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eadmund

> Firefox on Android still isn't a great experience

News to me! I've been using Firefox on Android for six years now, and I'm very happy.

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Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin is amazing. Best mobile browsing experience on any platform for me.

I can confirm. I recently wanted to try Chrome for Android but after several vibrating ads I migrated back to Firefox.

Interesting, I've only ever seen these on Pornhub... ;)

Interesting, I've only ever seen Pornhub on Pornhub... ;)

I try Firefox on Android about every six months and it is consistently worse than its competitors. Its address bar behaviour is erratic, websites render desktop versions or "basic" versions where I would get a more functional version on chrome, it feels heavy and scrolling still sucks.

This from someone who has had Firefox as my default browser on my computer since I unzipped Phoenix off a CD which came bundled with a computer magazine.

> websites render desktop versions or "basic" versions where I would get a more functional version on chrome

Sounds like user-agent sniffing, considered pretty bad practice.

I use Firefox Android daily and it's consistently more useful than Chrome;

* Firefox Sync lets me send tabs between all my devices

* I can run a scriptblocker, which has saved me from atleast two Script Injection attacks

* I can set DDG as search engine

* I can open tabs in the background which is useful when people post links with commentary or multiple links

The "open tabs in background" is a really nice feature. I love it for adding stuff to read from other apps to read it later, eg from chat or email.

Scrolling performance is terrible, even on high end devices. I'd imagine its borderline unusable on mid-range devices.

I use it on a Jelly Pro. A $125, 2.something inch phone running a MediaTek 6737 at all of like 1.3GHz with some barely passable GPU.

Scrolls fine. I mean, I'm sure if I went and pulled out a high framerate camera and checked it's running at a mere like 15FPS or something completely unusable, but it's never been bad enough to catch my attention.

And on a really low end phone being able to install uBlock Origin certainly means that Firefox solves a lot more issues than it might potentially create.

I'm use FF a ~$35 one year old Huang, with more than 100 tabs open, and have had no issues. Not so with the default browser.

Care to share the model name? Interesting price

I don't see that particular model now, but a search for $35 phones on Aliexpress [1] (where I bought it), shows plenty of similar enough phones.

Get the AliExpress mobile app and keep your eye on it for a few weeks, and you are bound to get a better deal.

Of course, it will probably copy all your data (including speech and movements) both to Google and 100 Chinese corporations + partnering government agencies, but that kinda comes with the territory.

(Especially as even brand names phones on Amazon, even when they are not using a compromised chpset like Rok, might really be cheapo fakes with the right SKU numbers, that are siphoning off that data as well.)

[1]: https://he.aliexpress.com/category/5090301/mobile-phones.htm...

No issues here, and I use it daily on a 2+ year old S7.

Currently >20 tabs open with Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin and HTTPS Everywhere addons. No stuttering or delays.

Now, my Note 5 is probably a bit above mid-range, but it's not true for me, Firefox's UI has been very consistently excellent, I am happily using it since the beginning of the Quantum releases.

Weird, what device are you using? I used it on my Nexus 5X and now on my non-Edge S7 and it's fine, maybe some slightly-perceptible judders but certainly fluid enough to be usable.

Low range Asus Zenfone Max2 (z0d10), android lollipop, currently 86 tabs but usually hovering around 120. No problems with scrolling, it's smoother than Chrome

I use it as my main browser on a phone that was mid-range when it was released 2 1/2 years ago, and I've been pretty happy with it.

It's perfectly fine on my Moto X Play.

I regularly switch between Firefox + ublock and Firefox Focus. Both are great in my opinion, just for different purposes.

I tried to use Firefox on Android recently. It felt like my phone was about to melt; I wasn't able to stick with it.

May I ask which phone do you have? I used Firefox as my primary browser for at least all of 2016 on a Samsung Galaxy S2 (a 2011 phone) and on a Sony Xperia Compact since fall 2016. No problems with performance. Opera has a much better text reflow on zoom but that's all. Chrome, no difference, but I never used Chrome much so I might be missing something.

Oneplus 3

On my oneplus 3t Firefox works like a charm. Only scrolling definitely is not as smooth as chrome or webview based alternative but it's working really well otherwise.

I was using it on a phone with 1GB of ram before (a moto G3) and it was definitely another story, but chrome was as bad, so I was still using Firefox.

Same here - works perfectly on my S5 with LineageOS installed

Links which can be handled by apps (e.g. YouTube or Reddit) won't open in the app but in Firefox instead. This is a show-stopper for me :/

In the current version of Firefox for Android (59), you have 2 options to open a link in an external app:

1) Long-press the link, and choose "Open in <app name> App". (This won't work if the destination is hidden behind a redirect, as in Google search results. Use DuckDuckGo, instead.)

2) Navigate to the address, and press the Android icon in the navigation bar.

That's too cumbersome for me, as 1) doesn't work with redirects (as you said) and 2) only works when the page has finished loading.

I feel the pain, but given the alternatives I'd rather stick to open source even if cumbersome

There are open-source alternatives were this works though :) For example Chromium or Lightning.

On my phone (I use Lineage), I have control of what app opens what link.

I mean a link inside Firefox. Search on google.com in Firefox for a YouTube video and click the result. It will open in Firefox, not the YouTube app.

And playing it with youtube means you got the ads. No thanks. In fact, I convinced some people to use Firefox to watch youtube on Android precisely because of this: get rid of really annoying ads.

I'm using NewPipe, so I won't get any ads. https://newpipe.schabi.org/

not gonna say it is best to use bleeding edge but since releasing their photon ui on ff58 nightly for android it was the best experience i had :)

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