Firefox for Android enters maintenance phase as team prepares new browser | Hacker News Reader

Firefox for Android enters maintenance phase as team prepares new browser

xda-developers.com

19 pointsMBCook16 comments

Firefox for Android definitely has some rough edges compared to Chrome, but it is also one of the very few mobile browsers which supports extensions I really hope that whatever they've got coming down the pipeline is up to the task, because it'd be a shame to lose yet another outlet for user customization.

The only reason why I prefer chrome over firefox on android is because of the touch gestures on the address bar. Slide down to browse through the hundreds of tabs I have opened, slide left to switch to next tab, slide right for the previous tab. Also, the tabs are represented as a card stack, and browsing it from last to first tab is done through the same gesture as getting into this view. So if I'm looking at a page and want to switch to the first tab 2 or 3 hundred tabs back, I just have to slide my finger fast 3 to 5 times from the address bar down.

If it weren't because of this, I'd probably move to firefox for the ability to have extensions.

> Slide down to browse through the hundreds of tabs I have opened (...)

You have hundreds of tabs opened?

Man, you're doing something wrong. At this point learning how not to have hundreds of tabs opened seems like a bigger improvement than choosing one browser versus another.

It's a weird thing to me too. I've worked with developers that have hundreds of tabs open (not using 99% of them), and they whinge and moan about performance.

Just stop opening so many tabs?

I do that all the time. I research something broadly, resulting in a reasonable tab tree. Then I use one or a few of the results, pinboard some of them and keep them open in case I need to reference them again.

Why not? I'm using Firefox. A couple of hundred tabs is no big deal it seems :-)

I only mentioned it because chrome makes it feel like it's not a problem. Tabs are big, wide as the screen, and there's only one column. It's easy to browse and find any tab with a few flicks, even when having hundreds of tabs. Switching through these tabs is fast, way faster than firefox's UI allows, and that's the point I'm getting at, that there's much improvement that can be made over firefox's mobile UI.

Please don't slam other people's web browsing preferences. You have no idea what forces you're messing with there.

I never knew, but sadly even on canary the bar moved back to the top. It was super handy to have it within reach of my thumb.

Where was it before? at the bottom?

yes

What is this slide-down action? It doesn't seem supported for me.

Firefox's thumbnails overview works reasonably well for me.

On chrome, you put your finger on the address bar and drag it down. The view will convert to the tab stack with your finger on the title of the current tab.

What I don't like about firefox's thumbnail overview is that they're in 2 columns so my eyes have to move in zig-zag if I'm looking for a tab, and they're also too small. Another thing is that websites can set a color for their tab in chrome, and this makes it much easier to identify the different groups of tabs in the stack.

Not happening here.

In case you want to look more into that, I'm running Chrome 67.0.3396.87 on Android 7, but I've also seen this on Android 6.

I'm on an apparently ancient and unsupported version.

There is a new library called GeckoView being worked on, and Firefox Focus is being rebased on it.

Perhaps Fennec itself will be replaced by a GeckoView-based browser. And in the longer run, by a ServoView browser.

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