Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

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That's really sad, because Firefox on Android is actually really great and the fact that you can run addons (e.g. uBlock Origin) makes it even better.

In years past Firefox would occasionally crash on me, but I'm not sure it's ever even done that on my current phone, which is closing in on 9 months old. I'm not exactly treating it kindly either, I currently have 93 "tabs" open and though it doesn't keep those in memory it does recall page position even if it has to reload the original source when I go back (based on it putting me at the same point on the page for a week-old HN thread I was skimming through).

There are some addons I'd recommend bypassing on mobile though just for UI reasons - uMatrix, any of the Vim keybinding options, stuff like that. Also, unfortunately the Invert Colors addon doesn't work on Android because of a missing API.

Firefox on Android is becoming ready for prime time just now, until recently it lacked basic functionality that most competitors have, e.g. unless you opted into beta, you still can't organise your bookmarks in folders [1]. So it is understandable that it still has a tiny user base, but at the same time now that critical features have been added I expect it to grow. We should also consider that soon, when version 58 will be out, there should be a significant performance improvement which will help adoption [2].

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1160470

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16047689

Dark background, light text for Firefox Android is pretty good, makes reading websites much easier for me!

I really want to use Firefox on my Pixel 2 but the scrolling still feels really chunky compared to Chrome. I hope there's still room for improvement there. I've been really happy with the newer Firefox builds on my MBP.

Firefox 58 should bring some bigger performance improvements still to Android. It's mostly going to bring those improvements to Android that Firefox 57 brought to the desktop, minus the UI and the deprecation of old extension APIs.

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