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Comment by steve19 | Hacker News Reader

Firefox on Android is so frustrating. Things like no swipe down to refresh, despite all other apps implementating that pattern.

On my phone, scrolling by swiping is slow, it scrolls such a short distance. Meaning going down a long NH page takes many swipes. All other Android browsers seem to get it right. Fonts also seem "off".

It's these small things that make the experience frustrating.

I truly want to use it, but it seems the designers of the app don't use other browsers, or have no interest in making the switch and Android FF easier.

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Things like no swipe down to refresh

This is the thing that made me switch to it from Chrome. Something as experience-breaking as refreshing the page isn't something that the user should encounter just through energetic scrolling.

I can see the flip side on this too though - the user action is pretty universal in apps, and it's disruptive when 9 out of 10 apps use this and you're trying to get fresh data out of app #10. There should be some consistency in user expectations across apps, or a clear way of performing the same action.

That being said, I agree with you and really like that FF doesn't have a motion for refresh. It's mildly annoying sometimes, but usually it's only on sites very clearly constructed around the mechanism which have no other way of refreshing the page without going somewhere else first. HN is convenient enough on mobile with FF because you can just tap on the HN Title to refresh the page. Other pages are not as kind.

I expect swiping down to take me to the top of the page. It's frustrating when it does more (like reloading the page). I guess I'm the wrong person to ask whether 9/10 apps do it; I usually find a replacement when they do.

Firefox, Pale Moon, and Chrome all have a refresh command in the "3 dots" menu. I usually use that.

Swiping down only refreshes when you are already at the top of the page, and it even gives some visual feedback to see that you have indeed reached the top and you are now initiating a refresh gesture.

I'm a quite energetic swiper and, to be honest, I have never found a situation where I wanted to return to the top and ended up refreshing due to too much swiping. But YMMV, I guess.

Personally I want to disable "swipe down to refresh" system wide and instead have a button at the top of those apps.

"on sites very clearly constructed around the mechanism"

Browsers have refresh buttons for that.

Yeah, I'm a heavy Firefox for Android user and I _really_ want to use it but the performance is really rough. I wish I had the sort of skills to help contribute to performance, but the whole thing is so huge I wouldn't even know where to begin.

At this point if Chrome implemented the "open tab in background" feature (when I click on a link in an e-mail I don't want to switch directly to the browser) I would probably switch back.

Mozilla don't really care about mobile. The (too) small mobile teams do care, but the company as a whole doesn't - which mostly explains why it's so rough.

Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android for 'just looking things up'. It's perfect for Wikipedia and IMDB (when someone points at the film you are watching and asks who the actor is). I only use another browser if I want up keep the page. No cookies, no bookmarks, no trackers

Sadly, Focus appears to just be another Chrome skin with some ui and privacy tweaks, and I think it's pretty telling that Mozilla did this rather than actually use FF mobile as the basis for this product. If you want to encourage browser diversity it doesn't really help.

I use FF Mobile because I want competition and I do like the features Firefox offers, but the performance and UX on Android are definitely lacking relative to Chrome.

Just go into Private Browsing in Android Firefox and you have essentially the same thing as Firefox Focus, except with Gecko underneath it and all the usual amenities of a full-featured browser.

Focus is meant for average users, who don't necessarily understand what Private Browsing does.

Having it as an Android Webview wrapper is nice, because it makes the APK really small. This way, users don't have to have two full browser APKs installed.

And well, it's not like it sways webpage owners one way or the other much, to have users use Firefox when they have all trackers and as a result essentially also all ads blocked. They don't make revenue off of those users, so why should they worry about making their webpage work for those users?

To me the UX is a major plus in FF on Android (albeit with plenty of rough edges in the more hidden features). But yeah, no investment in mobile performance sucks (but hey, they spent hundred of eng months on making desktop not suck, so yay I guess?).

And you take this wisdom from where? They tried to build an entire mobile operating system before. Clearly they do care.

The thing that annoys me the most is to change tab: on chrome / brave we can just swipe the top bar and change tab. On firefox, we need to first click on the tab button, and then find the right tab by looking at a huge list of tabs. I find it much less practical and that's what got me back to chrome.

Ha yeah. Firefox seems to want to encourage people to use fewer tabs, by having the tab-bar on top be a scroll-bar, so it's super annoying to have many tabs open.

All you need to do is go to your awesome bar and type "%" as the first character, then space, then start typing the string you're looking for.

Yeah but on mobile it's annoying to type % .. it's so much faster to just swipe the address bar

..Swipe down to refresh intervenes with google maps or canvas bad interactive content on firefox focus. I just opened a ticket.

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