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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for stating this. What people forget is that the early Android Browser was really, really bad. Chrome helped considerably, but it wasn't released until several years into Android. Also remember that Chrome was not preinstalled when it came out; you had to download it.

Firefox had an opportunity to become what Chrome for Android eventually became; the better 3rd party browser. But they made 2 critical mistakes (as an outside observer):

1. They didn't take mobile (and specifically Android) very seriously at first. Fennec felt like a side-project at best. 2. XUL didn't work very well on Android, and it took them a long time to make the switch to native.

I believe things could have turned out very differently had they done the right thing from the beginning.

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I'm sorry but I couldn't disagree more with this comment. I don't have stats on Firefox or Chrome (or even the native browser) usage to hand, but I really think these are largely irrelevant.

1) Most people experience most of the "web" on their phones via a non-browser. This may be by clicking on a shared link within the FB/Twitter/WhatEver app and seeing it inside an integrated WebView, or it may simply be viewing content normally available via the web through the lens of an app presenting the "same" content "natively". Either way, the point here is that browsers have had less of a role.

2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here.

The above may not be the case for the typical HN crowd, but it's quite naïve to think the majority want and act the same as we.

I am hopeful that this trend is changing - that slowly dedicated mobile web browsers are becoming a more viable option - but certainly this was not the case when Fennec was launched. The best we could hope for was for Chrome/Safari to gain ground over "apps". Mozilla's offerings never stood any real chance of being super successful in this early climate and tbh FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.

> FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.

They should have pursued commercial strategies like becoming the default browser for Samsung and others. That would have got them around the "default" problem. Sell the "differentiation", build a kick-ass browser for Android; that would have given them a chance. They didn't even try it.

It's resource-intensive and not generally straightforward to cut deals with Samsung. They have many hardware/software combos to support. They have their defaults to promote. And they often have money being thrown at them by other large players.

Of course. But all that effort pales in comparison to trying to persuade manufacturers and carriers to opt for an unproven OS with barely a reference implementation, as well as actually developing such OS.

Yet Firefox had pretty good success competing with ie on Windows. I think they should have been able to replicate that success competing with the android browser.

That's because IE on Windows was shit, much worse so than the Android browsers, and everyone who used Windows had that exact same shit browser. On Android, you'll have some people with a bare bones AOSP browser, some with something their vendor came up with, some with Chrome, some with another third-party browser (Opera Mini, anyone?), so they may not all be using shit.

I know a few people in addition to myself who run Firefox on Android so they can use uBlock.

You can use uBlock on FF for Android!?

I really want uBlock and uMatrix like on the desktop. When I tried from within FF on my phone neither were supported.

And here i am, browsing with Firefox for Android with ublock origin installed.

Yes, you can. It's the reason I use it on my phone. Chrome Mobile is faster, but I cannot tolerate ads on the big screen and on my phone they are 100x more unnerving.

> You can use uBlock on FF for Android!?

Yes, as well as many other extensions. I'm using Self-Destructing Cookies, Desktop by Default, Smarter Scrolling and Android Text Reflow in addition to uBlock, thus tweaking my mobile browsing experience to something much better than the stock browser.

Were you using the iPhone version? That, like all alternative browsers on iOS, is just a shell around Safari, not the real thing.

Similarly, the recently unveiled Firefox Focus is a wrapper around webview.

We seem to be heading towards a browser engine monoculture, and i am not sure i like that even if said engine is open source.

On Firefox for Android I am currently using;

- UBlock Origin

- NoScript

- HTTPS Everywhere

- Self-Destructing Cookies

- Better Privacy (remove Flash cookies and delete Local Storage)

- Canvas Blocker

I've found most plugins that work on desktop Firefox work on Android Firefox.

I'm one of those people, but this is exactly what I was trying to get at in my comment. The HN crowd often seems to see the world through a strange lens, as if the majority of users use technology like they do. It's far from reality.

When I was working on Opera, the reasons you stated above were also considered as the reason of the quick shrinkage of Opera’s market share at mobile, which eventually brought Opera to its downfall.

Firefox is at a similar position here because on mobile nobody cares about a browser with slightly more functionalities than the builtin one.

>2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here.

And yet Firefox, for a period of time, had trumped IE on Windows. And of course, Chrome trumps IE on Windows today.

Besides, the "age of the OS" doesn't matter -- the age of the users does, and younger users tend to be even more savvy and favorable of third party browsers.

Microsoft dropped the ball so badly in the IE6 days that the difference between IE and Firefox was enormous, in terms of performance, stability, and features.

Android's browser was never in a position quite that bad.

> For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default.

I disagree, which is why I cited Chrome for Android as an example. It was not the default for a while (a couple of years at least?) but was still fairly popular. I remember doing webdev at the time and getting bug reports for Chrome. I also have received bug reports for Chrome for iOS.

I agree that it's hard to beat a good default, but the original Android Browser was so bad that it opened the door for competition.

The built in WebKit engine was perhaps a bit out there, but besides Mozilla there was also Opera who had been doing mobile browsing for quite some time (Opera Mobile originated on Windows PocketPC).

You beat me to it. Opera was a good example that they could've cut OEM deals as a mobile browser.

Yup, but the surge of iOS and Android quickly brought that to an end, there is almost no OEM deals at mobile. (Still exists at TV/Set-top boxes, but those are not nearly as popular.)

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