prediction stuff doesn't work half as well if I'm in flight mode for whatever reason.)

when you have blokada, ublock doesn't make much sense.

why block ads on a browser when you can do it on a system-wide level.

unless you need the vpn connection for work or something like that.

uBlock Origin can block a lot more things than a DNS-based blocker can. Some websites load ads from the same domains they load content from.

With Firefox axing the entire Servo team along with a bunch of other technical people, I am very afraid for its future in terms of technical development. Especially for the macOS version, that so far has always been the red-headed stepchild.

It’s got me in quite a pickle since the only alternative that is privacy friendly and cross platform (macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) is Brave, and Brave, despite good or at least decent intentions, has done some questionable things.

The way to guarantee a future without an alternative browser is to not use an alternative browser.

I hear you, but simultaneously everyone (including me) has a certain limit to which they will be principled. If it happens like I mentioned, I will jump ship. On macOS, Firefox still guzzles battery compared to Chromium browsers. This seemed like a thing that, whilst not fixed, was actively being worked on. If I had to hazard a guess, that will slip heavily in priority now.

Who knows. The best way to vote is to be an active user of the product and give feedback that power use should be a priority.

Servo wasn't even the main engine.

Considering their main revenue sources will likely be decimated, it makes sense to focus resources on the primary browser engine, and allow the open source community to build out the experimental features, moving temporary resources there as needed.

The thing with Open Source is that even if Mozilla Corp goes under, all of us can continue building out Firefox like a regular open source project. Or the Linux foundation could pick it up, etc.

That's literally how Firefox was created in the first place, as an open source continuation of the Netscape browser.

Using Firefox will lead to improvements that will persist even beyond Mozilla Corp. In the meanwhile, Mozilla Corp can be looked at as an experiment to commercially and profitably develop Firefox, which, if it fails, will require us to switch to the non commercial models that are driving several other open source projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com