Hacker News Reader

Comment by fpgeek | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Firefox on Android is awesome. My favorite features:

1. The best options for delegating from websites to installed apps I've seen (via the long-press menu or by touching the Android when it appears in the URL bar).

2. Extensions. For me, browsing is practically uncivilized without Self-Destructing Cookies and there are lots of other useful ones.

3. The new "Open later" feature, where Firefox collects the URLs you click on, but doesn't load them until you switch to it. Among other things, it is a great way to collect links to look at from the Google Search app.

My only real annoyance with it are the occasional sites that make broken mobile browser assumptions so I end up spoofing Android Chrome or Mobile Safari. At least there's Phony, so the spoofing is pretty easy.

View on HN

It's worth it for ublock origin. Ads are doubly annoying on a small screen.

It's more than ads. With ublock origin in advanced mode you can easily block images and javascript (except on sites you whitelist). On mobile, that makes a lot of difference; the data usage can easily become half or even less than you'd have with Chrome, and because of that it also loads much faster. It can be the difference between nearly hitting your monthly data cap or ending the month with plenty of data to spare.

Even without Ublock, Firefox Android supports extensions, so I can toggle an image blocker extension during those lean times when I'm close to hitting my monthly data cap.

Unfortunately, I've found that Firefox is a bit slower to render pages than Android Chrome, and scrolling experience sometimes feels janky. That said, it's unlikely that Android Chrome will ever support ad blocking, so Firefox will stay on my device.

I tried to be the good guy on mobile and put up with ads for years. But I recently installed uBlock because I almost couldn't even read the content anymore.

Agreed. Erstwhile ad-free websites like BBC News for example now have an annoying full-page ad on mobile with a requisite tiny "Close" button. The worst part is, the news article loads before the ad, so you can see the article text and image for ~1 second before the screen flashes white and the full-page ad loads. That's a fail on so many levels, it's far simpler to view the site on on Firefox Android with Ublock Origin enabled.

BTW I have the BBC news site whitelisted on desktop because the ads are not nearly as intrusive and UX-breaking.

The breaking point for me was a neverending barrage of autoplaying, unstoppable video while on the subway. Now it's not just intruding on my own patience, it's pretty rude to everyone around me and I can't make it stop.

Ublock works on firefox android, you say? Sold.

I also use Firefox because of the extensions.

Sadly it breaks intents and doesn't call on local apps despite system settings. Instead it loads the site and only displays an android icon allowing to switch to an app. It's very annoying on slower connections (on the subway for example).

Doesn't work in all situations, but often you can open a link the associated app directly in its long-press menu. Alongside the usual options of open in a new tab, copy address, there's an open in app. One place where this does not work is Google search result because they insist on rewriting the URLs to redirect via them.

As you might guess, I don't agree that Firefox breaks intents.

If you're outside the browser, intent resolution proceeds normally. What changes is that if you're in Firefox you need to take an affirmative step to raise the intent instead of going to the web page. To me, that's the sensible default.

Otherwise you end up with nonsense like the following:

1. Clicking on an intent-matching link (e.g. Play Store, Google+, Twitter)

2. Being kicked to the intent-handling app

3. The app deciding not to handle the link (it's some sort of corner case)

4. Being kicked to whatever browser the app picks (often not the one you started with)

Back when devices were sold on the Play Store (not the Google Store), I lost track of the number of times I did this dance when I just wanted to look up something about a Nexus device. The problem was the Play Store app, unsurprisingly, didn't know anything about devices even though it matched Play Store device URLs.

I had a similar frustrating experience on iOS this morning. Clicking a YouTube link in Mobile Safari prompted opening the native app. I wanted to watch in the browser, so tapped "cancel," which cancelled the entire page load. There was no way to follow the YouTube link without uninstalling the native app. Firefox for iOS ignored the prompt, and I could watch the video.

My favorite feature is the reader view (does not always work but if it does it shows a little book in the URL bar), that removes all clutter and interstitials and just shows the main text body of the page in large enough automatically wrapped text.

You can force the page to reader view by adding it to your reading list.

Reader View is unfortunately no longer being maintained since Mozilla decided to integrate Pocket. It bugs me since I find Firefox's Reader View actually does a better job than Pocket in most cases of stripping out the clutter.

Where did you hear this?

Pocket were added as it were easier than implementing their own Reading List, although Pocket will be shipped as a default extension in the future rather than being integrated. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694

You sure you're not confusing Reading List and Reader View? Work on Reader View is still happening in bugs such as this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1175536

Install Firefox Readbility extension: https://www.readability.com/addons

Firefox mobile has extensions! It is the best mobile browser.

It sure is awesome, it just isn't as usable as, e.g., opera on a phone. I really wish they'd invest more time in basic usability issues like scrolling, font size etc.

You forget one: privacy! If you use Chrome, do you know what data will be shared with Google?

Every single keystroke?

In day to day use, FF beats Chrome in every aspect except video playing. The "Open later" feature is the greatest mobile UI improvement I've seen in the last year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com