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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead.

> All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead.

I would love it if OEMs started to do this.

Unfortunately, I bet that most OEMs will just license Chrome, and if they decide not to do that, my money's on them creating half-assed proprietary browsers built around WebView before they turn to Firefox.

Which is a shame, because Firefox for Android is young, but shows great promise.

The latter is still fine as the Android team is apparently working on a way of updating the webview without upgrading the device OS. So even the halfbaked browsers can still benefit from speed and security improvements

that part of the comment was nonsense. they can compile the stock browser just fine.

i bet all that means is that they removed dependency on the stock browser from the base system. which is welcome for barebones images that want only one browser that is not the stock one.

Firefox for Android is slower and has more bugs than Chrome for Android, but I use it and love it solely for the add-on support. LastPass on mobile devices sucked until I found you can install the add-on in Firefox and use your normal browser. Adblock is nice for cutting down on mobile data use, too.

Don't know what are you talking about, Firefox on Android is currently the fastest browser there. Chrome is slower and buggier on every new update.

My main slowness/bug with Firefox for Android is the sluggish scrolling. When I move my finger, there's a small but noticeable delay before the page starts moving. I don't have this problem with Chrome on my Nexus 4.

Like I said, I prefer Firefox for its desktop-like features. But in my experience, Chrome has a faster response in the UI.

> if they decide not to do that, my money's on them creating half-assed proprietary browsers built around WebView

All of the major OEMs have already done that. They've been shipping their own browsers built on top of webview for years now. The only devices that ever saw Google's/AOSP's Browser were Nexus devices and those running custom ROMs.

Being limited to WebView isn't a problem anyway - that's all the old Browser used. It's "just" a UI on top of WebView. Just like the majority of browsers in the play store are "just" different UIs on top of WebView.

Sadly it's unlikely that this is how it would work. Most probably when you agree to license the Google Apps package it's an all-or-nothing affair, so if you want Play on your handset, I'm guessing you must take Chrome too.

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