Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

I still believe that Mozilla biggest mistake with mobile was not Firefox OS, it was that they started on Android too late. They should have been on Android from day one, but they weren't, and when they did build Fennec, it was really bad. They eventually fixed it, but by that point Chrome for Android was already out.

And then they pivoted to Firefox OS. At a time when WebOS had already failed, Nokia had already failed, and the writing was on the wall for Blackberry and Windows Phone. It was already well known that the market couldn't support another mobile OS, and that was the moment they decided to build one, totally bizarre.

I firmly believe that if Mozilla had gone all-in on Firefox for Android at the time when Android's browser was just atrociously bad, they could have been the hip option there, and had a leg-up on Chrome for Android.

To everyone that says "people don't install 3rd party browsers on mobile", that's 100% wrong. Chrome for Android was a 3rd party browser for several years and was popular.

What has been going on with Mozilla as of late, as well as Gnome and various other FOSS projects, is a overton distraction on "social". This in the form of "helping" the third world etc. Mostly all this ends up doing is adding to some execs ladder climbing scorecard, and draining the project of focus and manhours.

> They eventually fixed it

And then broke it down, step by step. It used to be perfect but over the years gradually got changed/removed features that I loved, with no about:config option to get them back. Things like no menu button[1] (my device has a physical menu button), text reflow when zooming was removed, double tap to zoom to a paragraph now (sometimes?!) selects text instead of zooming, the tab you have open is no longer on the bottom side of the tab menu (it would slide open fast, as soon as your finger touched it and would feel super snappy; now there's some fancy animation)... etc.

It got to the point where I started looking for other browsers, but there just are no good options. Chromium sometimes bugs and uses 100% CPU for hours until I notice, and most other things are closed source. So I'm stuck with a mix of Firefox and Habit browser.

Habit seems to be what Firefox used to be: configure it any way you like (and it does a fantastic job at that). The trouble is that it's closed source and it has an inferior rendering engine, so I don't dare using it for things with a login that are valuable and it doesn't work for some websites.

Edit: by the way, the desktop story is completely different. I could never go without Firefox on non-mobile for various features (besides the privacy matter).

[1] What does that matter: Well, space (now there's two buttons next to the already-small address bar) and usability. I used to be able to hit the tab button without really looking. It was on the side of the screen, I'd just finger along that edge and I'd open my tab menu. Now I need to tap somewhere specific, and if I accidentally hit the menu button, I need to either reach over to the other side of the screen (on a 5.5" phone, that's a stretch for my thumb) or hit the back button (which would require shifting my phone, then touching it, then shifting back, all balancing it in one hand, oftentimes at least). How friggin' difficult is it to make an about:config setting to hide a button?

I can't help feel that what is going on with Firefox is also going on with a bunch of other big name FOSS projects.

There seems to be a generation of devs taking over that is less about making sure things work and more about padding their CV with the latest bling tech.

End result is that unless you manage to keep up with their bleeding edge web dev mentality of moving fast and breaking things, the stuff you depend on for whatever you are doing will be mothballed or tossed out in short order.

The redesigned Firefox for Android was roundly praised as the best Android browser for a while. (It's still very good!) It gained very little market share. Unfortunately it's very hard to compete with defaults these days without paying for distribution deals like Google is doing with Chrome.

It was too late. Chrome for Android was not the default for about 3 years iirc and had good market share.

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